Martial's Wedding

By Gregory Koukl

My prayer for Christian couples is that it would become an emotional need of one party to fulfill the emotional needs of the other.

Congratulations to Martial and Janet. Martial is my former roommate who now has a new roommate officially as of today. I just came from their wedding. God's best to you both. I tell you, he's the second guy in a row that has vacated that one bedroom, the first one on the left as you go down the hall, and walked down the aisle with a lovely lady. Maybe I ought to move into that bedroom or maybe it's just being my roommate. I've got another roommate who just discovered a lady or a lady discovered him and things are going fine for him. I may be looking for more roommates than I bargained for. I can't figure it out though, I've been living with myself for a long time and it hasn't made a difference.

I want to make a few reflections about marriage. I read a piece a couple of weeks ago that hit me right in the gut about the responsibilities of marriage. I want to tell you a couple of things that I never quite understood. Maybe I'm just a strange bird but I've talked to a lot of women and hardly any men about this kind of thing, women who long to have a deep relationship with their husbands and their husbands just haven't got a clue. He's out playing golf, having fun with the boys, he's out pursuing sports, he's out doing ministry, Christian work and this is part of the sacrifice the whole family is expected to make for the Kingdom of God. These women are just drying up. 


What doesn't register with me, and again this may be because I'm kind of unusual, but as I look back on my past relationships it has always been an emotional need of mine to fulfill the emotional needs of the woman I was involved with at the time. It mattered to me whether she was satisfied or whether she was happy. I'm not trying to take any credit for this or say I'm a wonderful guy, but it's just the way I guess I'm made. It's important to me. It means a lot to me emotionally that the woman that I've committed myself to on some significant level can look at me and smile and say that she's fulfilled in my company, that she enjoys being with me, that she's satisfied in our relationship, that I'm attentive to her needs. I'm not suggesting for a moment that I've ever done that perfectly--I certainly haven't--but it's important to me. It hurts me in my heart when I'm with someone, and now that I think about it, it's not only a woman who I have an intimate relationship with but even with my friends--it hurts me in my heart when I feel we're at odds somehow or they're dissatisfied with me in some way.


It's a classic response for me that anytime somebody says, "Greg, I'd like to talk to you for minute,"--it happened today as a matter of fact at the wedding--my first response is did I do something bad? Am I going to get yelled at? Have I messed up and didn't know about it? Have I hurt you? If I have and I'm going to get taken out to the woodshed so to speak that's fine, I'd just like to know in advance so I can mentally prepare. I guess it just points out that for me this is a priority.

This is why I am stunned since it's such a delicious feeling for me in a relationship to be connected with someone, I'm mystified why other men don't find that same motivation in relationship, why they don't have that same value of wanting to connect with another person and have that be a significant part of their fulfillment as an individual. For goodness sakes, why get married if this isn't what you're all about? Maybe it's just because men get a physical rush from a woman or there's a kind of "conquer mentality" and now that she's his, they're married, then he can forget about her and get on with the other things that satisfy him in life. Maybe that's what they think. It's a stunner to me because that would be the most unsatisfying life to be lived--being with someone to whom you've committed everything, your substance, your bone and marrow, your life blood, your cash, your home, your bed, everything--and not connect with her on a deep level.
My prayer for Christian couples is that it would become an emotional need of one party to fulfill the emotional needs of the other. That home would be a safe place to be so they could come home and be emotionally safe and be physically safe and be spiritually safe. That home would be a refuge, a place to revive and recuperate in the arms either physically or metaphorically of this other person you've given your life to. This is why this piece I'm about to read to you hits me in my gut with more force than it might other people, but I'm hoping that as I read this piece that it will hit some of you right in the solar plexus, that it will not go in and out of you but in some sense into you.

Why is it that it appears that husbands are not quite as concerned with fulfilling their wives' emotional needs? Maybe it's the hunter/warrior. They have to be out and about conquering, gaining ground, building things to a degree that they lose contact with those whom they are committed to protect. It's ironic it happens but it seems to be that way. I don't relate to it because I'm not built that way.

My prayer is that husbands would have an emotional need to fulfill the emotional needs of their wives such that if their wife isn't satisfied in some significant way then the husband is dissatisfied and he makes it a major priority, if nothing else than for selfish reasons because it hurts him, to care for the emotional needs of his wife. I don't know who wrote this. This is published in the Youthworker, Winter 1987. It's simply titled "Why I Left My Husband." Listen to this:

"My husband is a full-time youth director. He is extremely dedicated and spends between 50 and 70 hours a week with young people. I think the reason he is so successful with kids is that he is always available to them, always ready to help when they need him.

