Beyond Ordinary: When a Good Marriage Just Isn't Good Enough (10 page)

When I allow my mind to envision the scene, I can’t help but laugh and, honestly, become a bit self-righteous about how ridiculous Moses’ response is. God shows up in an audacious way and clearly communicates the step of faith he’s asking of Moses, but rather than embrace the call, Moses makes several attempts to protest it! Look at Exodus 4:13: “Lord, please! Send anyone else.”

Seriously, Moses? God comes in the form of a bush
that’s on fire but not burning up
, and you are arguing with him? Not only does Moses argue with God, but he has some expectations of how God’s rescuing should all unfold. From his staff turning into a snake to Aaron’s speaking on his behalf, Moses is willing to move only if God does what Moses expects him to do.

Maybe you’re like me and read this with your mouth agape,
thinking,
There is no way I would have behaved like that
. But when I am honest with myself, I know that most likely, I would have demanded even more.

THE REVERSE MESSIAH COMPLEX

I (Justin) mentioned earlier that while I was suffering from a messiah complex—an inflated sense of my own importance—Trisha had the opposite problem, a reverse messiah complex. We earlier defined
reverse messiah complex
as “a state of mind in which a husband or wife places godlike or messiah-sized expectations on his or her spouse.” While we’re talking about expectations, let’s unpack the reverse messiah complex a little more.

When we get married, we carry this invisible backpack down the aisle with us. That backpack is filled with dreams, desires, and wishes. It is full of the hopes and anticipations we have been building and accumulating our entire lives. The problem is that most of the time this invisible backpack becomes a heavy load of unmet expectations after the wedding. Many of us get married with an unspoken clause in our vows. We say, “I do,” but we may have done so because we thought our spouses would _____: you fill in the blank.

We all have expectations going into marriage. We expect to be loved. We expect to be honored. We expect to be cherished. And there is nothing wrong with having these expectations. In fact, God has expectations for who we are to be in marriage. But marriages move from extraordinary to ordinary in the kinds of expectations we have of our spouses. Unrealistic or unfair expectations will always become unmet expectations.

When I expect my wife to have sex with me to cure my insecurity, that expectation will go unmet no matter how often we have sex. When my wife expects me to be home at five o’clock every night to ease her loneliness and depression, that expectation will go unmet no matter what time I come home. When we start
expecting our spouses’ words, behavior, or choices to fill parts of our hearts that only God can fill, we set ourselves up for ordinary marriages. That is exactly what Trisha and I were experiencing.

The root cause of unmet expectations is unrealistic and unfair expectations: the reverse messiah complex. We expect our spouses to fill voids in our lives or hearts that only God can fill. Unmet expectations reduce a journey expected to be amazing to ordinary. Unmet expectations breed hurt feelings, misunderstanding, and unresolved conflict.

How do you know if unmet expectations are leading you to an ordinary marriage? Below are some indications that one (or both) parties in your marriage may be suffering from a reverse messiah complex.

Keeping Score

One of the things I (Justin) love about being a dad is coaching my kids in sports. One year we enrolled Micah in Upward Basketball. Upward is a Christ-centered league that does a great job promoting teamwork and sportsmanship. The league is less about competition and more about fun. One of the ways that is expressed in younger age groups is by not keeping score on the scoreboard. So as the game goes on, the scoreboard never changes. It always reads 0–0. But the truth is that every parent and every coach silently keeps score and stats. So while everyone says they don’t keep score, the score is still kept.

Unfortunately, the same thing is true in many marriages. We can be great scorekeepers. Our marriage scoreboards may say 0–0, but in our hearts, we
know
the score. We know exactly how much our spouses have to make up to us. We know exactly how far ahead we are. We take mental notes. We keep track. We can be great trash talkers too, because when we are ahead in the game, we have no problem letting our spouses know the score.

Keeping score is an indication that there are unmet expectations in your marriage. In basketball, without a hoop and net,
there’s no goal, nothing to determine whether a score was made or not. Similarly, in our marriages, without expectations there would be no way to tell whether our spouses have fallen short. And when we make the effort to keep score, when marriage becomes a competition, you can be almost certain that the expectations are unfair or unrealistic, and thus unmet.

Resignation & Defeat

Keeping score leads to a culture of resentment in a marriage. When unfair and unmet expectations are part of your marriage, you probably won’t fight about anything new. Why? Because when a husband or wife has godlike expectations of the other person, there can never be a resolution to that problem: no one can fill a God-sized hole but God himself. The problem will keep coming back.

We don’t often talk about the consequences of keeping score and resentment, but they are very real. Most likely if you have a scorekeeper in your marriage and if you are arguing about the same things over and over again, then at least one of you fights the feeling that no matter what you do, it is never enough. You feel defeated more than you feel encouraged.

And this feeling of defeat becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. You begin to resign yourself to never being good enough. And if that’s the case, why even try? Resentment becomes resignation and defeat when statements like these define your thoughts toward your marriage:

• No matter what I do, it is never good enough.
  
• No matter how much money I make, she’s never satisfied.
  
• No matter how nice our house is, it’s not big enough.
  
