Sarah had enough.
Their marriage stopped being fun many years ago.
She appealed to Wally to change more times than she could remember.
She hoped.
She prayed.
She appealed.
Then she did it all over again: hoped, prayed, appealed.
This cycle went on for years.
Wally made promises of reform, but he never really changed.
It was more behavioral modification than anything else.
Nothing lasted very long. Eventually he would return to his normal self–his old patterns. This was not good enough for Sarah. She began to lose hope that he would ever change. Finally she bit the bullet and left him after 23 years of marriage. Wally was devastated.
The ironic thing was that Sarah had always been willing to give in, acquiesce, talk about the problems, and even bend whichever way she needed to in order to preserve the marriage.
Wally, on the other hand, was always strong, stubborn, determined, and resistant. He had made the conquest a long time ago. As the saying goes, “I told you I loved you on our wedding day. If anything changes, I’ll let you know.”
Cold as ice
The day Sarah left things completely flipped. Wally was a slobbering obsequious mess while Sarah was cold, focused, and unrelenting in her decision to leave her husband.
In situations like this, what I have just described is not unusual at all. I have seen it many times when a marriage comes to the breaking point. While in the marriage, the wife is hopeful, prayerful, and willing to work things out. Contrariwise, the husband can appear to be in some kind of la-la-land.
He has what he wants and cannot see past his self-centeredness to consider the desires, hopes, and dreams of his wife. Then it is as though she turned the light of the marriage off. She leaves. It’s over. It’s kaput.
Her emotional attitude goes cold. What used to be a docile, unassuming woman has turned into a vicious, survival of the fittest competitor. It’s every person for himself/herself and she is now functioning as a single woman seeking to carve out the rest of her life on her own.
She moved on a while back in her heart and mind, and now she is moving on in a geographical sense.
The husband, who used to be a self-controlled fortress of self-absorption, turns into a pitiful pile of mush. He’s dumbfounded, dazed, and confused. Typically, a person like this will say that he never saw it coming. He’s probably right. He was so into himself that it never occurred to him that she would play the divorce card.
Wally is in a free fall. His life compass is spinning wildly and he has no equilibrium. He feels hopeless and lost. He comes to you to help him figure out what to do next. He’s paralyzed.
Sarah is not like this at all. She cut the light switch off many months ago and has indexed forward. What Wally is going through now–hopelessness–is what she had been going through for years.
Once she gave up on the marriage, she became a proactive planner. When a woman’s heart turns cold as ice and the emotion and hope is drained from the marriage, then she can be quite clear-headed about what she wants, even to the point of being brutal.
You have the world’s worst breath
Typically when things go as I have outlined here you can pretty much predict what is going to happen next. The husband is going to overreact. He will do this by going into some sort of a “Prince Charming” routine.
For example, if the wife works in an office environment, he will start sending her flowers. He may even show up at her work to “show his love” for her. Shortly thereafter the cards will begin showing up in her mailbox.
He will send her emails expressing more of his love. He will drive by her home to check up on her. His insecurity and new free fall status will tempt him to think the worst has happened–she’s sleeping around.
But the worst of his behavior is yet to come. At some point he will begin to grovel, plead, and beg. He may even hit a “10” on the manipulation meter by talking about how he cannot go on if she does not come back.
It will be an all out, last ditch effort to get her back, even playing the suicide card. By now he is out of control…but only to a certain degree.
He is not out of control enough to not know what he wants. At some point he will ask her for sex. He will talk about what he needs. He may even couch his request in how much he loves her and he just wants to express it with lovemaking.
The thing that Wally is missing is that he has the world’s worst breath to his wife. She can see right through him. The truth is that his requests are repulsive to her. There are several things that she is assured of in her mind. Whether true or not, this is what she believes:
- He does not have her best interests at heart. He blindly talks about himself and how bad he is doing and how bad he needs her. He cannot hear himself. He does not know how awful these words sound to her.
- He is now doing some of the things that she had hoped he would do for years. However, rather than doing them on his own, he does them because of what he is losing. This is not about her. It is all about Wally, his losses, and what he wants.
- He will revert back to his old ways should she come back. What he does not understand is that he should be pursuing God, not Sarah. The problem before she left and the problem after she left is his anemic relationship with God.
She knows that Wally is full of boloney. He is not all about God, but all about getting his life back in order.
