Marriage Is A Triangle

And I have to suggest to you that if it is not, then that is where a lot of our problems begin. If we are not clear why we marry, if we do not have some sense of direction as we begin life in covenant, then we are setting ourselves up for problems. When young people get so absorbed in one another that all they can do is be obsessed with one another, that all they can do is spend endless hours wrapped up in a tiny world that has room in it for only one other person, then that relationship is sick because it is not a triangle, it has no purpose in it. Marriage relationships, male-female relationships, that have only two sides and no triangle side tend to be nothing more than sexual relationships, because the intimacy of sexuality is the only thing left to do if there is no direction, no purpose. Marriage is and has to be a triangle. A minister I know used to say to couples, "Don’t get married! Why do you want to get married?" just to test them and see if they had an answer, a purpose. Let Malachi remind you of the wife, the husband of companionship and of partnership; the wife, the husband, with whom you set out to do something, to conquer the world, to make a mark, whatever it was. But marriage was and is a triangle when it works.

All that having been said, you and I know that there are scores of ways to have such a triangle, such a three-sided relationship, and some of them are unhealthy. Some of these triangles are unhealthy and broken. People form the strangest alliances to accomplish the most unhealthy purposes some times, and they have purpose all right. They make marriage into a triangle all right, but it is a sick and violent triangle.

For example, there are marriages founded on competition as their purpose. There are marriages in which the real intent, though it would never be spoken, is for one partner to outshine the other. Remember that old song, "Anything you can do, I can do better"? And so husbands and wives compete; they compete for power, who's going to make the decisions? I heard about the couple who solved this one in a unique way: the husband said, well, my wife and I have it all worked out who makes what decision. She makes the little ones, like where we will live and how we will spend our money and where the kids will go to college. Those are just little decisions. I make the big ones, like what to do about the national debt and who’s going to win the Super Bowl!

Marriage for some is a broken and unhealthy triangle in which the third side is competition. For others it may be the children …we are together only for the sake of the kids; once they've moved out, we find we have no need for each other. For yet others it may be career and financial goals; the ultimate yuppie marriage, they say, is to be a DINK. Do you know who the DINKs are? Double income, no kids; and if that's all there is, I predict an unhealthy and sick triangle.

We could go on. When something becomes the purpose and intent of your marriage and begins to shape it in unhealthy ways, you have a marriage triangle, but you have a sick one, a poor one. And Malachi says, You have been faithless, you have set aside the wife, the husband of your covenant, and the Lord of hosts says, I hate divorce and I hate violence. I hate this sick relationship, says our God, I hate divorce and I hate violence.