Haven’t you read, he replied, that at the beginning the Creator “made them male and female,” and said, “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh”? So they are no longer two, but one. Therefore what God has joined together, let man not separate” (Matt 19:4-6, Mark 10:7-9).

The Apostle Paul quoted these passages from both Genesis and Jesus almost verbatim in 1 Corinthians 6:15-17 and in Ephesians 5:30-32. Jesus Christ dignified the institution of marriage by performing the first of the recorded miracles of Jesus at a wedding at Cana (John 2:1-11). Christian marriage is seen by the Apostle Paul as parallel to the relationship between Christ and the Church (Eph 5), a theological view which is a development of the Old Testament view that saw a parallel between marriage and the relationship between God and Israel.

As I wrote in my paper on Pre-marital counseling, Marriage is a “Mystery”. In Ephesians 5: 22-32, Paul explains the Christian view of marriage. He concludes by saying, “This mystery is great….” It is a covenant made between a man and a woman in the presence of the Lord with permanence as its aim (Mal 3: 16). What makes a marriage? Is it the legal, public declaration? The official marriage license? The physical union? The setting up of the home together? Bearing and bringing up children? The love for one another? What makes marriage really a marriage? Marriage is a beautiful kaleidoscope of all these things (Thomas J, 2001). But for some it may mean only one or the other, or a few of these things, and then the marriage may be headed for trouble. In this paper I would like to point out few reasons that bring strife and misunderstanding between partners and the problems that leads up to divorce and the ways we can tackle them and restore the God ordained love and intimacy between the partners.

Problems in Married Life.
Swimming deep in the pond of colorful dreams and golden thoughts, young men and women exchange their marriage vows and unite together. But what do they find next? A period of excitement and enjoyment? Definitely yes. But, what next? The first thing they discover is that life in dreams and life in reality are quite different from each other. They begin to experience that their colorful dreams are being shattered when problems find their way to their golden world of newly married life. They begin to ask themselves whether they have done anything wrong by entering into the marriage bond.

Doubt.
King Solomon says in Ecclesiastes 9:9, “Live joyfully with the wife whom you love all the days of your life….” Yes, everyone would want to enjoy life to their fullest with his/her spouse, as it is the will of God for us. But not many enjoy it for long. Why? Because many unknown and unwanted problems suddenly enter into their married life and starts creating havoc. The devil, which attacked Adam and Eve, continues to attack couples even to this day. He tries his best to entice every couple to fall into sin so that their married life would turn into hell and instead of loving each other they begin hating each other. The devil uses the same strategies and weapons to achieve his goal, which he had used to cause the fall of Adam and Eve. The primary weapon that he used with Adam and Eve and the one which he still uses today to cause the downfall of so many marriages is “doubt”. When he came to tempt Eve, his first question was, “Did God really say, “You must not eat from any tree in the garden?” (Gen 3:1). By asking this question he tried to create a doubt in Eve’s mind. The devil tried using his weapon of doubt even against Jesus Christ, the Son of God. (Matt 4:1-11). When Jesus was in the wilderness after his baptism, He had fasted for forty days and nights and at the end He was terribly hungry. It was at this crucial situation that the devil used his weapon of “doubt” against Jesus. He said to Jesus, “If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread” (verse 3). I believe that the word “if” was aimed to create a doubt in Jesus’ mind about His Sonship and about His authority. The call to turn the stones into bread was an attempt to create a doubt about His power. But Jesus’ answer in verse 4, “Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God”, shattered the hopes of Satan. If he could use his weapon of “doubt” against Jesus Christ, how much more will he not use it against us? Firstly, he creates a doubt in the minds of the husbands and the wives against each other. Then he gives them false assurances, which are like mirages, looking very real but which end up in frustrations (Tandy, P.K., 2006). Then he gives them some attractive offers which are so tempting, appearing so good to taste, so capturing to see and so motivating to desire that people fall prey to these offers like a moth flying toward the light only to burn itself. Many families have been broken down because they could not protect themselves from the attacks of the weapons of the devil.

There was a husband and a wife who were married for a few years. They had the best of their love for each other. But as time went by, Satan tried to work his way into their loving relationship and made the husband doubt his wife’s character. So the husband started to think that his wife had an extra marital affair. This doubt caused misunderstanding between them. At the moment of mental tension between them, the husband could listen to the voice of the devil telling him, “Come on, have a drink, you will forget everything” and the husband heeded to the voice of the devil and started drinking. The quantity and frequency of his drinking increased gradually just as his mental tension increased. After a few months, he discovered that he had been fully enslaved by alcohol. But his mental tension never left him because the doubt planted by the devil in his mind was still there. Instead of taking efforts to find out the truth about his wife and sorting out the problem, he allowed the doubt to remain in him and consequently he ended his life up. What a tragedy! But it’s so true in the lives of many married couples that Satan works his devious ways in their lives and destroys the sanctity of the God ordained marriage.

