TENSIONS IN MARRIAGE
Memorial of Saint Maximilian Kolbe, Priest and Martyr
My dear encountered couples:
Our gospel speaks of marriage and divorce, a joining together and a separation. One of the main reasons for so many marriages ending in divorce is because the joining together is so difficult.
The day of the wedding does not complete the joining together. And in all reality, neither does the marriage act of love making. The two actions might be sufficient to make the marriage valid in the eyes of civil and religious authorities, but as for really joining two people into one – that takes a lifetime: a life time of much self-sacrifice, compromise, and tension.
Tension: There is plenty of that in marriage, isn’t there? Disagreements, conflict, moodiness, temper, all go into making a marriage stressful and tense, which is not all that bad. In fact, it is good, even necessary. Where there is no conflict and no tension, there just might be no growth, no progress, no development, no real furtherance of two people into becoming one.
Tension can keep people on their toes. It can make them think, it can produce new and helpful ideas, it can make them work harder at what they vowed on their wedding day to accomplish. It keeps them from getting in a rut, becoming lazy and lethargic. Tension demands change, activity, and aliveness. Tension can give a marriage vim and vigor, care and feeling, it can be the necessary catalyst moving two people to work together to solve the problems.
Taking tension out of marriage might stagnate it in unconcern and insensibility. People, like businesses under pressure, if they are serious at all about accomplishing something worthwhile, will try harder to make their goals and dreams come true.
Don’t worry about tension in your marriage; worry only when there is none. Two into one takes a lifetime of work. Who’s going to work at it when there are no challenges?
