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Relationships are born throughout a person’s lifetime. Sadly, many of these relationships also die. If relationships were a short distance run, they might make it. However, friendships are marathons. Relationships are a long race, and many do not cover the distance.

These relationships could be between siblings, friends, parents and children, boyfriends and girlfriends, spouses.

This blogpost considers how the relationship between a wife, Abby, and a husband, Matthew, deteriorates and dies. Let’s begin with Abby’s perspective:

My name is Abby. My marriage to Matthew started very well—after all, I did marry the man, didn’t I? I must have seen something in him at the beginning. I know I did. I thought I did.

He seemed so sensitive and caring. He listened well and looked at me when I talked to him. His eye contact was great, like he couldn’t look at me enough, and I felt so good. I valued him, and he valued me. It was a rewarding feedback loop. He made me feel seen and loved so it was easy for me to love him.

Matt did need lots of affirmation from me, probably because his father, Greg, was a very withholding man emotionally. He didn’t give his children many supplies in terms of love and praise. Greg was all about work and performance. Emotions were not part of his psyche and so he would not allow them to be part of his son’s life, either.

I listened to Matt because he seemed to need a listener. He talked a lot, and I listened a lot. I praised him for his work accomplishments. I tried to make him feel special. He blossomed before my eyes when I affirmed him. He came alive when he was the focus of my attention.

After a few years, I realized that he didn’t look at me the way he did at the beginning. He didn’t listen very well, either, and he certainly didn’t make me feel special. I was no longer number one in his life.

Slowly, I began to feel unloved. He didn’t see me or value me like he used to. He never scheduled a babysitter for us to go out on a date night. He didn’t look into my eyes the way he did when we were dating. The very reasons I married him—he talked so openly for a man and seemed to really need me—became increasingly less attractive. I began to see his talking as self-centeredness and experienced his need for me as neediness.

I began to point out what he was doing wrong. I explained to him over and over how he was failing me. For some reason, he began to pull away from me.

My feeling of being unloved turned into sadness. Sadness turned into frustration. Rehearsing my frustration turned into resentment and bitterness. Is there a difference between the two? Whatever word best describes it, I felt my blood pressure go up every time I looked at him.

Eventually, he began accepting consulting jobs that took him out of town for months at a time. I began to feel rejected, even abandoned. My bitterness devolved into something close to hatred and then to contempt. Yes, I felt contempt for the man I was so in love with twenty years ago. What had happened to the amazing man I had married?

My communication with him was now only negative (he always triggered my negativity) or it revolved around the kids (that he was always irritable with) or the budget (that he rarely followed) or chores around the house (that he never did).

Every time he came back from a long-distance consulting job, I spent the first two days venting all the negativity that had built up within me for how he did not love me the way he had in the past. Sometimes, he appeared to listen, but he rarely looked me in the eye. He was making me so mad. I was convinced I had made a mistake when I married him.

I found the pornography first—on his computer. I don’t think I would have been so hurt by this discovery if I felt like he still loved me. But the women he was looking at simply reminded me that I no longer had his heart. My contempt for this weak man intensified.

Then came the emotional affair. I found out she existed when I picked up his phone and saw a text from her.

I felt something so deep that I couldn’t even describe it. I know I felt powerless. Rejected. I graduated from bitterness to payback. I vowed that I would get him back for what he did to me. I was going to make him feel what he made me feel. I began by withholding sex—and gaining weight.

**

My name is Matt. I married Abby because she was beautiful and because she looked at me with admiration in her eyes. Yes, I’ve always been a sucker for a woman’s admiring gaze. What man isn’t? So, I fell for Abby. Yes, she loved Jesus, but if I’m honest, I put her beauty and her admiration for me first.

The first year or two of marriage went well, but then something began to change. I couldn’t put a finger on it for a long time. She praised me less and less. She stopped seeking me out in that exciting way that made me feel wanted and needed. But the worst of it all was the steady drizzle of criticism she directed at me. Nothing huge—just constant.

I had seen how Abby’s mother criticized her husband. I never thought Abby would do the same to me. I called her mother the eraser because she slowly and methodically erased her husband’s value and confidence with her negativity.

I woke up one day and realized that I, too, had married an eraser.

I never understood why Abby didn’t come to me and simply tell me what she needed from me. I’m sure I would have listened to her and tried my best to give her what she needed. But she didn’t express her needs. Never. Not once.

Instead of saying, “I need,” she said, “You never,” or “you always.” It was always “you, you, you.” It was about my deficits, never about her needs. Was I that bad or was she that unable to ever admit a need?

I honestly don’t think she could let herself need. Maybe needing was too vulnerable. Or maybe she believed that if she asked for something and I did it, it didn’t count. It would only be genuine if I did it naturally, totally from my own thoughtfulness.

I got so tired of her complaining and erasing and criticizing that I did what every self-respecting man would do: I ran away. Not primarily physically, but partially so through my job and by hanging out more with my friends. I certainly pulled away emotionally. I put on Kevlar and kept her at a safe distance.

At around year ten in the marriage, I noticed that every time I got too close to her, I would step on one of her landmines and she would blow up with criticism. So, I stayed out of the Demilitarized Zone to avoid her landmines. Year by year, I pulled farther away from her until I needed binoculars to see her.

Soon, the problem was not that we had too much conflict. To the contrary, we had very little since we never got close enough to fight.

Frankly, I got sick and tired of Abby. The woman I had married who admired me and took care of my needs no longer existed. She was not living up to her part of our contract. If she was breaking the rules of our marriage, why should I keep trying so hard? Who wants to hug a porcupine, anyway?

