A Considerate Marriage or a Negotiated Marriage?

I never gave much thought to being considerate. I didn’t have to.

When Eric and I started dating, consideration was the easiest thing in the world. I was a baby Christian, brand new to faith and brand new to him, and I was in love. Those feelings, and yes, they were feelings, kept him on my mind all day long. Thinking of him first wasn’t a discipline. It was a side effect. The feelings did all the heavy lifting, and I got to feel like a wonderful, selfless woman for free.

Then the feelings started to thin out. They do that. And my first thought was, what happened?

What had happened was that the engine quit. The feelings were no longer carrying me in the consider-one-another department, and underneath them, waiting, was a much older voice. My flesh sat up and started to scream the only thing it has ever really known how to say. What about me?

And what about me never stays a feeling for long. It wants receipts. It starts keeping books. In a marriage it hardens into the quiet arithmetic of the negotiated marriage: I handled bedtime three nights running, so he owes me Saturday. I gave in last time, so it’s his turn to bend. He got an afternoon with his buddies, so somewhere the account adjusts in my favor. Tit for tat, dressed up as fairness. I never sat down and decided to run my marriage like a trade deal. My flesh just reached for the ledger the second the feelings stopped picking up the tab. But that was not the marriage I wanted to build.

“Let us consider one another in order to stir up love and good works.” Hebrews 10:24.

Consider one another.

Not feel your way toward one another.

Consider.

I had read that verse and assumed I was already living it, because for a season the feelings faked it convincingly. But the command was never aimed at my emotions. It was aimed at my will. And my will, left to itself, only ever votes for me.

Here is what I knew about myself, and it isn’t pretty. I had been a wrecking ball in the relationships before Eric. I knew exactly where what about me leads, because I’d followed it all the way to the rubble more than once.

Ruin and I were old roommates. And I was not about to move her into my new marriage.

So I did the hardest, least romantic thing I could do. I bossed my will around. I told myself, out loud some days, to consider that man whether or not I felt a single flicker of anything. And it didn’t stay a solo effort. Eric and I made a choice together, to walk as one. To consider one another instead of negotiating with one another. He likened it to two countries at a bargaining table, each protecting its own interests, trading concession for concession.

But a marriage isn’t two countries. It’s one flesh. One country. And the same country does not negotiate with itself. Making that choice made all the difference in our marriage.

But I won’t pretend it fixed everything. Consideration isn’t a switch you flip once and leave on. It’s a choice you keep making, and some seasons you make it through gritted teeth. Last year was the hardest of our entire 28 years of marriage. I think Eric and I could have qualified for the Jerry Springer show, with all our arguing. (More on that in other posts.) That was the year the choice cost me the most, because it was the year I least felt like making it.

And right there is the objection, friend. The one that was mine, and still is on some days: But I don’t feel like it.

A negotiated marriage runs on feelings and fairness, and both of those clock out on you.

A considerate marriage runs on a willful, daily choice to ask how do I give you what you need instead of the old scream, what about me. One of those keeps a ledger because it has to. The other tore the ledger up, because it finally remembered it was one flesh.

One looks like my flesh. The other looks like Jesus, who felt the full weight of the cross and considered us anyway.

So here is the one thing I want you to carry out of this. When the feelings that once made you generous run dry, that is not the end of consideration. That is where consideration actually begins. The first time you choose your spouse with no feeling left to help you, and no scoreboard to make it fair, is the first time it’s truly yours.

A negotiated marriage, even a perfectly fair one, leaves you civil and a little lonely, two people keeping the peace from across a quiet table.

A considerate marriage grows the other thing. The sweetness. The closeness. The tender, fulfilling, shared-life oneness a balance sheet can never settle its way into.

Fairness keeps you even.

Consideration makes you one, and one is where all the good stuff lives.

Lord, when my feelings quit, steady my will. Help me consider him today, even when I don’t want to.

Live a poured-out life for Christ,

Jolene Engle