Marriage with a meaning.

• Author: Comer, John Mark
• Position: Religion - Essay

MY WIFE AND I married really young. I was barely 21 years old. Who knows anything at that age? I had no clue what I was getting into. Nobody told me the deep feelings of affection fade after a few years. I guess I was not listening when the experts said that people who marry young have higher divorce rates, but even if I had known all that, it would not have changed a thing: I still would have chased her to the world's end. I was in love.

Over time, though, things started to evolve and change. At first, when my hand brushed up against my wife's, a light tingling feeling shot up my arm. Early on, when she would walk into the room, my pulse would speed up. I could feel the blood throbbing through my wrists. I was in college at the time, and staying focused in class was murder. My head was dizzy every minute of the day.

A few years into our marriage, the electric feelings started to fade. My nervous system lost its hypersensitivity. My heart valve readjusted. The vertigo went away.

It did not take long to figure out that we were different people--very different people. I am introverted, type A, driven, and high-strung. She's uber-social, laid-back, phlegmatic, and goes with the flow. We started driving each other crazy.

One day we were out running errands. The radio in my car was playing in the background, and between songs there was an advertisement for an online dating service. The spokesman-doctor-expert guy was doing his spiel on how to find the right match in marriage, and his punch line was "opposites attract, and then attack." I reached over and turned off the radio--awkward.

Not long after, I started having second thoughts. I was defining love as "deep feelings of affection," and my "love" was fading, and that scared me to death. I am an idealist--"good enough" does not cut it for me. I want my life to be spectacular, but my marriage fast was becoming ordinary. I was not okay with that.

Questions started haunting my thoughts. Did we make a mistake? We were so young--did we jump the gun? Are we really right for each other? Why don't I feel the way I used to? What is wrong with me? I was sailing without a rudder, blown off course by my doubts and capsized by my fears.

In hindsight, my crisis of faith was based on a faulty understanding of marriage. It was not that my marriage was in trouble. It was more like my unrealistic expectations were in trouble. Ninety percent of the problem was in my head. In short, I had no idea what marriage...