Kierkegaard writes of three possible outlooks on life—what he calls the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. He says that all of us are born aesthetes, and we only can become ethical or religious through our choices. So what is the aesthete? The aesthete doesn’t really ask whether something is good or bad but only whether it is interesting.13

In verses 22–24, Paul says, controversially, that wives should submit to their husbands. Immediately, however, he tells husbands to love their wives as Christ loved the church and “gave himself up for her” (25), which is, if anything, a stronger appeal to abandon self-interest than was given to the woman.

The Overly Subjective View of Love

But married people make each other practice saving, investment, and delayed gratification. Nothing can mature character like marriage.

If we look to our spouses to fill up our tanks in a way that only God can do, we are demanding an impossibility.

It is the illusion that if we find our one true soul mate, everything wrong with us will be healed; but that makes the lover into God, and no human being can live up to that.

Wait, we say. The Bible says we are supposed to forgive people and then go and confront them? Yes! The reason we are surprised by this is almost always because we confront people who have wronged us as a way of paying them back. By telling them off, we are actually getting revenge.

If we look to our spouses to fill up our tanks in a way that only God can do, we are demanding an impossibility.

Hauerwas gives us the first reason that no two people are compatible for marriage—namely, that marriage profoundly changes us. But there is another reason. Any two people who enter into marriage are spiritually broken by sin, which among other things means to be self-centered—living life incurvatus in