I Keep Trying To Prove We Are One

There is a list. Not on paper, but it may as well be.

One real conversation a week. One evening where neither of you looks at a phone. One moment where something passes between you that could not be explained to a third party.

And every Sunday night, without ever deciding to, you total it up. And most weeks the total is short, and you go into Monday carrying a deficit that nobody else in the house knows about.

I want to ask a question that I think has never been asked out loud in your kitchen.

Who set those targets?

Not God. Nowhere in scripture is a couple handed a weekly quota of moments. Not your husband. He does not know the list exists. Not a counselor, unless one was unusually careless.

You set them. In good faith, out of love, because you wanted the marriage to be good and you are a person who works at things.

And the working has become the problem, which is a very hard sentence for somebody like you to hear.

The verb is in the past tense

There is a sentence in Mark, in the middle of an argument the crowd was having, and I want the grammar of it.

What therefore God hath joined together (Mark 10:9, King James Version)

Hath joined. Past tense, completed action, and the one who did it is named and it is not either of the two people involved.

That is a done thing being reported. It is not a target, not an aspiration, not a state of affairs the couple is responsible for producing.

You are standing on a completed action, and Mark 10 has never once described the joining as a project either of you was handed. Mark 10:9 puts the joining in the past tense with God as the one who performed it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a piece of grammar into a place to rest.

Now hold your Sunday night total against that. What exactly were you totalling? You were auditing the presence of a thing God already did.

That is not diligence. It is a person checking, weekly, whether something that was finished stayed finished.

A promise was made once and God joined two people, and neither the promise nor the joining is renewed by a good week or undone by a poor one.

You have been auditing a completed work, and the word has never once put that inspection in a wife's hands. The passage names God as the one who joined and reports it as done, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes a clipboard out of somebody's hands.

The project is what is tiring you

Let me say what the list is actually costing, because I do not think it has been added up.

You cannot enjoy an evening while grading it. That is not a moral claim, it is a mechanical one. Attention cannot be in the room and above the room at the same time.

So the very moments the list is trying to produce are the ones the list makes impossible. Every conversation is being marked while it happens. Every quiet evening is being assessed for whether it counts.

You are being worn out by the measuring rather than by the marriage, and Mark 10 has never once handed the measuring to anybody. Mark 10:9 reports the joining as done by God and finished, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes an instrument out of a woman's hand mid week.

And the man across the table, who does not know about any of this, has been sitting opposite a half present woman for about four years, which is the exact opposite of what the list was built to produce.

I say that gently and not as an accusation. You did this out of love. It is simply not working, and it was never going to.

You are exhausted by an assignment nobody gave you, and no verse has ever once made a marriage into a weekly target. Mark 10:9 reports the joining as finished and hands nobody an ongoing task, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a person put down a load she picked up herself.

You were trying to build a thing that had already been built, and the building has never once been available to you. It is written that God hath joined them together, and the Spirit of God is the one who tells a woman the work she is doing is not hers to do.

Say it, and stop for one day

Here is the assignment and it is a subtraction, which will feel wrong to you, and the wrongness is the point.

Say out loud, alone, outside if you can: God joined this. He did it once and it holds.

Then, for one day, do not run the list. No totalling on Sunday night. No grading the conversation while it is happening. No checking whether an evening counted.

One day. That is all I am asking. You can pick the list back up on Tuesday if you want it.

You are able to stop working on a finished thing, and it has never once needed your maintenance to remain true. Mark 10:9 has the joining performed by God and reported as complete, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present in the first evening somebody does not mark.

And when the urge to total it up arrives, and it will arrive on schedule, say the sentence again instead.