• No matter how often we have sex, it’s never often enough.
  
• No matter what I wear, it’s not good enough.
  
• No matter what chores I do, I never do them well enough.
  
• No matter what I make for dinner, it’s not good enough.
  
• No matter how much I give, I don’t give enough.
  
• No matter how much I listen, I never listen enough.
  

Resignation and defeat are indicators that there may be messiah-sized expectations in your marriage.

Absence of Conflict

When we have resigned ourselves to the probability that nothing we do will ever be good enough for our spouses, we start measuring the success of our marriage not by the presence of intimacy, but by the absence of conflict.

In our marriage, if Trisha and I (Justin) were able to get through a weekend without arguing . . . success! If I could go to a basketball game with some friends and not be made to feel guilty . . . success! If we spent an evening together at home and didn’t argue about finances, chores, homework, overworking, or extended family issues, then our marriage, in my mind, was healthy. In other words, the success of our marriage was arranged around what we could avoid, rather than loving each other more deeply, knowing each other better, sharing our dreams more, understanding our passions, and growing our intimacy with one another. We looked for the absence of conflict rather than pursing the presence of intimacy. The truth is that we settled for so much less than God longed for us to experience as husband and wife.

I think that when most of us get married, we have a vision of growing in intimacy with our spouses. We believe that the longer we are married, the closer we will get to each other. But our extraordinary vision is too often replaced by ordinary reality. The goal we once had for intimacy quickly gets replaced with the goal of pain avoidance. We don’t want to experience pain. We need a break, and we hope that avoiding conflict will bring some relief.

When pain avoidance becomes the goal, we start walking on eggshells and doing all we can to avoid an argument, to dodge conflict, to elude a disagreement. Avoiding pain will never lead to oneness. Dodging conflict will never allow us to be fully known. Our unreasonable and unfair expectations of our spouses in this way lead us down a path away from intimacy.

THE WAY OF THE DIP

When Moses rescued the people of Israel, they had expectations. They believed that life with God would be easier than life in Egypt. Collectively, they had a belief that if life was not problem-free, then God couldn’t possibly be with them. Despite the burning bush, despite the plagues, despite God’s heart breaking over the cries and prayers of his chosen people, the Israelites were ready to reject God’s rescue:

In other words, the Israelites said, “We would prefer the absence of conflict, working as slaves in Egypt, to intimacy with God in the uncertainty of the wilderness.” And it’s no different with us. We will always be tempted to settle for ordinary in Egypt rather than walking with God through the wilderness to extraordinary.

But God’s greatest purpose for the people of Israel wasn’t where they were going; it was who they were becoming. God was willing to allow a nineteen-day journey from Egypt to Canaan to take forty years, not because he is bad with directions but because he is great with character development. God’s wilderness detour was intended to refine the Israelites and to teach them more about who God is. The Israelites needed to learn to love and trust God
through his provision in the wilderness so that they wouldn’t forget him in the Promised Land. In fact, God tells them that when they are fully provided for is the “time to be careful”:

Seth Godin, in his book
The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick)
, writes about this tendency:

At the beginning, when you first start something, it’s fun. You could be taking up golf or acupuncture or piloting a plane or doing chemistry—doesn’t matter; it’s
interesting, and you get plenty of good feedback from the people around you.

Over the next few days and weeks, the rapid learning you experience keeps you going. Whatever your new thing is, it’s easy to stay engaged in it.

And then the Dip happens.

The Dip is the long slog between starting and mastery. A long slog that’s actually a shortcut, because it gets you where you want to go faster than any other path. . . .

Successful people don’t just ride out the Dip. They don’t just buckle down and survive it. No, they lean into the Dip. They push harder, changing the rules as they go.
³

Our tendency is to assume that if we stay together, our marriages will get easier. But the reality is that longer doesn’t equal easier. More years married doesn’t necessarily equal more happiness.

Telling the truth is difficult. Forgiveness is painful. The people we love the most drive us the most crazy. When our marriages don’t play out as we think they should, we are left discouraged and questioning our decision. That is the Dip. That is the place where we feel defeated. That is the place we feel helpless. That is the place where we have manipulated all we can and our spouses aren’t changing. That is the place where our milestones and achievements don’t fix our problems. That is the place where we stand at a crossroads and are given the choice: go back to life in Egypt, which is really no life at all, or trust God through the wilderness. That is the place where we have to choose to stick it out or to quit.

Walking through the Dip seems counter to our vision of what we thought marriage would be. We said, “for better or worse,” but we probably thought it would just be “better.” The Dip challenges our preconceived notions of marriage and causes us to ask, “Is it worth it?” The Dip is a path paved with honesty and hurt and vulnerability and risk and mistakes and insecurity and raw conversations.

The Dip is not the path of least resistance. But it is in the dips
that God shapes us, forms us, and refines us. The Dip feels like something we should get out of as quickly as possible, something we should avoid. What we think is that by not walking with God and our spouses through the Dip, we are saving ourselves from pain and hurt. But what we forfeit by not embracing the Dip is God’s molding and forming our hearts.