Hope Without Expectations

Is there an issue in your marriage that causes chronic hurt? I don’t mean your spouse not taking out the trash or leaving clothes on the floor; I mean something deep. Some way they do not meet a fundamental need or desire that you have, which you have communicated about, and elicited promises of change about, and yet about which there is no visible progress. An issue that has been going on for years.

A few things happen: at the beginning, you bring it up. You have conversations and arguments, resolutions and promises. Then the issue comes up again, nothing changes, and you feel hurt again. The whole process repeats for months or years, until you wonder if you should even bring it up. You lose hope. You try to suppress the desire or need you have, with frustrating results. Eventually your anger turns into resentful bitterness or even contempt; your resignation into despair. You start to turn to other things—other relationships, media, fantasies—that can fill that need, or distract you from that need. An increasing gulf in this area grows between you and your spouse. It doesn’t help that these are often issues that are very difficult to share about with other people.

How do you cope with this? How do you have hope without expectations? How do you continually seek growth without becoming crushed if nothing happens, when it’s something so important to you?

It’s worth figuring out because despair is really dangerous. Studies examining people who survive long imprisonments or conditions of chronic suffering have shown that one thing you can’t survive without is hope. And even more dangerous for a marriage is contempt. A study examining couples’ facial expressions found that those most likely to split up were the ones who displayed expressions of contempt. Not to mention the power and joy that is missing in your marriage, and often life, even if everything else seems to be going okay.

I think the first thing is to be willing to open up your wound. To let all your hurt out, and know it is okay to feel hurt, and to sit with it a while. To acknowledge the ways the hurt may have spilled into other areas of your life or driven you to various habits. To try to sit with your hurt with God. To let Jesus into the room where it is and find that he understands, has even experienced the same thing. Sometimes it helps to spark up the courage to tell someone else about it and let them sit with you too.

Then you try to listen to God when he says he loves you, in, as C.S. Lewis puts it, “the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense.” You try to look into the layers of the need and ask God to somehow meet you in it. In one sense, he obviously can’t meet it in the way a physical person or your spouse could. But I’m trying to believe and discover that he can in a better way, because in him is everything our from-another-person needs reflects. As Lewis also says, “the intimacy between God and even the meanest creature is closer than any that creatures can attain with one another.” This is somewhat of a mystery to me, but it has the ring of truth.

I think the second thing is then to accept. Accept that this issue exists, that it isn’t a horrible mistake or accident that it is happening to you. I accept it because I believe it is serving a purpose, and that is the only way I can accept it with hope, and not with resignation and despair. I believe that this purpose is one that God is working, regardless of whether my spouse changes or not, and thus I can have hope, in God’s working and purpose, regardless of outward change. His love is a love that wants to make us better, not always give us what is easier.

The next thing is to ask God to give you that kind of love, that kind of belief in his purpose and workings, for your spouse. Then I can try to really understand him, through his own lens, not through my lens. Maybe he has hurts too I can listen for, or ways he is created that I can better understand. My hurt is often shouting so loudly that I can’t hear his. Then, also, I can try to see it as an issue we work through together, instead of his issue that hurts me. That means we talk about it, without judgments or demands. Maybe that means we seek counseling or therapy (I’m convinced everyone should do that if they can). But it’s really only then, once I have that kind of love for my spouse, and that kind of trust in God, that I can approach the issue with open hands.

In the end, of course, that is how God loves us: with greater hopes and standards for us than anyone on earth can have, yet completely without condition as no one else on earth can. As Lewis says: “he forgives most, but he condones least: he is pleased with little, but demands all.”