Marital Conflict and Divorce Quickscan
If marriages
Are made in Heaven,
they should be happier.
Thomas Southerne
Every once in a while I hear of a couple married dozens of years who "never quarreled once." I always wonder if they're amnesiacs or liars.
Place two sentient people together in marriage, and conflict is bound to occur. In measured doses, conflict can be productive; it forces growth and change, compromise and resolution. It releases tensions constructively rather than letting them build to dangerous levels.
But when does the normal jostling of any marriage relationship become a crisis? "It needs to be defined by the individuals involved," offers Ed Smelser, a counselor at Fairhaven Ministries in Roan Mountain, Tennessee. "Just as some people can handle more physical pain than others, some couples tolerate more marital discord. But a body can stand only a certain amount of pounding, and a couple can take only so much anger and quarreling. Tension is inevitable. Arguments are common. But when the situation becomes so painful that a couple can't see the marriage continuing — that's a crisis."
What is the pastor's proper response when a shaken marriage totters in near collapse — and when some do eventually topple? Here are engineering plans to shore up the tottering and rebuild the devastated.
Outsider In
While our presence in some crises will be welcomed, our very entrance into a marriage crisis is often strewn with ambiguity: They want a pastor, but they don't. Or one does, but the other resents it. It's difficult for the pastor, an outsider, to know the expected role when summoned, sometimes ever so faintly, into a marital crisis.
A marriage crisis rarely grows in complete obscurity. Signs of disintegration begin to appear around the edges of the relationship: ...
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