I.

I am in love with my husband. After 31 years of marriage, I can say this unequivocally. This is why it is good to stay married, and not to opt for divorce when the difficulties come. This is why making and keeping promises is a must in marriage. It is so worth it! After thirty-one years, I am delightfully, giddily, in love with my husband.
Oh, we were smitten at the beginning, all right. But children came soon, seven of them, and conflicts soon arose over how to rear them, and over how to spend the money my husband so doggedly worked to provide. Our backgrounds rose up snarling at each other -he was a child of divorce and of alcoholism, I a child of relative ease and indulgence. How often over the years we could have called a halt to the craziness and gone off to promulgate it in other ways.
Instead we stayed and worked it out. Our children grew up slightly less crazy than we were and much more wise, somehow.
In John Bayley’s introduction to Tolstoy’s great tome War and Peace, he opined that “marriage is the novel’s ultimate theme, its climax, its apotheosis. ’Marriedness’ is happiness; and to be happy is to be right, justified by life and at peace with it…The book ends with marriage,…not [as] a device for concluding the work, but, in a curious sense, [as] the justification for it (introduction p. vii, Signet Classics, 1968).” Spencer W. Kimball, prophetic leader of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from 1973-1985, stated simply: “Home [is] the place to save society.”
As practicing Mormons, we believed that. So we stayed. We fought it out, so to speak, between ourselves, but most effectively, within ourselves. How many the times I cried in the night, how many the nights my husband ground his teeth in anguish. How angry we were with each other, but it was an anger that was tempered with submission and obedience. We had promised to do our best, to love each other and our children. How imperfectly we loved each other, interspersed as it was with personal psychological issues and, perhaps more tellingly, with selfish attitudes that kept the smolder of resentment flickering.
Ultimately, however, as I have already exulted, love won out. What a marvel! We have been to counseling, personally and as a family, several times over the years. We have struggled to the brink of absolute desperation, been consequently humbled, and have thus haltingly but surely progressed step by step. We have, at our best, submitted ourselves to change, to repentance, and as a result have seen amazing things come to pass.
Who can read this and say that God does not keep his promises when we keep ours? Who can imagine that holding to the foundation of human society - that is, honorable marriage and subsequent family - with all one’s might and mind, is not but what is best calculated, indeed, for the happiness of humankind? Ah! We have accepted a false bill of sale in this world today. We, like the citizens of the emperor’s fabled town, behold all the counterfeits of marriage in a blinded state, and fail to see what is so blatantly clear, that the emperor is naked.
We have been trying to hide our exposed selves ever since Adam and Eve made aprons to hide their nakedness. This nakedness, however, is not so much physical as it is spiritual, and presents a conundrum for which we as mortals have no real solution. This sense of “being exposed” is a result of crossing that invisible barrier in our souls that tells us when we have done wrong. We try every way we know to “hide” that sense, we cover it with all kinds and shapes of aprons, with a multitude of politically correct platitudes, to the point that on some level we actually convince ourselves that we are clothed, hidden from ourselves and from God. But it is a tenuous cloak, and the first cold wind uncovers us again. Our reaction? To find some other way to hide.
It was God who made the coats of skins with which to clothe Adam and Eve, however, and it is only in Him that we find our true hiding place. Curious: we try to hide ourselves because we transgress his laws, but it is He himself who provides the only true covering.
This we know. We as a couple and as a family have hidden ourselves in him, and when we once again cross that unwavering line, as we unfailingly do as mortals, his “arm is stretched out still;” the cloak is still there, but it is He who covers us with it through our humility, our willingness to change, our obedience, because we ask Him.
Yes, this piece is unashamedly religious. As politically incorrect as it may be, and tragically so in this crazy world, to speak rationally of God, how can we do otherwise? As Isaiah, speaking as His mouthpiece, reminds us: “I, even I, am he that comforted you: who art thou, that thou shouldest be afraid of a man that shall die, and of the son of man which shall be made as grass; And forgettest the Lord thy maker, that hath stretched forth the heavens, and laid the foundations of the earth…(Isa. 51:12-13)?”
You do not have to believe what Isaiah says; but not believing does not make it untrue. Considering what has been our actual experience, does it not make sense? Ask Him yourself.
Anyway, I am profoundly in love with my husband, and that is a irrefutably a miracle.