The Deep-Rooted Marriage: Cultivating Intimacy, Healing, and Delight

by Dan B. Allender

what draws couples together eventually can divide them. What brings them together is a hunger for redemption of harm they barely can see, let alone name—and that failure to name creates a framework for untold present and future suffering to play out.

We have learned to deny the desire to be delighted in, but it exists in every heart.

Denial or avoidance of what is true inevitably brings about more harm. As a client once put it, “I’m learning that I either pay now, or I pay even more later.”

Numbing Fragmenting leads to numbing, when something in our bodies says, I can’t bear this. We cannot become aware of the extent of the anger, grief, or fear in us—it is too much. Subconsciously we sense the danger of, What if I physically harm someone in anger, or I never stop crying in my grief, or my panic puts me in the hospital? It’s better to just push it down. This is how we survive.

For some spouses who hate conflict, this will come with an increase of fear. For others, it will be accompanied by a surge of anger and arousal. When we feel activated and the rising necessity to flee, fight, freeze, or fawn, it is time to stop.5 Even if we can justify our reaction of running away or digging in our heels, we must let that go. Only then can we ask our partners for a pause so we can collect ourselves (care for fragmentation), tend to our emotions (tend to numbness), and make a decision not to isolate.

In chapter 5, we discussed the critical experience of attunement, when someone tunes into another person. We all are wired to receive this; it is a legitimate human need. We all need someone to offer us their presence and focus, to show they are aware of our feelings, to listen and empathize, and to reassure our hearts that we are seen and cared for.

Curiosity helps us tell the story of what happened, and, as Ann Voskamp once wrote, “Shame dies when we tell stories in safe places.”6 Curiosity is foundational to safety.

Brené Brown once said, “Shame cannot survive when met by empathy.”7 Empathy is the antidote to shame. It says to our spouses, I get it, and I’m here with you.

We will have fear, and it will take courage to rewrite the script, to move away from, If my spouse fully sees me, there is potential for judgment, and instead think, If my spouse fully sees me, we can overcome this shame in me.

Dan has been honest with me about my weaknesses, so I know I can trust him when he delights in my strengths.

The internal question we ask of our spouses is, Am I chosen? And being chosen is revealed through presence and access: Do I have access to my spouse’s heart? Access to their story? Do they have curiosity about my heart? About my story? And our partners are asking the same of us. They are impacted when we look at our phones more than their eyes when we’re in a room together. When we don’t offer emotional presence by paying attention to their words, facial expressions, and indicators of what they’re feeling. When we don’t look closer with interest.

Our culture’s approach to death is to outsource it. We don’t die at home. We outsource death to hospitals and hospices. We wish to keep it as sanitized and distant as possible.

We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing. GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

when our partners refuse to play, dismiss our desires to play, or are consistently unavailable, we can internalize a message of shame. I must not be that important. I must not matter. Play communicates to our partners that they are chosen, remembered, and desired. It is a powerful antidote to shame. It helps rewrite the internal scripts our partners may be rehearsing.

Like the hydrangeas, we can live without the amendment of play, but we won’t thrive, and we’ll be more susceptible to stress and seasonal changes. Play is the amendment to our soil.

Theologian and novelist G. K. Chesterton pondered this when he wrote: Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again,” and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun, and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be an automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy, for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.

There is no neutrality in the matter of blessing or cursing. We either bless or curse—there is no middle ground. We either are moving toward each other for the sake of the wild, inconceivable glory of God, or we are not.

A curse cuts your partner, making them pay for your failure and pain, and provides an escape from suffering the furrowing of your soul. It is a judgment, a stance of contempt, that freezes the other in the pronouncement that there is nothing good to be enjoyed.