Epilogue & Endnotes

[Jerry Wierwille]

Quotes
“The longer you’re married the more you see that everything that comes your way is an opportunity to find God and each other in new ways.” (p. 117)

“There is a paradox at the heart of the love:

You don’t need anybody,
but you need someone.
You are fine on your own,
but you are not fine on your own.

…You’re whole and you’re complete, and you don’t need anyone, but you also have this sense when you meet this person that you need them. That without them you are in some hard-to-explain way not complete.

You were fine as just you. You weren’t aware that yo needed someone, but suddenly you can’t imaging living without them.” (pp. 130-31)

“Unreconciled humor is when you see someone laughing at something that they haven’t made peace with about their spouse. They laugh not in an endearing way, but to relieve the tension of whatever it is the two of them haven’t resolved.” (p. 138)

Response
Bell talks about how it is easy to divide your experiences in marriage [and in any relationship] into simply “good” and “bad” experiences. When this happens your relationship becomes a binary environment of ones or zeros and you begin to see everything like this in the world around you. This makes the world seem so black and white but that is not what the world is like and that is not what marriage is like. There is a whole range of experiences in marriage that fall between a zero to ten rating scale, and then there are experiences that you cannot even rate because they exceed the natural scope of life and go beyond, into the divine. That is why marriage cannot be contained between four dots, that is why marriage cannot be tamed, that is why marriage makes us aware of something greater than ourselves. Marriage invites us to “transcend those binaries, becoming aware of the diving presence in all of life” (p. 117).

Bell reminds us that you need to “find your happiness within yourself, not in someone else. If you expect the person you married to make you happy it will kill your relationship and leave you endlessly frustrated and angry. The two of you are figuring it out together, both marriage and life” (p. 140). This is absolutely vital because if you are not content with your life as an individual, you will not be content with your life in a relationship. It may seem that things are “ok” for awhile, but when the stress of life rises, or your partner fails you and lets you down and is not there for you, or when you find yourself in a major argument, you will find yourself unsatisfied with your life. We can’t let our relationship status dictate whether we are happy with our life. Relationships will have ups and downs, but when we are content with ourselves we can enjoy the ups and downs and will be left wondering what has happened to our joy and excitement in life. Our vitality must not be tied to our relationship status. Rather, it is internal; it comes from God, not another person.

From Jürgen Moltman:

“Lovers experience each other as counterpart and presence. Their subjectivity becomes soluble in their relationships and concentrates itself once again in their own individual being, and it is in this rhythm that their intersubjective shared life emerges in mutual love as they arrive at one another and themselves. They mutually come close to one another and to themselves. These experiences of personhood are different from the experiences of the solitary object acting on objects; in the flow between counterpart and presence, a personhood comes into being with permeable frontiers, in energy charged relationships. Selfhood is not arrived at by way of demarcations and differentiations. It comes to its full flowering through the power of life-giving relationships.” (The Spirit of Life, p. 287)

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