The Start of Something New

So I'm getting married next month and it seems like time for some reflections on that elephant. To clarify, by elephant, I'm referring to the significant happy event, not the fiancee.

The format of my reflection shall be a dialogue between two fictional characters, Bebo and MattDunn. It shall remain a didactic exercise for the reader to determine whether one of these personae is allegorical for a real-life person of relevance and whether one is simply contrived for this blog post.

Bebo: Thanks for meeting me here in this quirky coffeeshop, MattDunn.

MattDunn: You're welcome, Bebo. I don't even like coffee, but I'm a bit of a junkie for human companionship, so I'm generally amenable to meeting with anybody, anytime, anywhere if it means good conversation.

Bebo: So is it true that you're getting married? Facebook tells me so, but you've also been twice previously married on Facebook, so I don't know whether to take you seriously.

MattDunn: Yup. It's true. It's happening.

Bebo: Wow, so tell me about your fiancee. What do you like about her? How and why did you come to decide that she was going to be the one for you?

MattDunn: I wanted to start my dynasty soon, and she's a woman of child-bearing age with all indications of fertility.

Bebo: True statement, but that describes all the dozens of women over the years who fallen madly in love with you that you've had to fight off with a stick.

MattDunn: Well, I'll tell you, when we first started dating, I found myself focusing on more of the differences between us than any valuable commonalities. And I'll tell you, most of us aren't born naturally able to love unconditionally and sacrificially, and to think of each other in the best possible light. I think by default, we tend to want to find carbon-copies of ourselves. So I was a little more critical of her then. I used to think: she doesn't sing as well as I do, she doesn't dance as well as I do, she doesn't cook as well as I do, she doesn't follow sports, and she doesn't watch a lot of movies, so what does she have going for her?

Bebo: Seems a little harsh.

MattDunn: I agree completely, and it's pretty immature, but when you think about it, everybody seems prone to that sort of self-centered thinking. Girls will grow up making lists of attributes for their ideal husband: he has to love animals, he has to be a musician, he has to be funny, he has to be taller than I am, he has to care about third world countries, or whatever; the point is that most people make lists of what they're looking for in their counterpart and expect a real, three-dimensional, breathing human being, flawed and fantastic at once, to match up with this fantasy wish list. It's trivial and superficial and unrealistic when you put it like that, but it's common, and I fell into that a little bit.

Bebo: So it wasn't her fault for not measuring up to your expectations.

MattDunn: It was my fault for projecting trivial expectations on her. You can't approach a relationship with the subconscious hope of the other person changing into someone else for you. That's not fair to them. Where do you get off asking them to change like that?

Bebo: So can't a person have standards for marriage?

MattDunn: Absolutely they can and they should. But they should realize that they're not on the market for finished products. People are meant to do a lot of their growing up through the experience of marriage; they're not supposed to be polished, completed works prior to it. I know a lot of girls in college who automatically ruled out a lot of earnest and good guys around them because they weren't able to see that the guys were works in progress, still learning to be real men.

Bebo: Yeah, you still haven't answered my question about why you picked your fiancee as the one for you.

MattDunn: Simply put, she has the biggest heart of anyone I know. I've never known anyone who loved me as completely and unconditionally and sincerely and unreservedly as she does. She is never too tired to talk about my day. She is never unwilling to put aside what she has in front of her to take care of something for me. She used to walk a mile and back to my apartment just to do my dishes or laundry when I lived off-campus. If there's anything she can do to better my day, she does it without question or hesitation. She never holds back affection or affirmation. She always, always smiles a megawatt smile when I come into the room. It's like I turn on her smile just by existing. She has a lovely smile. She is my biggest fan, and if one of our deepest needs is to be known and loved and liked for who we are, I will never find someone who could love me better. There's an excerpt from a book I was reading recently called Third Class Superhero by Charles Yu:

It's the truth like he has never heard the truth before. She doesn't mean it with sentiment or virtue, doesn't want credit in the big book of good deeds or bonus points towards Heaven. She doesn't regret it or begrudge him a single minute of her life. Her love for him is not something that can be changed -- it's physics, not emotion: It's the atomic weight of radium. It is vast and it is exact. It is tender and finite and inexhaustible. Her love for him is a fact. Her love for him is a brutal fact about the world.

That's what I think about it, Bebo, and I'd have to be a prize idiot to walk away from that kind of love. It's the best thing in the world.

Bebo: MattDunn, it sounds like your time dating Emily has really deepened your understanding of what love is.

MattDunn: It's definitely transformative. It's also nice to find a sweet Christian girl who will watch South Park and The Ultimate Fighter with you. And on days that I miss The Ultimate Fighter, she'll even send me a link so I don't have to search for the episode on Google and spoil the results of who wins the fight for myself.

Bebo: How does Jesus Christ fit into your perception of marriage?

