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My son Brandon, lives in Omaha with his wife Philly and 3 day old son, Alyas (congratulations to Mary Sue and I…our first grandchild! EEEHAA!). We visited them right after Alyas was born. What fun! Brandon is a seminary student and planning to go on to do doctoral work in philosophy. He often talks with friends his age who are thinking of getting married and he told me he’s been able to summarize what it takes to be married in one sentence. Since in marriage counseling I work with people in this area for a living, I was interested in how he’d decided to succinctly put one of the world’s great mysteries. He tells them: “Don’t get married if you like being selfish.” I like that.

Don’t get married if everything has to go your way.
Don’t get married if you think you are right all the time.
Don’t get married if you think when someone disagrees with you they are attacking you.
Don’t get married if love means how you make me feel.
Don’t get married if you don’t have a servant spirit and you can’t do something for someone else without wanting something in return.

Let’s take Brandon’s concept one step further: what if you are already married and you tend to be selfish? If everything has to go your way (and rarely will everything go your way under any circumstances), then you will be resentful and harbor ill-will toward your spouse because they will constantly be disappointing you. This will play out it one of two ways: shutting down or lashing out. Shutting down and withdrawing from your spouse can be seen in such ways as not coming home, being on the computer all the time, spending time with friends but not your spouse, giving your heart and time and energy to your kids or career or business, or an affairee or pornography or your race car or hobby and not your spouse, watching TV in a separate room, not sleeping together or going to bed at different times, hunting or fishing to extremes, reading romantic novels constantly (Great. Now you’ll have more reasons to despise your spouse because they aren’t making you as happy as the wonderful people in your unrealistic fantasies).

The second way selfishness is played out is lashing out and saying mean things. If this is you any little thing will set you off because everything has to go your way and you’ll be hollering about this or that and you’ll have that grimace on your face like the elementary school principal did when you were in third grade and he stood at the end of the hall when you went to lunch with his arms folded and glared at you like you were evil warmed over and you cowered and avoided him like the plague and your kids and your spouse will treat you in kind. If your spouse hurts you or doesn’t meet your expectations or has a struggle or shortcoming or a problem and it bothers you you will tell them no matter what because that’s how you feel and if you don’t say how you feel then you feel you are a hypocrite even if it hurts the other person because how you feel is more important than how anyone else feels and they better understand that and if they don’t get it or show enough emotion or remorse then you will let them have it so they will feel sorry because you won’t let it go unless they feel as sorry as you think they should because after all the world revolves around you and it’s your job to make sure they understand you.

And then you will be soooo surprised when your spouse has you served papers for irreconcilable differences when basically the differences were that one or both of you were selfish and self-absorbed and everything had to go your way and if it didn’t life was unfair and you withdrew or fought and why live like that and so you divorce and then you meet another selfish person like yourself and marry them and then the whole thing repeats itself only this time it’s going to be a lot shorter time that you will take that crap and you give up on your second marriage much sooner than you did on your first because you know now how to divorce and that somehow you can survive and after all I just need to be happy and since you can’t make me happy and I don’t need another kid (I have enough already) because one is too selfish to help and the other is too selfish to help without building up resentments I may as well divorce you because you’ll never change, because the fact of the matter is that selfish people, if they aren’t careful, don’t change except to become more selfish, more self absorbed, more right, more entitled (“I won’t just settle!” and “I’m not going to go through that anymore”). So you divorce (again) in your stubborn pride and actually feel good about it because I just need to do what will make me happy and we were just two different people and we just grew apart and you never listened and you’d never change anyway and I don’t want to have to go through this again in a year so enough already, but I’ll never marry again because that’s too painful, so I’ll just live with a “partner” and rip their hearts out without marriage and call it a day.

“If you seek your life to save it, you will lose it; if you lose your life for my sake (Jesus said) you will find it.”

“Whoever wants to be great among you must first be a servant.” (Jesus said this, too.)