Forget about your wife
If Wally awakes from his relational stupor he may see the light. That is the best thing that could happen to him now. Wally is called to do something that will be nearly impossible for him to do. He will need to do what he has not been doing all along. He needs to pursue God.
Before Sarah left Wally was a confident performing-in-his-own-strength kind of guy. After Sarah left Wally did not change–he was still performing in his own strength.
He was cockily confident when she was with him, to the point of ignoring her. He could do whatever he wanted to do and it never occurred to him that things would be different. He was living in his own self-centered strength.
When she left, Wally resorted to a similar kind of living–I can get her back using my own strength, wisdom, and abilities. Whether before or after, the common theme for Wally was that he was not walking in humility, wisdom, and power, all of which come from God.
He forgot God during his marriage. Now he is forgetting God in his pursuit to win her back. He has not learned the lesson. Now that his life is spinning out of control it is nearly impossible to get him to slow down and to do what seems foolish to him–pursue God rather than his wife.
For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men. – 1 Corinthians 1:18 & 25 (ESV)
Wally is going to have to do something that is counter-intuitive to his native wiring, thinking, and behaving. The beauty and the power of the Gospel makes no sense to the natural man.
- How can a dying man be power and wisdom?
- How can walking in weakness be God’s will?
- How can dying to myself give me the desires of my heart?
Walking with God sketched out
When a person like Wally comes to me, the content of this article is a version of the conversation that I have with him. My goals are simple:
- I want him to see how he has been living his life.
- I want him to see how he is still living his life.
- I want him to see how living a Gospel-centered life is a better way to go.
This is hard for self-reliant people like Wally. I’m simply asking him to trust God in a dire situation. Like it or not, that is what he is going to have to do. The sketch below typically describes what Wally is doing and what he needs to do.
Initially Wally and Sarah were moving forward in their marriage, walking toward God (green line). Their marriage was not the way it was supposed to be and Sarah became troubled in her soul. She made requests, appeals, and pleas for Wally to lead differently.
Nothing changed.
After a number of years, she began to grow distant in the marriage (her red line). If Wally was paying attention, he would have noticed that something was wrong. After she left, he got a clue. Unfortunately, rather than seeking God, the primary breakdown in the marriage and his life, Wally moved toward Sarah to close the gap he accurately perceived (his red line).
Once he did this, then both of them were off-center (gray line). Wally may have even been satisfied with this kind of realignment in the marriage. To Wally the marriage was in many ways the same as it was before. The problem was that neither Wally nor Sarah were changed people.
Sarah knew this.
Therefore, the more Wally sent flowers and cards, the more she pushed away from the marriage (her red line). Upon noticing this, Wally moved toward her to close the gap. Again, it’s the same problem–they were moving more and more away from the centerline of their marriage.
If Wally does not realign his heart to God, he will eventually help push his wife completely out of the marriage.
A Christian woman wants a man who has a heart that is after God, not a man who is only after himself or even after her. If she is God-centered, this is the desire of her heart.
The most important thing that Wally needs to do is to go back to where God wants him to be and begin pursuing God with all of his heart, soul, mind, and strength regardless of whether his wife comes back to him.
He needs God more than he needs his wife.
R – E – S – P – E – C – T
A woman is called to submit and to follow her husband. Therefore, it is important for the husband to give her something to submit to, respect, and follow. This something is a “God-impassioned man.”
I have often said that a Christian woman would have to be out of her mind not to want this. A man who is authentically pursuing God can be trusted because he is not relying on himself, but on God alone.
Wally will have to decide what he is going to do. If he is loving God rightly, then he will be able to love his wife rightly. However, if he is going to pursue his wife while giving God a courtesy nod, then neither relationship will be restored (Matthew 6:24).
Should Sarah leave?
There is an unstated and obvious question that I’m sure many of you have thought about as you read. Should Sarah leave her marriage?
The obvious answer to that question is that I do not know. Her leaving is not the point of this article. Just as Wally has many issues that he needs to work on, you can be assured that Sarah also needs to mature in Christ.
No marriage that separates or ends in divorce has a guiltless partner. It always takes two people to destroy the covenant they made. In this article I have addressed what Wally should do to properly separate, with the hope of reconciling.
If Sarah was willing to come to counseling I would want to help her to see how she could participate in this marriage with the hope of reconciling it to God.