MattDunn: I can think of three distinct ways that the personage of God is irrevocably intertwined with the concept and practice of love, and marriage, at its most ideal, is the culmination of love here on earth. The first way is that we humans are created in the image of a loving God. Bespotted and adulterated as we have made ourselves, 1 John 3 tells us to "behold what manner of love the Father has bestowed on us, that we should be called children of God! [...] Beloved, now we are children of God; and it has not yet been revealed what we shall be, but we know that when He is revealed, we shall be like Him." That same chapter tells us that our ability to love is a God-given gift: "Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. He who does not love does not love God, for God is love." So if we can act in love and live a life where we love others in a mode pure and complete, we are doing so because God made us as reflections of His nature and design.

Bebo: All right, fair enough. We were made by a loving God in His own image, so it stands to reason that our capacity to love would follow suit. What's your second connection to God?

MattDunn: Well, it's the fact that Jesus Christ demonstratively taught us to love. Everything He wants us to do, He did himself. In 1 John 3, we are told that we love "because He first loved us," and that "in this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His son to be the propitiation for our sins." Jesus didn't just sit outside the temporal realm and make broad declarations about love -- He came down and did it the hard way. So when Paul tells us men in Ephesians 5, "Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself for her," it is a powerful command to love sacrificially.

Bebo: So how does that play out in your personal relationship with Emily?

MattDunn: One of the biggest lessons we have to learn to be decent human beings is learning how to forgive. And forgiveness is not a blanket nicety: it's a personal surrendering of your own rights to allow for the shortcomings of another person who has damaged you in some way. Sometimes when Emily did something stupid or wrong, I would kinda hold on to that anger or the fact that I was right and she was wrong, and even if I said I forgave her, I would remember it the next time she made the same mistake. There's no such thing as "forgiving and not forgetting." Forgiving means you have to give the other person a blank slate, every time, up to infinity, no matter what. But the lesson was really transcendent for me because it made me think of how my sins were personally grievous to God, to the point where He had to bleed and die for them to be forgiven: not just statistics on a sin-spreadsheet He could erase with the push of a button. And yet His mercies are still new every morning, so that's something that's expected of me.

Another more metaphorical example is debt. Emily has a pretty sizeable college tuition debt, and when we get married, I will assume and pay most of the debt. This situation had the potential to engender resentment and frustration, but a good friend pointed out to me that when Christ positioned Himself as the bridegroom to take the church as His bride, He had to pay off her debt with His life and in doing so made her perfected and spotless and new. He counted it as worthy to pay off her debt because it meant He had his perfect bride. There's certainly something there I can take away from His example as I go about paying Emily's financial debt.

Bebo: MattDunn, you are very wordy and long-winded, and I'm starting to suspect my only role in this dialogue is to break up the paragraphs into more accessible chunks.

MattDunn: By Jove, I think he's got it!

Bebo: That's what I thought. What about the third way that God connects to your up-and-coming marriage?

MattDunn: Just that imperfect people like me are unable to love completely without the daily and miraculous grace of God. It doesn't come easily or naturally to us, despite being made in the image of God. The call to love someone as your wife is an incredibly high and demanding task to be commissioned with, and I'm definitely not up to it on my own, so this marriage will be an exercise in faith and dependence on God for it to work.

Bebo: That's it?

MattDunn: What? What do you want from me?

Bebo: You've spent all this time talking about love, and you haven't even mentioned 1 Corinthians 13. Or the whole Genesis 2 description of Adam and Eve being created compatible for each other.

MattDunn: Oh, everyone talks about 1 Corinthians 13. It's expected.

Bebo: So what is marriage to you? Is it mutual cohabitation with benefits?

MattDunn: It's supposed to be the ultimate witness and testament to God's love. You're supposed to be able to point to a marriage and say, that's what love is, and that's the best glimpse in this lifetime of what God intended when He designed us to love, and the best gift that He has ever given us. I don't think that's true of most marriages, but it's supposed to be. And yes, I'm also looking forward to the benefits.

Bebo: Sex!

MattDunn: Uh, a mobile beer bottle dispensary, but sure, that too. My friend Patrick, who plays a lot of video games, once referred to women as "mobile spawn units." That's another good role for them.

Bebo: So talk to me about your take on the biblical roles of man and woman in marriage, and how instrumental communication is going to be, and whether you've been introduced to the 5 Love Languages or the Act of Marriage, and how will key aspects of your marital intimacy change as you grow older...

MattDunn: No, that stuff doesn't interest me so much. Look, we'll make it work. Marriage has been made to work with great success without a lot of taught methodologies. I love her and she loves me, it's a true statement on bad days as well as good, and God is on our side on this one. It'll all come out okay.

Bebo: What's the best piece of marital advice you ever heard?

MattDunn: From the movie Claudine: "Love is when a man brings the groceries instead of eating yours."

Bebo: So is there a possibility that you'll be getting married and then deployed the next day?

MattDunn: No way, that only happens in the movies.