God’s Design for Marriage Is Bigger Than Survival

Nothing is specifically wrong with your marriage. That might be exactly what’s bothering you.

A marriage can run perfectly well with no obvious problems, nobody yelling and nobody leaving, and still sit a long way from what it was built for. When we look to the opening pages of Genesis for the original blueprint of marriage, we see that God designed a partnership of full knowing and zero hiding, where two separate people join together in a shared life. Mere survival was never the goal.

What’s the difference between surviving your marriage and thriving in it?

Surviving is when the machine runs efficiently. Bills get paid, kids get where they’re supposed to be, and nobody sleeps on the couch.

Thriving is when you’d choose each other again.

It’s when you’re still curious about the person you know best.

The tricky thing about surviving is it often looks a lot like success from the outside. Nobody stages an intervention over a marriage that seems fine. Your friends aren’t worried about you, your mother isn’t concerned, but you’ve got a quiet ache you can’t justify to anybody.

Erin and I went through a stretch of years where our marriage was completely fine. We ran a household, raised 3 boys, and I stood up on Sundays and taught about marriage. I could have told you our marriage was good and meant every word. What I couldn’t have told you was the last time the two of us talked about anything that wasn’t logistics.

Fine is a plateau you can camp on for a long time.

What was marriage actually designed for?

Go back to the beginning. In Genesis 2, God reviews creation and calls things good, over and over, until He stops on one thing and says it isn’t. It’s not good for the man to be alone.

Even though it was a perfect place, God was there, and he had all the fruit he could eat, we read that Adam was lonely. It wasn’t because anything was broken. It was because of how he was designed.

He was created with emotional needs that could only be met by another person.

So God made a counterpart, Eve. Then the chapter ends on a detail that’s easy to skim past. The man and his wife were both naked, and they were not ashamed.

The key ingredient that made it work wasn’t constant nudity, although perhaps that didn’t hurt. What stands out is actually the complete absence of shame.

Two people stood completely exposed to each other, fully known, with no part of themselves held back in reserve, and neither one felt the urge to cover up.

That’s the original design: a place where you can be fully seen and not have to be afraid.

As soon as things went wrong, shame entered the picture. Immediately after their sin, Adam and Eve reach for fig leaves, then head for the tree line. They were covering up and hiding.

Every marriage since has had its own version of that: you hide something by not bringing it up, round the number down to cover up the truth, and swallow the disappointment because saying it out loud feels vulnerable.

What does “one flesh” actually look like in everyday life?

“One flesh” is the phrase Genesis uses for what happens when two people join together, and it means far more than sex. The idea behind the original Hebrew word is a union that makes something new out of what used to be two separate things.

I think about it like two rivers converging. Once they’ve merged, there’s no way to separate the waters back into where they each came from. They are now permanently blended into a brand new river.

That’s one flesh. Not two people living efficiently in the same house, splitting the chores and organizing their calendars. One life, with 2 names on it.

On the surface, it looks unremarkable. It looks like knowing what kind of day your spouse had before they say a word. It looks like a decision you’d normally make alone that you involve them in now, because their read on it makes yours better.

Most couples I meet are living as roommates with excellent logistic arrangements. The calendar is synced. The union isn’t.

How do you move from duty to delight?

I used to talk about generosity at church, and I landed on a sentence that changed how I think about almost everything: it’s not that I have to give, it’s that I get to give.

Marriage runs on the same hinge.

There’s a version of a good marriage where you do all the right things because they’re the right things. You show up at her sister’s birthday. You go to his work banquet. You handle the bedtime routine on the night that it’s your turn.

Duty can hold a marriage together, and I’d never talk anybody out of it, because plenty of marriages seem to survive on duty. I guess it beats the alternative.

But duty makes a poor ceiling.

Delight is when you have a shared life that produces more than the two separate lives ever could have. It’s a marriage where the person who knows the worst about you is also the one most glad you're here.

The practical step to get there is smaller than most people expect. Simply take 1 thing you normally do for your spouse out of obligation, and this week do it on purpose instead. Same act, different engine. Then notice whether it changes anything about how you feel walking into the room.

Why does a good marriage still need protecting?

In Song of Solomon, in the middle of the most romantic writing in Scripture, the bride says something strange. She asks somebody to catch the little foxes that ruin the vineyards, because the vineyards are in bloom.

When a vineyard is blooming, that’s exactly when it’s most vulnerable. A fox that eats a blossom takes the grape that blossom was going to become.

Foxes are sneaky. They slip under the fence rather than kicking it down.

Little foxes can sneak into a marriage, too. A schedule that stopped leaving room for each other. A phone that gets more of your attention at 10 p.m. than your spouse does. A conversation you’ve been meaning to have for 6 months.

None of those things will end a marriage this year. But all of them eat blossoms.

This is why couples with marriages that are fine often come to a weekend intensive. About a quarter of the couples at our Christian marriage retreats aren’t in any obvious crisis. They came simply because their marriage is worth more attention than the leftovers from the little foxes.

Does your marriage have to be in trouble before you get help?

Nobody waits for a cavity to reach the nerve before seeing a dentist, and nobody considers scheduling a cleaning an admission that their teeth have failed. Instead, you go every 6 months and somebody cleans your teeth for good health.

Couples treat marriage differently because we don't have a cultural habit of preventive care for it. We tend to think that getting help means something has gone wrong, so couples wait until something has.

Psychologist James Cordova and his team at Clark University decided to test what happens when you take that assumption away. They built something called the Marriage Checkup, designed to be the relationship version of an annual physical: two conversations with a professional, a year apart, framed as a checkup rather than as treatment. Then they ran it as a randomized controlled trial with 215 married couples and followed them for 2 years.

The couples who signed up weren’t who you’d expect. 63% had never been to couples therapy in their lives. Most of them weren’t in crisis, and they came anyway, because somebody finally made it normal to come.

What happened to them was interesting. Compared with the couples on the waiting list, the checkup couples reported more intimacy at every single measurement point across 2 years. They felt more accepted by their spouse, and they were also more satisfied with the marriage, though that last effect had faded some by the end of year 2.

Here’s what I take away from that study. Nobody in that study had to wait for things to get bad before they got assistance. They showed up, answered honest questions, and let somebody outside the marriage tell them what next steps would be beneficial.

Your marriage doesn’t have to be failing to be worth 2 days of your attention.

What would it look like to dream together again?

Somewhere along the way, most of us stopped planning and started maintaining. You used to talk about where you’d live and what you’d build and who you’d become. Now you talk about the dishwasher.

So here’s what to try this week, perhaps at dinner. Ask your spouse 1 question that has nothing to do with running the household.

What do you want the next 10 years to look like? What’s something we used to do that you miss? What might you try if you knew I was on board?

The first time you ask a question like this, it may feel silly. Ask anyway. Most couples find there’s still a fire under there, and it just needed somebody to stoke it.

Marriage was God’s idea . He designed it for a fully known, shared life, and delight that outlasts the wedding photos. Your marriage doesn’t have to be broken to deserve that. If you want the longer walk-through of the work itself, start with our complete guide to saving your marriage, and then go ask your spouse the question.