A Different View on “Successful Marriage”

        In one of the recent convocations I attended, I happened to meet a middle aged woman who as she introduced herself to me, was a member of a certain group within a Christian denomination that has a special ministry for the family. By common interests perhaps we found ourselves sharing our individual family experiences, encounters with different family problems taken from actual counselings, and our personal reflections. She came to the point of saying that in their group, they usually ask “successful couple” to talk or share, she actually used the word “preach” before other couples in their church. When she said “successful couple”, she was implying those who had been married for 30 to 40 or even more years and according to her had proven the success of their marriage. The reason is plain obvious, they wish that through it, they will be able to impart important lessons to most of the families under their care. Wide range of concerns was mentioned, from extreme financial problem to drug addiction, from incestuous abuse to infidelity among spouses, as well as to the usual issues of divorce and broken marriages.

Our sharing was good and enriching, well, especially on my part. Somehow I gained some ideas as how other people in the family ministry do their roles. However, though I am quite inspired by the thought of having the so called “successful couples” talk and be displayed as actual role models among others; I am not totally attuned to her idea that implies skepticism if not absolute mistrust to younger couples not even as role models but just a “sharer” in similar efforts. In my view, married life is not a one-size-fits-all formula. It is not something that can be designed in an error-proof approach that can be all applicable to every couple. For me, being married for 20 years, 40, or even more does not at all necessarily imply successful marriage in the context we generally accept as Christians. I had met several persons and had read many real life confessions of many persons who in the eyes of the community had successful marriages simply because their marriages never ruptured and saw all their children became successful. But the same persons confided to me, or expressed in their writings their apparent if not clear declaration that their marriages were “failures”. Many of them revealed that their love for their children – the wish to provide them with a wholesome picture of an unbroken family, the effort to maintain some status in the community, and for some other personal reasons, they had chosen to keep the marriage. But all the while, throughout their marriage, or from some point and thence, they were unhappy. That, painfully they had to admit, their marriage was not the kind they wished to have in the onset. And I could imagine the suffering of coming face to face with the reality, probably at a certain point in one’s life or probably again after having wonderful children, that his or her marriage after all was a total mistake.