How Envy Can Poison Your Marriage
- Dawna Peterson
- Jun 14
- 2 min read
One of the best tests of the strength of a marriage is how people feel about the good things that happen to their spouses. People who felt true joy at the good news of their partner formed stronger bonds than those who were jealous of their spouse’s successes, writes psychologist Shelly Gable in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
In this Sunday's Gospel, Jesus continues to describe the intimacy shared by the Father and the Son, and again invites the Apostles to share in this intimacy. Yet he concludes by telling them that they are not yet ready for full intimacy.
What impediments remain?
We have seen throughout the Gospels that the Apostles suffer from all the same sins as other humans, especially pride, doubt, fear, and envy. Envy is especially destructive in a marriage.
Envy can occur in two different ways -- within a marriage as a competition between the partners, or by one or both partners looking outside the marriage at what (they think) other couples have. Often, these two forms of envy go hand in hand: the spouse who is envious of their partner's success is also envious of the neighbor's successes. Such envious spouses spoil their own enjoyment of the good things they do have by focusing on what they lack.
Envy within a coupleship is the very opposite of what marriage is supposed to be. When a Christian couple marries they typically exchange a vow, such as “to have and to hold, from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness or in health, to love and to cherish 'till death do us part…”
Envy turns that vow upside down. Instead of the couple having one another's backs, marriage becomes a win/lose proposition, a zero-sum game, in which one partner is unhappy if their spouse is happy. When this occurs, the two do not have common goals for the future, nor do they have one another's best interests at heart.
This passage is redacted from a chapter of our book Climbing the Seven Story Mountain. You can read the full chapter here. And we have a chapter on eliminating envy from your marriage here.
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