Pre-Marital Ideals and Expectations

An Open Letter to Donald Miller on Your Engagement

http://blog.christianitytoday.com/women/2011/06/an_open_letter_to_donald_mille.html

First, congratulations. Second, let's talk about that list of qualities we should want in a spouse.

by Karen Swallow Prior

posted June 23, 2011

Dear Donald,

First of all, I’m a fan. I’ll admit I’m not young enough or hip enough to have discovered you on my own, but the college students I teach help me to keep up with the times, and they introduced me to your work some years ago. I love it all, especially A Million Miles in a Thousand Years. I wish I’d had your books when I was languishing in youth group hell many years ago.

I’m thrilled to learn of your recent engagement. As someone who’s been married for 26 years—to the same man, no less—I can fully rejoice with you and Paige in your anticipation of the blessings, challenges, joys, pains, and memories this covenant relationship will bring.

In addition to two and a half decades of marriage, I bring the second-hand experiences of a fair number of hook-ups, break-ups, engagements, broken engagements, marriages, searching, longing, and questioning on matters of love and marriage: when you work with college students, you get to live through a lot of this with them. I’ve had the chance to watch a lot of young people make good decisions and bad. (And I made a few of each in my day.)

So when I heard about your recent post, “What are You Looking for in a Spouse? Why not Create a List?”— I was intrigued. It’s a good thing to know one’s self well enough before entering a lifelong partnership to be able to identify in a potential mate a handful of deal-breakers. For the Christian, of course, the first of these non-negotiables is being equally yoked. There are likely a few qualities that are essential to one’s being and therefore non-negotiable. One such non-negotiable for me would be a love of animals. Not an abstract kind of love, but the kind that turns pets into family members who share the furniture with the humans. A spouse who didn’t share this value would doom one or the other, and therefore both, to perpetual misery. I encourage my students to identify such non-negotiables when they seek my advice, as they often do.

But upon reading your post—which includes a list of qualities that your fiancée, Paige, sought in the man of her dreams long before she had met her future husband—my intrigue grew into concern.

You see, a list like the one in your post—a list of more than a dozen traits the dream husband should exhibit, most of them self-centered, focusing on how a future spouse will treat “me” and make “me” feel—doesn’t leave a whole lot of room for God to bring a partner who can meet needs we don’t even know we have, needs God knows more intimately than we or our spouses can ever know.

While Paige wrote that her dream spouse would be someone who “is always thinking about me,” I can pretty much guarantee that neither your first fight nor your 91st will be about how much thinking you did about her on any given day. It will be about who forgot to mail the credit card payment or who didn’t roll up the car windows before it rained, or whether or not you really need more towels, again.

Yet, this matter of the list isn’t really my greatest concern.

My greatest concern is that you both realize that whatever qualities each of you identifies as non-negotiable must be already present in the other person. Here’s my plea, to both of you: Don’t enter into marriage with the expectation that one or both of you will “change,” at least not in some pre-determined, pre-scripted way.

You don’t put it quite this way in your post (in fact, Paige says you have all 15 qualities of her dream man already), but the idea creeps in rather stealthily (as such ideas are wont to do) when you say that one “great thing about creating a list is that Paige helps me become this man,” and later, “Paige is helping me become her dream come true.” This sounds as though you’re both banking on her changing you.

This notion that a man will change for a woman goes all the way back to Adam’s bite of the apple, but has more salient and recent precedents in Victorian thinking and Romanticism. It’s Victorian to think it is the woman’s role to “civilize” a man and make him a more suitable husband. It’s romantic to think such a thing is possible.

Of course, both husbands and wives do change over the course of a long marriage. Indeed all people change over time. They just don’t necessarily change in the ways we want or expect. And that’s not a bad thing. The long-haired, skinny guitarist in a rock band that I married years ago is now a mild-mannered school teacher who’d rather swing a golf club than a guitar axe. Likewise, the waif my husband wed who hid her insecurities behind too much black eye make-up and aspired to change the world as a social worker has become a cynical academic with few wifely qualities, save an overindulgence in footwear that borders on neurotic.

Yet, each of us is for the other, I firmly believe, what God knew we needed. Through God’s grace, we have brought out the best in each other over the years, even though that best wouldn’t likely have been found on any list either us might have written so many years ago.

I pray for the same grace for you and Paige as you grow, both as individuals and as spouses to each other. And I pray that the changes each of you undergoes in your great marriage adventure are both delightful and surprising.

Your fan,

Karen