That may be why the attendance has more than doubled in the past year. He really knows how to talk their language. This past year he would be out two and three nights a week talking with kids until midnight. He's always taking them to camps and ski trips and overnight camp outs. If he isn't with kids, he's thinking about them and preparing for his next encounter with them. And if he has any time left after that, he is speaking or attending a conference where he shares with others what God is doing through him. When it comes to youth work, my husband has always been 100 percent. ... I guess that's why I left him. There isn't much left after 100 percent.
Frankly, I just couldn't compete with God. I say that because my husband always had a way of reminding me that this was God's work and he must minister where and when God called him. Young people today desperately needed help, and God had called him to help them. When a young person needed him, he had to respond or he would be letting God and the young person down.
When I did ask my husband to spend some time with the kids or me, it was always tentative. And if I became pushy about it, I was "nagging," "trying to get him out of God's work," "behaving selfishly," or I was revealing a "spiritual problem." Honestly, I have never wanted anything but God's will for my husband, but I never could get him to consider that maybe his family was part of that will. It didn't matter how many discussions we had about his schedule--he would always end with "Okay, I'll get out of the ministry, if that's what you want." Of course, I didn't want that, so we would continue as always until another discussion....

His I love you became meaningless to me because he didn't act like it. His gifts were evidence to me of his guilt because he didn't spend more time with me. His sexual advances were met with a frigidity that frustrated both of us and deepened the gap between us.... Just once I wish he would have canceled something for us instead of canceling us."

Please don't misunderstand. I am not condoning divorce or encouraging people who are frustrated in their marital situations to leave their husbands or wives if the circumstances are reversed. I am simply using this as an illustration to show the deep frustration that one person and I suspect thousands of people in the reach of my voice are experiencing because they have husbands who are absentee husbands. In many cases this is what is so tragic as in this case, the absenteeism is essentially a disregard for God-given responsibilities to the family under the guise of ministry and service to God. This is one of the reasons that I am so frustrated with many of the applications of the "God calling me" kind of talk.

Frequently " God calling" is just a phrase that people use, and I think they're very sincere when they use it and they presume that God is involved in what they're doing, but it becomes a mask for a prideful and selfish pursuit of a self-fulfillment in Christian work, a "married to the Christian organization" mentality in a way that leaves the clear and explicit responsibility of the husband back in the dust. There are women and children all over the country that are drying up because their husbands and fathers are married to the Christian organization. Here is a woman who at a point of desperation finally left. I don't know if she was ever reconciled to her husband. Sometimes it gets to that point before a man wakes up and realizes that he has a different obligation.
I'm single and I hope to be married someday and I hope that when I do that there are good, fine, solid, clear-thinking, strong-willed Christian friends of mine that will hold my feet to the fire such that I could not get married and seek to live professionally as a single person.

I talked maybe six months ago to a woman who is married. Her husband is not in ministry. They have a child. He is a professional man and does a lot of travelling; in fact, he's only home two nights a week on the weekends and when he does come home he's out playing volleyball or tennis. As we talked what she reflected to me was, "I didn't get married to be a single mom." Sometimes I wonder what is it that people who do this want from marriage? They aren't participating. What do they want from child-rearing? And this would actually apply to professional women who have children and then almost surreptitiously deliver their children over to a professional child-rearer and then visit the child for a couple of hours a day, if that much. What is the point of having a child? What is the point of having a wife? What is the point of having a family if you're not investing yourself in those things?

Listen, friends, if you don't want them don't get married or don't have children. That's real simple. That's a legitimate alternative. Why would anybody want to get married and then functionally abandon his family to live like a single man? It doesn't make any sense to me. Stay single. It's cheaper. You can do a lot more things. So you'll be more sexually frustrated if you're walking with the Lord properly, i.e. you're living a chaste life. And if you're not living a chaste life you're going to be a lot more sexually frustrated. Yeah, there's a trade off but it seems to me a lot easier to live with sexual frustration than it is to live with abandonment.
I don't understand it and I hope that this story "Why I Left My Husband" will be a stimulus to get some people to reexamine their lives to think clearly if they are giving themselves to the responsibilities that they as a free will agent chose to take into their life and, in fact, made a covenant with God and another person to pursue and fulfill in front of witnesses and family and friends. If you make that commitment and covenant then take it seriously.

I wonder how many weddings there were today. Hundreds just in Los Angeles, certainly. How many people let these weighty words of "to have and to hold in sickness and in health, in good times and in bad until death do us part" trip off their tongues with very little thought as to what they were saying, thinking maybe more about the wedding night than about the wedding life. It's a tragic thing.

For those of you who are single and are frustrated with it, I think marriage has both the capability of being a more fulfilling life than single life and also a greater disaster. It's just dependent on how you choose. I'll give you just as a round figure, and this is a conservative estimate, the married women out number single women in Christian counselling more than ten to one. It may be rough living alone, but I want to tell you something, it's a whole lot rougher living in a dysfunctional marriage in which people made commitments lightly without thinking them through and are not living consistently with those commitments now.
The biggest tragedies are not just those who would abandon those responsibilities but those who would think that they are doing a service to God. It isn't a service to God. It's a disservice to God. It's a disservice to your wife, gentlemen, and to you children. It's a disservice to yourself and to that high commitment of marriage that you made.

My prayer is, as I'll articulate it once more for my friends Janet and Martial and for all of those out there who have made this commitment or are thinking of making this commitment, that you would nurture this commitment and that God would cooperate in that nurturing this attitude that it would be an emotional need of yours to fulfill the emotional need of your spouse, and I could add to that your children as well. At least that's the way I see it.