The first five items were things you would expect to find on the list of any ordinary Christian man who considers himself worthy of a great wife. “Why wouldn’t such a woman marry me?” he thinks. “I myself am intelligent, godly, sweet, humble and attractive, and have other appealing characteristics too. I’m reasonable. I don’t expect a spectacular woman to marry beneath her moral station. All I want is a wife with a subset of the great qualities I already possess.”
Though selfish and self-regarding, it is typical of the things proud Christian men pray for, and I will spend no more time sneering at this part of the list or decrying its presumption. But I do want to attack with holy vigor the sixth criterion: “Let her not have a lot of complications in her personal life.”
Oh good grief. You want a woman without “complications”? Then you are not worthy of a good woman, because you are not good yourself. You don’t want a woman, you want a sanctified pleasure-bot, an individual who can delight you with her godliness and humility and wit and attractive body but not annoy you with those weary, time-consuming, resource-demanding pains of life. The truth is, nearly every potential spouse will have “complications” that require your patience, provoke your tears, eat up your time, deplete your energy, and plead for your help. But that is part of the joyful price to be paid to be in loving partnership with a real human being. Your wife’s “complications” are the very things that constitute your opportunity to sacrifice yourself for Christ’s sake and love her as Christ loved the church.
I admit that the example the man used, if taken literally at every point, would give anyone pause. Grown children (plural) who run around the house (couldn’t they at least sit down, or go outside?) smoking dope all the time (don’t they ever do anything else?). But let me scale back that problem to realistic but still-unpleasant proportions. Suppose a woman has a jobless, sullen, pot-smoking 19-year-old son. Isn’t she far more in need of a husband than a woman who has no such “complication”? The young man is fatherless – his dad died or deserted the family. His mother, straining under her own burdens of grief or abandonment, does not know what to do. Does she turn him over to the police? Confront him and provoke another fight? Keep silent and enable more self-destruction? Evict him in the risky hope that homelessness will teach him responsibility? I could see such a woman longing for a husband to help her to think, to provide steadiness, to offer a shoulder to cry on, and to assure her that she is loved.
But she will get none of that from a man who is praying that God will send him a woman “with no complications in her personal life.” He’s much too focused on getting his own needs met.
The greatest true-life romance I ever read outside of Ruth and Boaz was that of C. S. Lewis and Joy Davidman. Lewis married a woman with complications galore (twice!), and both times it was strictly for her benefit. There was nothing in it for him. Joy was a friend but not a love interest. She was a poor divorced immigrant with two boys, 10 and 12, and she was due to leave England because her visa was up and her application for renewal was denied. She asked Lewis if he would marry her in order to save her from being deported. He did. They had a civil ceremony for a marriage-in-name-only but did not live together as husband and wife. Then within a year Joy got terminal cancer. A kind priest conducted for them a “real” wedding ceremony at Joy’s hospital bedside, and Lewis brought her to his home to provide her with hospice care.
As Lewis wrote later to a friend, friendship gave way to pity which became love. Though Joy was expected to die within days or weeks, her cancer went into remission, and she and Lewis celebrated a joyous three years together before she finally passed away. He grieved as no man ever grieved. Brian Sibley’s account of their romance, Through The Shadowlands, is the only book that ever made me cry. You should also read Lewis’s A Grief Observed.
Ten years ago when I was single and miserable the thought crossed my mind that perhaps God would bring to me a dying woman whose final months I could bless by being her comforter and caretaker. That kind of situation is no one’s first choice in marriage – certainly not mine – but I did earnestly want to help somebody. Though I am a man of a thousand limitations, I wondered if in some narrow range of circumstances there might be a woman whom I could do some good, a woman who would be better off with me than without me.
Eight years ago a widow asked me what I was looking for in a woman, and I had to think for a second because I had made no list of qualities. “I just want someone nice,” I said. She was nice. Still is. Boy is she nice.
I don’t recommend making a list of qualities you’re looking for in a mate, but if you do, could you put this item on your list? Ask God to bring you someone whose “complications” you are suited to address. Don’t look primarily for someone who satisfies you but for someone whom you can satisfy. The last thing Joy Lewis said to her husband on the day she died was, “You have made me happy.” What greater reward than that could any worthy husband know?
Yesterday my nice wife received a Valentine's Day card from her mother. Her mother added this note: "and a special Happy Valentine's day to a special son-in-law who loves my daughter and makes her happy." Believe me, those are the kinds of statements that make marital joy complete.
