Running From Yourself

For by the grace given me I say to every one of you: Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment.

Romans 12:3

EVER WONDER WHY HOLLYWOOD ROMANCES RARELY LAST EVEN THIRTY-SIX months? I have a theory.

Our culture virtually worships actors. They receive constant adulation, praise, and admiration, and they know they are the objects of many fantasies. But marriage unleashes reality. Within a real relationship, a spouse discovers that actors smell just like the rest of us. They can be just as petty, just as selfish, just as demeaning, and just as despicable (sometimes even more so).

One time after a nearly sleepless night in a hotel, tossing and turning all night long, I finally glanced in the mirror and was shocked at what I saw: the tired eyes, the messed-up hair, the pale color. I said to myself, “Gary, at this moment you may well be the ugliest person on the face of this planet.”

Looking at our reflections through the mirror of our marriage can be equally hard to take. We feel horrified by how we’ve acted—astonished by our own selfishness, pettiness, laziness, or even cruelty. Satan can use this awareness to tempt us to run. In truth, we don’t want to run just from our spouses; we also want to run from ourselves, the persons we were in our marriages. We want to be with someone new who hasn’t seen our bad side. Some may even try to deceive themselves into thinking their spouses were at fault for bringing out the flaws in them. We think we can just start over, and the bad side won’t follow.

This, of course, is the great myth. We have enough energy either to run from who we are or to cooperate with God’s Holy Spirit in changing who we are, but we never have enough to do both. It will always be one or the other.

Actors who love to receive praise may have a particularly difficult time coping with someone who looks at them with unjaundiced eyes. What must it feel like to be shown larger than life on fifty-foot screens, then to go home and see a look of absolute disdain on the face of your spouse? To have photographers beg you to stop for a picture after you’ve spent hours fixing your hair, getting into your clothes, and creating that look, then to go home and take off the makeup, sleep on the hair, and wake up in a T-shirt instead of a tuxedo or a Vera Wang dress?

This is slightly more than a theory—I read the words of a top Hollywood actor who said, “Here’s the great thing about dating. You get to start over and go, ‘I’m a really nice guy.’ ” He freely admitted he wasn’t a consistently “nice guy” in his earlier relationships, but dating someone new gave him a chance to start over—until the real man acted out once again.

But the permanence of marriage forces us to admit we haven’t been as nice to our spouses as we wish we had been. It encourages us to evaluate ourselves with, in Paul’s words, “sober judgment.” Some painful memories will tempt us to run. Some snapshots will make us wince and cause us to think, I wasn’t a really nice guy; I was a horrible guy.

But if we accept that God designed marriage to help us grow in holiness, we know, going in, that we’re works in progress. Instead of running from these hurtful revelations, we can welcome them, realizing that marriage is showing us what we need to know and pointing out where we need to grow.

Marriage is showing us what we need to know and pointing out where we need to grow.

Rather than run from ourselves, we can focus on changing ourselves! Let’s be honest—some things about you and me are ugly. If we marry, our spouses will see that ugliness, whether it’s an attitude, a habit, a disposition—whatever. After marriage does its work and this weakness gets exposed, we’ll have a decision to make: Will we run from this revelation into the arms of another person who doesn’t yet know our weakness, or will we embrace the call to grow in holiness, accepting Scripture’s admonition to “think of [ourselves] with sober judgment”?