The All-or-Nothing Marriage — Eli J. Finkel

The deep happiness that marriage can bring, then, lies on the far side of sacrificial service in the power of the Spirit. That is, you only discover your own happiness after each of you has put the happiness of your spouse ahead of your own, in a sustained way, in response to what Jesus has done for you. Some will ask, “If I put the happiness of my

To conduct a Me-Marriage requires two completely well-adjusted, happy individuals, with very little in the way of emotional neediness of their own or character flaws that need a lot of work. The problem is—there is almost no one like that out there to marry!

We should rightly object to the binary choice that both traditional and contemporary marriage seem to give us. Is the purpose of marriage to deny your interests for the good of the family, or is it rather to assert your interests for the fulfillment of yourself? The Christian teaching does not offer a choice between fulfillment and sacrifice but ra

What counts in making a happy marriage is not so much how compatible you are, but how you deal with incompatibility. —Leo Tolstoy, writer

Marriage isn’t a constant passion-fest; it’s more like a partnership formed to run a very small, mundane nonprofit business. And that, they say, can be really, really nice. Having a solid, like-minded teammate in life is pleasurable in its own way, and for most people, it’s certainly better than not having one at all.

In the strongest marriages, husband and wife share a deep sense of meaning. They don’t just “get along”—they also support each other’s hopes and aspirations and build a sense of purpose into their lives together. That is really what I mean when I talk about honoring and respecting each other. Very often a marriage’s failure to do this is what cause