Half of all marriages fail. Why? Good question.
Some of the best researchers on the subject, professionals who’ve listened to hours and hours of conversation between ordinary married people, have come up with very interesting findings. Good lovin’, they claim, may not be at the heart of long and happy marriages, even though good lovin’ is what we’d like to believe in; a marriage drenched in passion isn’t necessarily a marriage which will last.
Okay, what then? What some researchers have come to understand is that the success of a relationship may be more dependent on the ability to fight than the ability to love. Go ahead and read that again. Marriages fail, they claim, when spouses can’t deal with inevitable conflicts. Maybe I can put it this way—couples who learn how to fight, learn how to love.
Conflict occurs even in the best of relationships. Those marriages that make it do so because spouses learn to keep those conflicts from escalating into the kind of murder that kills love and respect.
I don’t know how our fights—my wife and mine—rank with others. There have been some stiff ones, I know. Thankfully, I’ve not been around enough other couples’ tiffs and rants to judge the relative nastiness of ours. But we’ve been married now for 51 years, and I seriously doubt we’re in any kind of trouble, thank the Lord. We must have learned to manage our brawls, I guess, but don’t ask me to write the “how to.”
The fact is, it’s impossible for me to imagine myself alone now. In the give-and-take of marriage, I’ve pretty much lost the egoism that being single affords. I’m not perfect, and I still want what’s mine—and then some; but I can’t remember the last time I told myself, bitterly, that the only reason I’d done something I didn’t want to do was because, dang it, I was married, done something totally (grrrrr) for her. It’s been a long time, thank the Lord.
All of which is not to say we’re home free. I’m not too old to be shocked, even by myself.
Mostly, this great psalm, Psalm 42, is lament. Three times (vss. 5, 8, 11) when he’s almost lost in the dark night of the soul, David has to pinch himself to God’s goodness, push himself to engineer a way out of what seems pathless despair. Twice, in fact, he falls back into the darkness after trying the best he can to pull himself out.
I don’t want to be prescriptive because God’s love comes in so many shades and sizes that no one size fits all; but I’m wondering, when I feel the wild emotional amplitude of this famous, short psalm—I’m wondering whether some believers, not all, need to understand that, like a marriage, God almighty and his people—some of us at least—stay together only because we’ve learned to fight, and in so doing, how to love.
No one ever talks about that in Sunday School, but the proof is here in one of David’s roughest song, shadowed as it is with darkness. And there are others like this one, lots of them, more than we’re often willing to admit or certainly advertise.
Maybe David—or whoever wrote this great psalm—has learned how to love the Lord in all his mystery, only because he’s learned also how to fight.
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