How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told

by Harrison Scott Key

Whatever your feelings about Christ being the bridegroom and the church being the bride, here’s what I’ve come to see: Rome slaughtered Jesus, and that’s what marriage will do. It will slay you, crucify and burn and behead you and everything you thought you knew about yourself. And the thing that is left, after all is burned and plucked away, that is the real you.

What if marriage, at its very best, exists to remake us into beautiful new creatures we scarcely recognize? What if, in some cosmically weird way, escaping a hard marriage is not how you change? What if staying married is?

One of my favorites, Alain de Botton, once wrote, “Compatibility is an achievement of love; it must not be its precondition.” That is marriage, in the end: two of you, being you, warring against the worst parts of you, making space for the best to grow, and learning to see that some parts of your spouse are not your favorite, and letting those parts be anyway. Hating those parts is no grounds for divorce. The only thing worth divorcing, in most cases, is the hatred itself,

Yet, to stay married, you will need more than therapy. You will need an entire community of people insane enough to love both of you, people to whom you cannot and will not lie about what is most real inside your wicked and wondrous heart.

Maybe some of these questions disqualify me from calling myself a Good American Christian, but I’m not worried about the approval of whitewashed tombs who can’t tell the difference between doubt and wonder. Those people are afraid to admit they don’t know the answers to those questions, either. I take comfort in what Augustine once said, quoted by Soren in a sermon not long ago: “If you have understood God, then what you have understood is not God.”

The human heart is a terrain that cannot be mapped by reason alone. Virtue cannot solve the riddle of marriage. All I really know is this: the most powerful force in the universe is love and the strangest is forgiveness. I will never fully understand either but then I still don’t know exactly how elevators work and I enjoy elevators all the time.

Not long ago, a friend who went through something similar said to me, “You forget. You move on. Everything is fine and great, and then in a flash, you remember all over again and the rage fills you like it once did.” This, too, has happened. It is not a calculated rage. It is not planned. It is not welcome. The feeling springs forth from the dark places in me, and sometimes I feel that this rage is only trying to help, to remind me, to make me vigilant, and sometimes I feel that the rage is evil, accusatory, telling me to walk away, to be the one to leave next. I feel it. It is not a good feeling.

The good news: comedy is all about miracles, transformation, new understanding, mercy. That’s the real miracle of comedy: forgiveness, the greatest LOL of them all. What is forgiveness but burying the dead and being okay with it? What can be more impossible and necessary in this life? They say God doesn’t keep a grade book, and I’m trying to throw mine away. “Love keeps no record of wrongs,” we hear so often in wedding ceremonies, and we smile like fools.

But the darkness has been overcome, is being overcome, by shining what light we have into the places where you don’t always want to look and laughing at the absurdity, the audacity, of life, and our audacity to carry on. The merry heart so often seems ridiculous to the afflicted because it is a heart of flesh, not stone. Stone hearts cannot laugh. Only soft ones, loose and alive, do that.

Love means letting some things go. They say tragedy is all about death, but things have to die in comedy, too. Sometimes what dies is your old marriage. Sometimes what dies is you. But God can make a valley of bones dance again. Your marriage can return from the dead. They say Jesus looked different after he came back. His buddies didn’t even recognize him. If your marriage gets resurrected, you’ll look different, too. Badly maimed, possibly. Limping, smiling, a sparkle in your one good eye. The world may look at you funny. Because heartache and love will transform you and your partner into new and better beings, if you will only get out of the way.

But I refuse to allow the wounds of the recent unpleasantness to undo goodness that always was. I never knew her before, not fully, but I know her now—including the parts she was once too fearful to reveal and the parts I was so often too frightened to see. I now understand that to comprehend the immensity of someone’s pain is to comprehend the full breadth of the soul. The beauty of my wife is more beautiful to me than I ever could have imagined, because I see the fullness of her now, and I can admit, without reserve, that she is definitely one of my favorite people, perhaps even among my top five. How can I not love this woman, for how deeply she has allowed herself to be seen?