It’s almost comical to talk about dealing with things beyond your control in marriage. I would jokingly say that marriage is all about losing control. In his book, The Meaning of Marriage,” Timothy Keller highlights a point that Ethics Professor Stanley Hauerwas has made famous–that none of us marries the person we think we do, because the institution of marriage inherently changes each of us. I’m not the person I was before I got married. My wife is a different person too. So, trying to exert control in marriage is both difficult for you and sometimes off-putting to your spouse. Too often we view marriage as a mechanism for making “me” happy, when in fact it should be a union for “us.” So, by definition, that means giving up a lot of control for the betterment of us. We have to understand what marriage is, what it isn’t, and what it’s all about.
