Beyond Ordinary: When a Good Marriage Just Isn’t Good Enough

A few months ago, my wife Trisha and I found ourselves at the starting line of the Indianapolis Mini Marathon. If we could finish the 13.1 miles, it would fulfill a 3-year goal that we had to run the race together. Trish had been training about three times per week, working her way up to longer runs later in the week. I had been training, sporadically, at best. I was counting on the adrenaline of 31,000 people running the race with me to carry me farther than my training could.

As we approached the four-mile marker, I got a huge smile on my face. We were running at a ten-minute mile pace and I felt really good. I looked at Trish and said, “This is amazing. I’ve never ran beyond 4 miles at one time before.” “What?” she said. I could tell she was more concerned than impressed. “I ran three times per week for the last month, but I only ran three miles each time. Every step we take past four miles is personal best for me.”

“You’re crazy,” she said. “I prefer to think I’m brilliant. Think of all the time I saved not doing those long runs on Saturdays.” Famous last words.

As we approached mile ten, I could feel my legs starting to tighten with every step. I kept waiting for what everyone calls ‘the runner’s high’ to find me, but it never arrived. As we crossed mile ten, I went down. My quadriceps were a ball of tightness and I couldn’t bend my legs and take a step without piercing pain.

My in-shape wife was just hitting her second wind, but was gracious enough to stop and help me stretch. As I lay on the ground in pain, I said to her, “I don’t understand why my legs are cramping up so bad. I’ve drank water all along the way. I stretched out. I felt great just ten minutes ago.” She said, “Justin, you don’t train for the first ten miles of a half-marathon. You train for the last 3. Your body wasn’t prepared to run this far.”

For the next three miles, we walked, kind of ran and stopped to stretch. Trish could have gone ahead of me and finished, but she sacrificed her half marathon time to stay with my ill trained, broken down body.

When we get married, we think we are ready for the race before us. We are optimistic. We are in love. We have a plan and a dream. We dated for a year; we went to pre-marital counseling for a month; we read at least half of a “preparing for your marriage” book. We’ve trained. We’ve prepared.

What most couples don’t realize is that you don’t train for the first ten miles of marriage; you train for the last three. Without warning, many marriages go down in the middle of the race. Marriages that felt fine just a few months or years earlier fall victim to the brutal difficulty of the marriage race.

For a variety of reasons, couples that had every intention of finishing their race together either begin running at different paces, or quit their race altogether.

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 like we think they should, we are left discouraged and questioning our decision. That is the marriage Valley. 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 accomplishments or achievements don’t fix our problems. That is the place where we have to choose to stick it out or to quit. That is the place where we stand at a crossroads and are given the choice: settle for ordinary or pursue the marriage God has in mind.

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

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

It is the moments when we embrace the downward turns in marriage that God gives us the marriages we had dreamed of; not because he has changed our spouses, but because we are allowing him to change our hearts. In those challenging moments of embracing the Valley, we learn to lean on God rather than trying to be god. In those challenging moments, we allow God to remake our expectations and to transform our vision of who God is, who we are, and who our spouses are.

Ordinary marriages go to great lengths to avoid marriage Valleys, yet it is often in the Valleys that God meets us and sets us up for extraordinary.