Communication.
With all the staggering strides man is making in the area of space-age communication systems, one would think that there would be fewer communication problems among people. Not so. On the contrary, we find that divorce rates are soaring and families have become fragmented. Couples are also often in a “deep-freeze” where each had gone off into their own little worlds and lost touch with the other (Thomas, J.,2001). What a far cry this is from God’s design for marriage. There has probably never been a married couple which has never had a quarrel. But how do we cope with these conflicts and differences? Do we let them pull us apart and embitter us? Or by the grace of God, do we make them become means of strengthening us and molding us together? In fact, unity can be built by conflict (Thomas, J., 2001). When there are disagreements that build up tension, rather than attacking each other or hiding our frustrations behind a calm exterior, we put the conflict out on the table and discuss it honestly and in a non-judgmental way. Thus, on the heels of disagreement comes forgiveness. Small, seemingly harmless words can be the beginning of a major crisis. Words communicating impatience or frustration like “Hurry up”, Oh no, not again!”, “You never seem to get it” are the words that can lead to severe conflicts in many marriages. The Bible encourages us to “Let your speech always be with grace” (Col 4:6) so that our words will “give grace to those that hear” (Eph 4:29). This does not mean that our words should always be pleasing to the hearer, but only that they are beneficial for them.

When Adam and Eve sinned in the Garden of Eden, humankind was affected in many ways, not the least of which was our ability to communicate. Sin not only erected a barrier between God and humans, but also produced relational barriers between men and women. In Genesis 3, we read that not only did Adam and Eve hide from God and each other; they also hurled or placed responsibility for their problems on the serpent, each other, and God. Most failures in marriage are not caused by blowout, but by slow leaks (Oliver, G.,J. & Miller, S., 2002). One of the main contributors to slow leaks in a relationship is difficulty in communicating, or even the inability to communicate. As goes a couple’s ability to communicate, so goes everything else in their relationship. Caring and communication skills are pre-requisites to effective problem solving, conflict resolution, and verbally sharing affection. Every message relayed by a partner to the other carries two component parts: attitude and behavior. Attitudes-caring or uncaring- derive from the combined beliefs, feelings, and intentions one holds. Behaviors- verbal or nonverbal actions-reflect and stem from underlying attitudes. So, messages-skilled or unskilled- exchanged between partners reflect a couple’s underlying attitude toward self and the partner (Oliver, G.,J. & Miller, S., 2002). According to research, whenever a couple comes for marriage counseling, two levels of issues always exist. At the surface, there are a variety of content issues, things that bother or upset the partners, past behaviors that have been ineffective or painful and current ways of dealing with problems that range from uncomfortable to unacceptable. Effective marriage counseling in some ways acknowledges and addresses these presenting issues. However, underneath the surface of most couples’ problems, there are usually several root causes of problems. One of the most frequent root causes is not a content issue but rather a process issue. It is not so much what couples argue about as it is how they argue. There are numerous couples who have spent years in a dysfunctional dance of missed communications, thinking that the problem was sex or finances or in-laws when in fact one of their root problems was their inability to communicate and resolve issues effectively. Larry Hoff and William R.Miller (1981) have written that “Marriage is not a static system with inflexible roles, but rather a dynamic, changing relationship, calling for continued commitment to openness, creative use of differences and conflict, negotiation and renegotiation of roles and norms, and continued individual and couple awareness and growth.

The following relationship principles are foundational to Couple Communication (Miller et al. 1992).
1. Partners have choices. They can argue over who caused what, or they can take responsibility and be accountable for their own behaviors.
2. It only takes one partner to change a system. When one person changes his or her behavior, the system changes (for better or for worse).
3. If each partner is focused on changing the other partner, nothing changes; the system stays stuck.
4. Small changes can make large differences.
5. If one partner recognizes that what he or she is doing is not working, he or she can stop and shift. By stopping his or own ineffective behavior and shifting to a different more productive behavior, he or she changes the system.
6. Process leads to outcome. The quality of how two people interact yields levels of meaningfulness, productivity, and satisfaction.
7. The nature of a relationship is up to both partners. While each partner contributes, neither is solely responsible for the entire relationship.
8. Every relationship is governed by informal and usually unspoken rules of relationship. These attitudinal and behavioral constraints/enablers develop and can be changed over time. They govern how two people relate.

At this point, I would like to do a case study of a young couple whose relationship is in the brinks of failure and take us through a real-life counseling experience. James and Joan have sought counseling because they are extremely unhappy with their marriage. Both have been married for 9 years. In James and Joan’s fifth year of marriage, several major changes occurred. Joan had a disagreement with her boss, who summarily fired her. Since a mild recession was underway, Joan could not find a new job, despite seeking employment for six months. At this time, James and Joan decided to start a family. For almost a year, they tried to conceive, but were unable. Finally undergoing fertility testing, James was discovered to be functionally sterile.

