"I" TROUBLE PLAGUES MODERN MARRIAGES

A lady called a marriage counselor and asked him to set up an appointment for her husband. The counselor said, "Don't you mean to say that you want to come in together?" She said, "No, I just want you to see my husband." The counselor insisted, "Usually when there's a marriage difficulty, both parties contribute to the problem, so I really need to see both of you." The lady wasn't buying his suggestion. She said, "The only thing wrong with our marriage is my husband's behavior. If you'll just get him straightened out, we won't have any problems."

That woman had two chances of getting her husband into therapy - slim and none. While it's a rare thing to hear a person so blatantly assert that the complete responsibility for a poor relationship belongs to the other party, most people in troubled marriages assume that the major portion of blame should be accepted by the other spouse. After hearing a wife recite a long list of grievances against her husband, I asked, "What have you done to wreck this marriage? She said, "I was too good to him." She was unwilling to recognize the truth that her marriage had soured because both parties suffered from "I" trouble.

When we enter marriage, most of us feel some sort of inadequacy, incompleteness or insufficiency. That's normal. God recognized Adam's deficiency in the Garden of Eden. According to Genesis 2:18 "The Lord God said, 'It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.'" Problems occur in marriage when we expect our spouses to flawlessly provide every biological, emotional and relational need. We forget that our spouses married us with the same kind of expectations. Marriages are often troubled when a husband feels cheated because his wife fails to live up to all his expectation and she is just as frustrated for the same reason. Instead of recognizing and correcting their own flaws, they complain about the things the other spouse does or does not do.

Somehow this vicious cycle has to be broken if marriage has any chance at all of succeeding. The Bible offers the only solution to the kind of "I" trouble that's sending 1 out of 2 marriages into the divorce court. "Each of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others" (Philippians 2:4).

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