Marriage Archives - Page 2 of 2 - Kristen Anne Glover

Why I Stopped Wearing My Wedding Ring

A few months into my husband’s deployment, I stopped wearing my wedding ring.

I sat on the edge of our bed with tears in my eyes and slipped it off my finger. The diamonds tossed lamplight around on the walls, and the gold felt heavy in my hand the way my heart felt heavy in my chest.

I plunked my wedding ring into the ceramic ring holder, the one that looks like a bird on a stump, the one he hates, and turned off the light.

I took off my wedding ring

Years earlier, my future husband had given me that ring as a symbol of the covenant between the two of us, the sign of a continuous, never-ending promise that nothing but death could separate.

A few months later, we stood together before an illuminated cross in the front of my church and whispered sacred vows over that ring. “For better or for worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, ‘till death do us part…”

Those were the early days, when we talked in dreams. Everything was said that could be said, then, because it was impossible to keep it in. How deeply I loved him. How beautiful marriage was. How much we were going to do together as husband and wife. How he was handsome when he slept, and how I envied his eyelashes.

I still envied his eyelashes, but he snored now, and I burned dinner.

My ring had worn a place on my finger, a permanent indentation, white and smooth, with the years. The gold was scuffed, and I’d managed to chip a diamond. I didn’t even know you could chip diamonds, but there it was, all the same.

The love that had once been poetic had become practical: folding socks, stopping for milk, paying the phone bill, taking out the trash. He went to work. I grew babies. In the evening, we exchanged daily updates like kisses.

“The kids finished their math.”
“I have a meeting tomorrow at two.”
“Did you buy windshield wipers?”

And so it went, each day feeling more and more like we were to people occupying two separate worlds that collided only occasionally. Some days, it felt like I wasn’t married at all.

Sometimes, I felt like I was not married at all

It might have gone on that way indefinitely had he not been deployed to the other side of the world. I realized, before he left, that life wouldn’t be that much different with him gone. Not really. And that broke my heart.

The Army put an ocean between us, and more time zones than was polite. The Internet was sporadic and Skype froze his face in disturbing pixelized mutations.

We would go days without talking because it’s hard to talk over an ocean.

Over the course of days and weeks and months apart, our marriage was stripped down to the bare bones. There was nothing to hide behind: no busyness or long hours at work or a never-ending laundry pile. There was nothing to cover up the fact that we really didn’t love, honor, and cherish each other the way we set out to do.

Because you can think you’re doing okay if you can throw in a foot rub in every once in a while, and if you feel affectionate and say “I love you” a couple times a day. You can think your marriage is godly just because it’s comfortable. You can think you’re honoring your vows just because you still wear the ring.

But you can be wrong.

And both of you can feel incredibly unloved and lonely and isolated, even in the middle of a perfectly satisfactory marriage.

People were not made for satisfactory marriages, and our souls know it. Our souls are restless for the kind of intimate communion that is man and woman and the mystery of two made one.

It is why we make those vows in the first place, because our souls long to be bound by that kind of promise.

But like any good thing, it is one thing to want it, and another thing to do it.

I sat on the edge of my bed in the quiet of the night and slipped off my ring. I cried over it because I had allowed my marriage to become something so unlike what I knew it could be. I had neglected my vows.

You can think you are honoring your vows because you wear the ring

Bare faithfulness is not the same as love. Enjoying someone’s company is not the same as cherishing. Being proud of someone is not the same as honoring. All of those things were meant to be so much more, so much richer and deeper and more gospel-infused than anything I had been living for a long time.

I looked at my bare left hand and made a decision. If I was going to wear that ring, I said to myself, then I had to live the vow.

That began a ritual that has transformed my marriage. Every morning, I slip my ring on my finger and pray that God will help me to be worthy of it. Then I repeat my wedding vows to myself, thinking of specific ways I can love, honor, and cherish my husband throughout the day.

Each night, I take my wedding ring off again, hold it in my hands, and ask the hard questions. Had I faithfully kept my vows to my husband that day?

Did I put him first, after God, in my day?

Did I pray for him?

Did I make it easy for him to lead?

Did I actively support God’s calling on his life?

Did I encourage him to use his gifts, even if it meant personal sacrifice?

Did I give him my undivided attention?

Did I stop what I was doing and listen? Did I hear?

Did I uphold his reputation in the things I said about him?

Did I believe the best about him?

Did I trust him?

Did I limit my complaining and withhold criticism?

Was I thankful, appreciative, and kind?

Did I respect his hard work in the way I managed our finances?

Was I happy to see him?

Did I actively pursue ways to make him feel loved?

Was I a faithful partner in the raising of our children?

Did I uphold his authority when I parented without him?

Did I work on areas of weakness?

Did I strive to mature and grow?

Was I teachable and open to correction?

Did I recognize growth in him?

Wear the ring, live the vow

As the days passed, the vow I made on my wedding day took on more and more significance. It knit me together with my husband in ways I had longed for, but long neglected. Even with an ocean between us, I was more conscious of my commitment to him, and more focused on truly loving, honoring, and cherishing him than ever before.

And he returned the favor.

Some people say you should never take off your wedding ring. But I needed to take off my ring in order to see the significance of it. I needed to take it off to remind myself why I put it on in the first place, and what that meant for me. I needed to take off my ring to remember that wearing ring is the easy part of marriage—but it means nothing without the vows.

May I challenge you to do the same. Take off your ring. Look at it. Recite your vows to yourself and think about way to fulfill them before you slip it on again. Make each day a new commitment to love, honor, and cherish your spouse the way God intended.