Shortly after receiving the test results, James had a one-night, adulterous relationship with a coworker. Joan discovered the affair. Thereafter, James and Joan had substantial conflict, went to marriage counseling with their pastor for eight weeks, and ultimately decided to move to a moderately sized city only thirty miles from both families of origin. Both James and Joan now claim that the affair has been forgiven and forgotten; however, several changes have become apparent in their relationship since Joan’s discovery of the tryst. First, they have never felt as emotionally close as they once had. Second, their sexual life has been different. Third, the two have begun to bicker and argue frequently, at times even yelling and cursing, which they had done only infrequently after their first year of marriage. Since the tryst, James and Joan’s relationship has not undergone any additional major crisis, but it has continued to deteriorate. They have general negative feelings towards each other and blame the other for the negative tone their marriage has taken in the last half year. Both James and Joan are greatly depressed about the problem and feel that it is affecting their time away from each other as well as their marriage. They feel a loss of emotional intimacy and describe their feelings for each other as being “almost extinguished.”

James and Joan’s oneness and intimacy have been seriously eroded by their inability to handle the problems they have faced. Their bickering and fighting have pushed the relationship to a place of chronic negativity. These negative interactions along with the affair have done great damage to trust, resulting in intense fear of vulnerability that now has pervaded their marriage. The good news is that there is some commitment, providing a starting point for rebuilding a lost love.

As a counselor, I would first gather a solid but brief understanding of James and Joan’s problems and goals. It is clear that they need a great deal of help with communication and conflict management. Their despair made it crucial that they be given a framework of hope. In Revelation 2:4-5, Christ admonishes the Ephesians because they have left their “first love”. The instructions for regaining first love are as relevant in marriage as they are in our devotion to the Lord: (a) remember, (b) repent, and (c) “do the works you did at first”. Hence, as a counselor, I would ask James and Joan to reminisce (i.e. remember) about their better times, which stimulated their appetite for real change. Joan and James brightened noticeably, which pointed to a reservoir of positive affect that had not been entirely extinguished by years of bickering and defensiveness. The second step in Christ’s model (i.e., repent) points to the importance of setting their minds towards real change. When asked if they really wanted to try to turn things around, each clearly expressed yes, allowing both to hear from the other a commitment to work hard. The last step Christ mentions leads us directly to realize the clear need to do the kind of things done when love was stronger (do the works you did at first). Early on, partners are more polite, show more respect, make time, talk more like friends, listen better, show more zeal, and give greater evidence of passion in the bond of love. These “works” of love are the very things essential for the couples to preserve or regain their love for each other. Jesus Christ’s model points to a way and a hope. So, I would suggest to James and Joan to look back at their lives, when they were first married and think about the good times they had together and the good things and the acts of love which they did for each other. I would suggest the following guidelines which would help them in dealing with their problems and would ask them to say it to each other.

1. We will recommit ourselves to making our marriage work.
Divorce isn’t even an option. We’re going to see our problems through and build a better marriage because of it.
2. We will attack the problem, not the person.
We will agree to disagree agreeably. Do the facts of our problems warrant the heated emotions we’re showing? How about assuring each other, “Honey, I’m not sure if I agree with you in this matter, but I want you to know that I love you. Let’s work this out as a team.
3. We will always put people before things.
No broken dish, dented fender, damaged clothing or scratched record album are causes for lashing out at the other person any more.
4. We will try to see the situation from the other person’s point of view.
Why is she so upset when I’m late and the roast is burned? How would I feel if I were in his shoes? Often, the only difference between marital and martial is a misplaced “I”.
5. We will try to use “I” statements instead of “You” statements.
Following are some examples of how to carefully change accusatory “You” statements to loving statement of personal feeling.

“You” (accusation) “I” (Observation”
You’re insensitive I feel misunderstood
Will you shut up and listen I don’t think we’re communicating
You never pay attention to me I feel left out
…..and then you started yelling It bothers me when we yell at each other
You broke my favorite vase I am upset that the vase is broken

6. We will watch our tone of voice.
Loudness and bitterness only indicate that we’re losing control of ourselves.
7. We will try not to dredge up each other’s past sins.
Both James and Joan have to learn to forgive and forget their past sins because God forgives and forgets and so should we.
8. We will talk it out to its conclusion.
Let’s not leave it hanging only to build up inside us. Together we’ll explore, “What have we learned from all this? How was I wrong? What can we do to prevent this from happening again?”
9. We will be sure to seek forgiveness and to forgive freely.
This is the most important point of the fight, for it determines whether we are merely lowering the heat under the cooker or turning the fire off completely. It takes two to tangle; and if once person was a participant in the shouting match, he/she was also part of the problem and must be willing to ask for forgiveness and also to forgive.

Suggesting the above said points to James and Joan, I would ask them to work towards bringing back the “first love” in their lives. It is imperative for them to trust in the Lord because it is He, who instituted their marriage. It is therefore He who holds their relationship safe and of vital importance for He compares it even with the relationship of Himself and His bride, the Church. After few weeks, James and Joan were back with a joyful face knowing that their relationship is back to how it started and they have started to love each other even more than they have ever had.

Conclusion.
What a joy! This is what our Lord expects from each and every one of His Children. This is the kind of relationship which He envisaged for us at the Creation, but sin turned everything around. But, it’s high time that we took back what the devil has stolen from us through his deception and lies to destroy the lives of God’s children and in turn live a life to the fullest of God’s blessings according to Psalms 128. Let us trust Him to give us the needed grace, wisdom, strength, humility and love to see us through our married life- and He will.