Marriage

Reading these passages

The passage read at more weddings than any other was not written about weddings. 1 Corinthians 13 went to a fractious congregation that was suing itself, splitting into factions, and disgracing its own communion table. Every item on Paul's list corrects something they were doing.

Which is exactly why it works at a wedding. It was written for people who were finding each other difficult, by someone who knew they were.

And notice what the definition contains. Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up. Not one clause describes a feeling. They are all behaviours, and most are negative — things love declines to do. You could obey the entire list while feeling nothing at all, which may be the point on the days when that is all anyone has.

Where the weight falls

Ephesians 5:25 is the verse most often lifted out of shape: Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it.

The comparison has two halves and the second is the one that governs. Whatever authority the chapter describes, the model handed to husbands is a man executed on behalf of the people he was responsible for. It is a standard of self-expenditure, not of command, and reading the verse without the clause about giving himself inverts what it asks.

Peter is blunter still, and his verse is almost never preached: Likewise, ye husbands, dwell with them according to knowledge, giving honour unto the wife, as unto the weaker vessel, and as being heirs together of the grace of life; that your prayers be not hindered.

Read the last clause again. Peter attaches a man's treatment of his wife directly to whether his prayers get through. There is no gentler reading available — the consequence named is not marital unhappiness but a blocked line upward.

And heirs together is doing work in the middle of a sentence that has just described a hierarchy. Whatever the ranking in the first half, the inheritance in the second is joint.

Leave, then cleave

Genesis 2:24 is quoted by Jesus and by Paul, and the sequence in it is the part usually skipped: Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.

Leaving comes first. Before the cleaving, before the one flesh, there is a departure — and in a culture organised entirely around the extended household, that instruction was not sentimental. It described a real reordering of obligation.

The verb behind cleave is dabaq, used elsewhere of skin sticking to bone and of a man pursuing an enemy without letting go. It is not a word for affection. It is a word for not detaching.

Mark adds the sentence read at almost every ceremony: What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder. The verb for joining is a yoking word — two animals fastened to one load, moving at the same pace or not moving. It is a working image rather than a romantic one, and it assumes there is a load.

The unglamorous requirements

Ecclesiastes brings something the romantic passages do not, which is arithmetic: Two are better than one; because they have a good reward for their labour.

No feeling is mentioned. The argument is about output, and the verses that follow are about falling down, keeping warm, and being outnumbered — practical failures that a second person solves. It is the least sentimental case for partnership in the book and probably the most durable.

The image it ends on has become a wedding cliché and is worth reading literally: And if one prevail against him, two shall withstand him; and a threefold cord is not quickly broken. A rope of three strands is stronger than three separate strands not because of arithmetic but because of the twisting. The strength is in how they are wound together.

Paul supplies the other requirement nobody puts on an invitation: Forbearing one another, and forgiving one another, if any man have a quarrel against any.

Scripture assumes the quarrel. It does not treat conflict as a sign of failure or as something that a good enough marriage avoids. It plans for it, and the instruction is not to prevent the quarrel but to have a practice ready for afterwards.

Found, not achieved

Proverbs states the whole thing in the language of discovery: Whoso findeth a wife findeth a good thing, and obtaineth favour of the LORD.

Findeth, twice. Not earns, not deserves, not builds. The verb belongs to the vocabulary of things that turn up — and it is the same verb Proverbs uses of finding wisdom and finding life.

Which sits oddly against everything else on this page, and the oddness is worth keeping. Every other passage here describes work: loving as Christ loved, dwelling according to knowledge, leaving, cleaving, forbearing, forgiving. This one describes luck.

Both are in the book, and the page does not reconcile them. Anyone who has been married a long time will recognise the problem — that the thing requires enormous and continuous effort, and that no amount of effort accounts for having found the person in the first place.