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Iaaieeeaaieeeaaieee Will Always Love You (As Long As You Meet My Expectations)

I Should Have Been a Hermit

I should've abandoned humanity and embraced solitude. Imagine the freedom, the control — no one to tell me things I don't want to hear, no one to interrupt my thoughts, no one to frustrate my plans.

Unless you're thinking that I'm some sort of masochist, you've probably guessed that there's not much extroverted blood flowing through me. Rather, I am a shifty-eyed introvert who moves through the office hallways like a burglar hoping to avoid detection. My idea of bliss is a life of uninterrupted introspection, free from socially awkward mingling. Just the idea of it excites me to the point of losing all bladder control.

The reason that the reclusive life sounds so heavenly to me is that it would guarantee a great deal of personal sovereignty. I like to be in control of my life and when other people are involved, what I want is not always what happens. Wrenches in my plans tend to make me resentful and prone to unrestrained staring.

Now, please don't misunderstand me. I like human beings. I just don't like it when they don't submit to my wishes. I am, however, slowly realizing that my bid for unlimited control might not be that biblical and perhaps not all that different from tyranny.

An Ideal Wife

One example of my tyrannical tendencies was my philosophy for pursuing a wife. I did this by making a list of the characteristics that I liked about myself and then holding them up against all prospects:

• Tall
• Musical
• Athletic
• Bilingual
• Spontaneous
• Desires many children
• Theologically/Philosophically minded
• Good sense of humor
• Not prudish

Whether or not I was realistic about myself is up for debate, but this approach made perfect sense to me because of my fundamental assumptions: (1) that a good marriage was marked by combining two people who were as similar as possible, and (2) that I am perfectly capable of choosing a wife on my own.

Predestined to Be an Arminian

The thing about embracing the delusion that one is in control is that, if you carry this assumption into marriage (or any relationship), you will set yourself up for a "bait and switch." This means that, after a period of time, you'll begin to feel like you were baited with your fiancée, who was then switched with your spouse.

To illustrate this, let me use a fictional example.

Let's say that Sam and Becky are diehard Calvinists who are so dedicated to their theology they decided that they're predestined to marry someone who shares their convictions.

Naturally, therefore, they knew that they were made for each other when they happened to ('were predestined to' in Calvinist slang) sit down next to each other in the student lounge in order to engross themselves in John Calvin's Institutes of Christian Religion. Only serving to reinforce their intuitions, they subsequently caught each other reciting the Westminster Catechism as they walked to class. After much prayer and consultation of Spurgeon's works, Sam and Becky are wed.

A few years after the wedding, trouble begins to brew. Becky takes a theology class from a local college where she is assigned to read a handful of Arminian authors. She is alarmed when she begins to find their arguments more and more persuasive. Understanding that this would be a great source of contention between her and Sam, she prays about her misgivings. Yet after much internal debate and pastoral counsel, she cautiously enters the Arminian camp.

How could she? Sam groans. If I had known this was going to happen, I would've waited for the right one. I thought she was more rooted than that. Had I been too hasty in my judgment? Was I just blinded by her irresistible beauty? Is this just a phase that she's going through to test my faith? How did I get Japanese pop music stuck in my head?

Theological positions may or may not be trivial to you, but I can guarantee that if you have the wrong expectations, you'll go through something like this once you're married. It may not be this dramatic, but you'll probably feel some degree of betrayal. She used to be the outdoorsy type, but now she prefers to stay inside and read. He used to be so much tidier, but now he leaves his messes for me to clean up. She said that she enjoyed spending time with my family, but now she avoids them altogether. He wanted to be a lifelong pro wrestler, but now he just wants to be the governor of Minnesota. I'm sure you get the point. For better or worse, people change without your permission.

Why Ideals Are Less Than Ideal

Because people do change, we set ourselves up for major disappointment if we expect immutability. We have to realize that, even after years of dating, we cannot completely know who a person is, let alone who they will be. If people were robots rather than human beings, we'd be much safer in assuming constancy, but we don't have that luxury … and it's a good thing.

In order to demonstrate the futility of assuming a person's invariability, we can use my list above as an example:

• What if she lost her legs and was therefore no longer tall (and probably not as athletic)?
• What if she went deaf and lost most of her musical ability?
• What if she saw the movie Along Came Polly and became passionately interested in risk management instead of theology?

C O F F E E  S H O P

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What are you looking for in a wife, or even just a date, and why?

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If any of these things happened, my dreams of finding someone with whom I had so much in common would be shattered.

Of course, there's nothing wrong with having things in common, but if we make this the highest priority, we set ourselves up for disappointment.

Thankfully, before I was married, someone with more wisdom than me counseled me to replace my entire list of items with one item:

• God's best

All of a sudden, my eyes were opened to the vanity and superficiality of the image that I had set up in my mind. All of the things on my list could disappear in an instant. However, she would never cease to be God's best.¹

What's Next: Part 2

My second faulty assumption had to do with self-dependence. I was under the impression that the process of dating would somehow provide me with the omniscience necessary to choose a wife. In part two of this article, I'll continue this thought and raise a few more questions along the way.