Making Your Marriage A Mission

"Without cost you have received; without cost you are to give."

We have written a lot in this blog about marriage as a vocation, that is marriage as a spiritual discipline lived out in the daily give-and-take between spouses and before God. We offer many posts exploring research on these topics, and providing tools for building stronger relationships in our vocations.

We have spent less time writing about an equally vital aspect of sacramental marriage: it is a mission. We are called as a couple both to be a witness of Christ's love for his church in the world, and also to evangelize.

In this week's Gospel, Jesus sees many people who are "troubled and abandoned, like sheep without a shepherd." But he does not simply feel pity for them; he sends out his disciples two by two, to teach, to heal, and to confront the ills that bedevil people's spirits.

Just so, we are meant to go out as couples into the world to evangelize.

Any good healthy relationship serves as a witness to the world about what marriage can be. But evangelization requires something more. To be an evangelist, you have to do something.  You have to take action.

We have done many things over the years: supported schoolchildren in India, helped build a counseling program for Sudanese refugees in Cairo, fostered medically-fragile babies removed from their families by the courts.

But we have always also evangelized by promoting and supporting healthy marriages. We have participated in pre-Cana programs, mentored engaged couples, led couples' groups, and offered relationship workshops.

This web site is our current mission. We started writing Climbing the Seven Story Mountain as a relationship exercise, pulling out for ourselves what we had learned and aspired to over (what was then) more than three decades of marriage.

At the recommendation of a publisher's agent, we created this blog. Through this mission, we offer a weekly meditation on this week's Gospel that ties it to marriage and relationships, and to specific scientific studies that support these things.

The importance of mission to marriage is not merely rooted in theology. Research suggests it may also be one of the more reliable paths to a lasting and satisfying marriage.

Gabrielle Pfund and Patrick Hill conducted cross-sectional and longitudinal studies of couples, and found that those with a greater sense of purpose tended to maintain their romantic relationships better. A sense of mission was also positively associated with relationship satisfaction, commitment, and investment. Even better: the relationship also ran the other direction: higher relationship quality predicted increased sense of purpose over time. Couples who pursued meaning together, not just happiness, were more likely to stay connected through the inevitable difficulties of life.

This matters for how we think about outreach. Pre-Cana programs, mentoring younger couples, hosting a dinner for neighbors going through a hard time, writing or speaking about what you have learned in your own marriage: none of these require expertise or credentials. They require only a willingness to share what you have received.

And that willingness is itself a kind of evangelization — one that often clarifies itself in the doing rather than in the planning.

A Dinner for Four

Sometimes the best way to evangelize through your marriage is to start simple. Here's an exercise to try:

• Invite another couple to dinner. Choose someone a few years behind you in marriage, or a couple you sense may be struggling, or simply one you have been meaning to know better.

• Keep the evening simple. No agenda, no prepared remarks, no curriculum.

• At some point let the conversation find its way toward the question of what marriage is actually like. If it helps to have something to say, try this: "Here's something we wish someone had told us earlier." 

• Speak from your own experience, the way you would with a friend. Be honest about what has been hard. Be honest about what has held.

• Afterward, when your guests have gone, sit together for a few minutes and notice what came up during the evening. Share with one another what things felt the most alive, what you found yourself saying that you hadn't quite put into words before. Couples who do this often discover that they know more than they realized, and that sharing it costs less than they feared.

This kind of generous, informal hospitality is what positive psychologists call "prosocial behavior," and research consistently shows that helping others strengthens the helper's own sense of meaning and connection. The research also suggests that couples who pursue meaning together show greater satisfaction and resilience over time.

That's especially true when the meanings are oriented outward, toward others, when it's a mission. Giving, it turns out, is good for the givers.