Wear your ring, but live the vow.

To the Woman Who Loved Him First

To the woman who loved him first:

an open letter to my mother-in-law on my anniversary

You loved him first, of course. I think you loved him better, too. Now that I am a mother, I know this. There is a way a mother loves better than anyone else ever can.

Because you loved him before, before he was anything but yours. You loved him when the only thing you knew about him was that he was a gift from God, and that was enough.

You loved him knowing you wouldn’t be able to keep him. Knowing he would never love you as much as you loved him. Knowing that one day, you wouldn’t even be the most important woman in his life anymore.

You loved him for me.

Long before I came along, you were there, growing that boy of yours into the man who would be mine. You shaped his character with godly virtues and hard corrections, discovered his gifts, delighted in his talents, and ceaselessly encouraged his calling.

Not that it was easy. I am a mother too, now, and I know this. There were scary nights and temper tantrums and habits that had to be broken. There were times you looked at that boy and wondered if you’d ever see the man.

You had to love him enough to discipline him, to make him do the things he didn’t want to do, and let him learn the hard lessons. You had to sit up with him night after night after night, helping him do his homework so one day, I could sit by his side at his graduation. All of them.

You loved him when it was hard.

And that has made loving him all the easier for me.

By your example, you taught that little boy what love is, how it is sacrifice and time and commitment. How it is sincere and good and kind. How it has to be given away.

He did give it away—to someone else. On our wedding day, fifteen years ago, he promised me the same kind of unconditional love you had shown to him.

He could make that promise to me because you had loved him well.

You didn’t do it perfectly. I am a mother now, and I know that too.

But somehow, in loving him first, you loved me best.

All these years, your son has poured out on me the love you poured into him. On this, the anniversary of your boy becoming my man, I am grateful. I can think of no other woman I would rather share my husband with. Thank you for being the woman who loved him first.

It has made all the difference.

Because she loved him first

I Don’t Want an Equal Marriage

This week, my Facebook stream was commandeered by an army of red equal signs.

At first, I didn’t know what that meant because I’ve always been a little socially awkward, even social media awkward, and I was oblivious. Was the entire nation suddenly becoming more interested in math?

Thankfully, before I had the chance to make a fool of myself, some other clueless person asked and the secret came tumbling out. That equal sign stood for marriage equality.

I had no intention of stepping in to the marriage equality debate on Facebook or anywhere else where meanings can be misconstrued and misapplied, where allegiances divide friendships and shut down communication before it even starts.

But I stopped when I saw the words marriage equality coupled with that great big equal sign because I realized something that might make the culture cringe, and it really has very little to do with the current debate and much more to do with my own heart and my own home.

I realized I don’t want an equal marriage.

Before my husband was my husband, back when we were just two kids talking marriage on a park bench in the forest of Chicago, we asked ourselves this question: Can we be better together than apart? Because we were both self-centered enough to know that equal wasn’t worth it. We wanted to know that together, we’d be more than the sum of our parts.

We wanted a marriage that was exponential, not equal.

Of course, we could have just taken our two equal selves and done some simple addition. After all, 1+1=2, and two is already better than one, right?

An equal marriage might work that way. But I didn’t want an equal marriage.

I wanted a marriage in which 1+1=1, and then somehow equals 3 or 4, or in our case, 7. That kind of math meant sacrifice, a dying to self, a setting aside of rights. It meant elevating the needs of the other above my own. That kind of math requires submission—mine and his.

If I had stuck to simple addition, I would not be the mother of five children. If I had stuck to simple addition, I would not have dropped out of school to help my husband finish two graduate degrees. He would not have taken the kids on vacation without me because I needed a break from everyone more than I needed a break with everyone. He would not have put a PhD program on the way back burner because he knew I couldn’t do it again, not yet.

We have both subtracted a lot out of lives and God has multiplied the remnants into something more than I could have imagined. But it wouldn’t have happened if we were both more interested in being equal than submissive.

Submission isn’t a popular word these days because being submissive means you have to consider someone else as better than yourself. You have to put someone else’s needs above your own and some days, that goes against every fiber of our being because deep down inside, we’re much less concerned about sacrifice than we are about rights. Our rights. Marriage rights.

That term—marriage rights—makes my heart a little sick every time I hear it, and it has nothing to do with homosexuality or Christianity or being gay or being straight or being something in between. It has to do with what I believe marriage is, not who it is for.

The term “marriage rights” cuts at my heart because I believe that when we reduce marriage to nothing more than a battle of rights, we’ve already lost. The beauty and reality of marriage is that it is a place to die, not a place to elevate rights. It is a place to subtract self and will and equality and all that other stuff that is in our nature but is not in our God and love someone more than ourselves.

That is sacrifice. Submission. Tough stuff.

It is tough because self is the hardest thing to die and the hardest thing to make submit, especially if there’s another self in the room. Self will proclaim, “He’s no better than me!” and “I have the right to be happy!” and while that kind of talk is normal and perhaps even logical, it is not biblical, and it does nothing to make a marriage that multiplies because self-talk constantly reduces the multipliers to 1.

Any number times one always equals itself, nothing more.

I do not want to struggle through marriage for nothing more than what I went in with. I do not want an equal marriage. I want an exponential marriage.

So while the debate over marriage rights rages on, I am battling to keep marriage equality out of my own home. It is hard because I am selfish. But I am choosing to keep my focus on the math that matters, the subtraction and division that will build up my husband, my children, and myself into more than just the sum of our parts.

I am choosing to have a marriage that multiplies.

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