Beyond Awkward Side Hugs by Bronwyn Lea

Author:Bronwyn Lea
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 2020-01-28T00:00:00+00:00

LOVE MATCH

Our friend Stanford has become something of a local celebrity for his witty, wise talks on relationships, dating, and marriage. When the students in our college ministry ask starry-eyed questions about dating and finding “the one,” his counsel includes asking whether they can see themselves parenting alongside this person who has caught their eye. Students are often taken aback. They’d only gotten as far as thinking about conversation topics for a first date, and Stanford throws in parenting as a yardstick? But he’s consistent and insistent in his counsel on who to date (and thus who to marry): marry someone godly, someone you like, someone you can work with, and someone you think would make a great mother or father to your kids.

Not only does Stanford firmly believe that such relationships have the highest likelihood of supporting and being supported by a lifetime of satisfying sex (and, being a data kind of guy, he has graphs and stats to show why that’s true7), but he also firmly believes this is the kind of beautiful vision for marriage that can flourish as God intended. “In twenty years’ time, if you find yourself on the couch late at night folding laundry and trying to match socks, and you look across at the wife of your youth and think, ‘There’s no one I’d rather be folding socks with,’ then I’d call that winning,” I’ve often heard him say.

It’s a beautiful thing to conceive of a marriage in which there is comforting togetherness even in something as mundane as folding socks. And the sock imagery actually works at multiple levels, because when I think of marriage, I think not only of a couple contentedly folding socks together but of a couple themselves as a sort of metaphorical pair of socks. After the initial love match, one is part of a pair, and even after a long day of being hard at work separately, each is still somehow keeping in step with the other. Then it is a sweet thing to be folded up together at the end of the day.

Socks, like marriage, are also part of a much bigger picture. Socks are just one item out of a closet of clothes. And marriage is one relationship in a network of love relationships. At its best, a marriage is located within a larger community of healthy relationships, and has both the depth and breadth necessary for a couple to love and partner with each other in this world.

My husband is not just my lover; he is my neighbor. He is my closest and most intimate neighbor, but he’s not my only neighbor. I cannot forget that we live in a neighborhood filled with other neighbors. I am his wife, but I am his sibling too. I am his closest sibling, but not his only one. We belong to a church, a community, and a world filled with other sacred siblings.

From here we turn to the burning question raised by all this talk of spouses

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