I used to look at marriage as a very selfish thing. I mean, I knew it wouldn’t just be about me. You had someone to support and be supported by, someone to work with in all of your labours, etc. But somehow I came to see it as, compared to singlehood, selfish.

I wanted marriage and was single, and wanting marriage felt like a selfish desire. I didn’t desire it for the sake of my God or my future spouse directly. I was aware of those factors, but was thinking primarily of myself. Maybe in that context, it was a selfish desire.

But as I am approaching my own marriage, an entirely new world  has opened up before me.

A lot of my own emotional struggles that I’ve been facing (ones that most people probably discover and struggle with in the weeks, rather than months, leading up to the wedding, or even not until after they are married), have had to do with “losing myself”. For an independent young woman, the idea of marriage began to hold fear for me.

But I am suddenly arrested by the beauty of this relationship.

Marriage is used in the Bible as a metaphor for the way Christ loves us and it is incredible. I am not entirely certain how to express it, but God willing, I will be able to convey at least part of the wonder that has been opened up to me.

There is a lot of baggage when it comes to the Bible and marriage. One verse in particular has been viciously abused and causes many women, and men, too, to immediately recoil against it.

Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord.

~Ephesians 5:22 (NIV)

But this isn’t a verse that sits on its own. It is paired with the instruction to husbands, an instruction that is often missed in the debates against this verse.

Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her.

~Ephesians 5:25 (NIV)

Both verses are followed by further instruction, but it is the instruction to the husbands that receives the most explanation, almost as if Paul somehow knew how desperately we would need the clarification.*

I would encourage you to read the entire passage here. Don’t skip past the instruction to wives in anger or frustration. Try to read it and compare it with the instruction to husbands. Both have an equal level of severity and both, I think, are equally difficult.

They are difficult because of what they are each asking: complete and total surrender of the self for the good of the other.

I imagined, when I thought of marriage, that it would feel to me like it was about me and my own fulfillment (and to him like it was about his).

But it isn’t. It is so much more than that. And it is so much more beautiful.

A relationship that is primarily about my own fulfillment is colourless. I know what is going to happen next, I know how to get what I want. There is no mystery, no beauty, no depth in such a relationship.

But marriage is possibly the least selfish relationship there is, second only to parenthood. There is a selfish component to nearly every other relationship. You are friends with people who make you laugh, who make you feel good. You’re friends with people who agree with your perspectives and build you up. You’re friends with people who are the same as you, and you tend to steer clear of those areas where you differ, at least while you’re together. And nearly every other interpersonal communication involves some sort of trade-off where you are benefited as much or more than you are inconvenienced.

What is it about marriage that draws us so deeply into it? It requires this submission of yourself, this sacrifice of your will, laying your life down for the good of the other, and, as it should be, both of you laying down your individual lives for the sake of building one anew, glorious and glorifying to God.

Marriage is not selfish. I felt that way because I did not know what it would require of me. I still don’t know, not fully, and will probably never fully know (though more will be revealed over time).

It is beautiful, too, because I don’t pour myself out and find it spilled and wasted. I am pouring myself into him, and he into me. The source of these springs of ours rests in Jesus Christ– the pouring out is replenished. And eventually it becomes such a beautiful flowing exchange of love and mercy and grace and creation and instruction and growing and nourishing and building and peace and joy and hope and faith and trust and no longer can we tell what is mine, what is his and what is from God above.

I’m not sure what this has communicated. But marriage is beautiful. And… beautiful. I don’t know how else to describe it. We haven’t got there yet, but as we have tastes of heaven here on earth, so, too, can you have tastes of marriage while waiting for its approach.

And it is beautiful.

* Ladies, I hope that the command to submit tastes a little sweeter after reading this explanation of the instruction given to husbands: “Even so husbands should love their wives as their own bodies… For no man ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and carefully protects and cherishes it, as Christ does the church.” Ephesians 5:29 (AMP).