What Does the Bible Say About Divorce Got Questions

Details of the divorce included a vocabulary that was entirely new to me: custody, alimony, child support, visitation rights, lover, affair, adultery. My three sisters and I would lie in bed at night and throw these words into the darkness, where they'd hang suspended for a while, until one of the older girls would translate the words, one at a time, for the rest of us. We played a game called "normal day," a variation on house in which we were paired off with various movie stars—Steve McQueen, Robert Redford, Paul Newman, O.J. Simpson, even. We married and divorced, took lovers, charged mightily on the credit cards of the loves who spurned us. Normal day.

Our love ricocheted between our parents like pinballs. We were afraid to favor either one for too long lest we hurt the other. My parents didn't have the vocabulary to talk about what was happening to their marriage. At this time, in the early 1970s, divorce was not common. In our town, our parents were essentially the first to split up. Many couples later followed suit, but at first, divorce instilled a certain terror, and people stayed away, as if our situation might be contagious.

How, with this experience, could I possibly imagine anything good coming from the heartbreak of divorce? Indeed, though I definitely believe now that my parents made the correct choice, the decision has haunted each of them ever since. "Not a day goes by when I don't think about it," they have both admitted from time to time.

So here I was, recently married, using divorce as a threat. That was not the only time. Mark and I have been married for close to a decade now, and we have two young children. Over the years, I have returned to the empty threat of divorce a number of times, and I'm always amazed by how much the idea frightens me. In fact, I believe I throw divorce out there between us as a reminder of exactly how much I don't want it.

But the theme is certainly in the air these days. I'm 41; friends are starting to divorce; parents of my children's friends at school are divorcing; friends who aren't divorced speak of it all the time. These are the ones whose complaints I listen to the most as a way to test the waters of my own marriage. These friends wish their husbands would have more ambition, earn more money, help out more with the children. They long wistfully for something new, an affair.

Here we are, fast approaching or recently past the seven-year-itch mark. We're sick of our spouses and they of us. We have created bad habits, avoided fixing our own and now find ourselves wondering mightily how in the world we'll last the rest of a lifetime with this person. In a culture that breeds divorce, how does a marriage survive? What are the tricks? These questions interest me because I decidedly do not want to get divorced. Sure, I have the fantasy of a clean slate and someone new. But I know the wreckage divorce leaves. I couldn't stand to live that pain. I don't want my children to experience it. And the complaints I have about my husband aren't extreme enough to warrant divorce. Perhaps my marriage corrects the marriage of my parents. I get to live out and finish what they could not. But I also understand that I am in love and they, sadly, were not.

What Does the Bible Say About Divorce Got Questions

Source: https://www.self.com/story/staying-true-to-love

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