Increasingly, I channeled my energy into work, hunting, fishing, fantasy football, and—I’m ashamed to admit it—to pornography and to emotional affairs with women I met while doing my consulting job out of town.

Yes, I ran away and rejected Abby because I was so tired of her negativity. Anybody treated me better than her—even the barista at the coffee shop. So it was that I found my admiration in the eyes of my customers, or in the eyes of the women I gazed at on the computer, or in the eyes of the coworkers I hung out with in New Mexico, Ohio, Hawaii, and Kansas.

I never slept with another woman out of respect for my wife and in obedience to God’s commandment against adultery. But my emotional affairs were probably just as damaging to my marriage. I withdrew my affections from my wife and invested them in other women.

But what else could I do? To be close to her was to reap her wrath. To distance was to find positive attention elsewhere. Her eyes despised me—most of the time. The eyes of others smiled at me.

The distance grew until I began daydreaming about divorcing her. I hadn’t signed up to live with a bitter, critical woman, so why should I stay? For our three kids? They would survive even if the marriage didn’t. Besides, I would just be giving her what she wanted anyway, right? Obviously, I wasn’t enough for her, so I might as well leave and then she could find the man she really wanted.

I reached out to a lawyer.

Twelve hours before I was supposed to sign the divorce papers, I had a restless night and slept very little. God spoke to me all night long. He told me to have no regrets. I knew what He meant was that I should turn over every stone before I gave up on Abby.

I went to a marriage conference—without my wife—in a city where I was doing a consulting job. I didn’t even tell Abby that I was going because I believed that it would only confirm my decision. These are the bullet points I took away from that conference (I call them bullet points because they hit and penetrated their target):

• Look inside at yourself first before you look at your spouse’s flaws. Sounds like something Jesus might have said
• Listen to your spouse instead of forever defending yourself
• Remember that marriage isn’t about what you can get but about what you can give. It was never meant to be a relationship where you are served but where you learn to serve and to love
• God brings a man and a woman together into a marriage to help them grow each other, to heal wounds inflicted from past relationships, and to expose immaturity and sin within both individual heart
• Look at your marriage from the eternal perspective: Do you want stories to be told one day on the streets of heaven about how you laid aside all your needs for your spouse or do you want to make yourself happy for forty years in this world and then die?
• On the day you exchange your vows, you are in marriage kindergarten and spend the next sixty years learning how to graduate to higher levels of marriage. After ten years you might be in 8^th grade.
• Reframe your wife’s criticism as the cry of her heart when she feels unloved. Listen with compassion
• Have you forgotten that you are to love your wife the way Christ loved the church? Sacrificially and unconditionally pretty much sum it up
• Marriage is an impossible relationship. By the love, power, and servant-heart of God, do the impossible. Mission Impossible is always possible with Jesus
• Learn to love and serve your spouse and save the marriage. Your children are watching closely and will learn from you what to do when their marriages become difficult, stuck, and seemingly hopeless. What legacy will you leave for them and their children?
• Move toward your wife, not away from her or against her
• The attribute that attracted you most to your spouse often becomes the one you dislike the most later in the marriage. Don’t be shocked if that happens to you because I just told you how it will go down
• Many things contribute to the disintegration of a marriage. Distance is what kills it in the end
• Contempt expressed through disrespectful criticism, and emotional walls that keep the other spouse from getting close are often what create the distance that kills
• Live out the love of Jesus in your marriage. Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things ~ I Corinthians 13:4-7
• Maybe most importantly, remember that marriage is not a contract where you commit to do your part only if the other person does their part. Never do marriage that way. Marriage is a covenant, just like God’s relationship with us. In a covenant, you give even when the other person is not giving. You give back better than you receive. You are faithful even when he or she is unfaithful
• Yes, there may be exceptions to these points, e.g., if your spouse is abusive or repeatedly unfaithful, but consider these truths and speak with God before you separate or divorce

**

Currently, I know dozens of couples with similar dynamics to the ones that Matthew and Abby are wrestling with. The seventeen bullet points above are helping Matthew love his wife and woo her to himself. He still gets hurt and angry in his marriage and occasionally reverts to wall building and distancing especially if he is experiencing other stressors besides those in his marriage. But the distance between he and Abby is lessening. He no longer needs binoculars to see her.

He now sees that the biggest problem in the marriage is not what Abby does not give to him but what he does not give to her. He has chosen to learn how to love Abby like Jesus loved him. It is the only way any marriage will work—with agape love.

For those of you in marriages—in any relationship whatsoever, actually—I encourage you to follow the truths above and don’t forget what R. Kent Hughes said: The man who sanctifies his wife understands that this is his divinely ordained responsibility… Is my wife more like Christ because she is married to me? Or is she like Christ in spite of me? Has she shrunk from His likeness because of me? Do I sanctify her or hold her back? Is she a better woman because she is married to me?

You men who are reading this blogpost today, I especially challenge you to be the project manager of your marriage and approach it as the most critical project of your lifetime. No job at work will matter more. One day, you will walk away from work, and no one will remember you—at least not often.

How you love your wife and the legacy you intentionally cultivate for your children and your children’s children could impact countless people. Eternally.

So, learn covenantal love. A relationship built on covenant will make the difference between a conditional, selfish love and a sacrificial, Christ-like love. You will run the marathon and cross the finish line.

How you love your spouse might be the best evidence of how the gospel of Jesus Christ has impacted your life.

And walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God ~ Ephesians 5:2