Dear Future Husband (Assuming You Exist)

“We all looked. She was right. Couples were swaying together, smiling together, whispering to each other, putting their heads on each other’s shoulders. Rebecca Saperstein looked like she was in seventh heaven. And it all just seemed so foreign and unattainable. Like all those people knew something I didn’t – like they’d learned some secret language or code used to communicate desire, mutual attraction, and romance. I didn’t understand how you could like someone, how they could like you back, and then how one of you could work up the guts to tell the other one. It just seemed like a confluence of statistical impossibilities.”

Lily Archer, The Poison Apples (2007)

The title and filename given to this stock photo by Lynn Greyling at publicdomainpicture.net was ‘hand in marriage’, which I thought was rather witty.

 Dear Future Husband (assuming you exist),

Well, first off, let me offer you a hearty round of applause. When, a few years ago, I encountered the above quotation, I was struck to the core by how accurately it expressed my feelings about the whole sphere of romantic love, and I can’t say much has changed. Two people aren’t a couple, and then, all of a sudden, they are. It’s weird. I honestly don’t get how it works. As I write this, the closest thing I’ve had to a romantic relationship was when that guy in the queue for Arena¹ addressed me as ‘fair maiden’ (to be fair, I was dressed as Princess Eilonwy from The Black Cauldron for a Disney Society social²), asked me whether I was from the land of Birks (I replied, truthfully enough, that I’d been in Moberly in first year³), and proceeded to inform me that he had wrestled a bear. I mean, I think that amounted to chatting me up. Anyway, at that stage, the queue moved and we were tragically wrenched apart. The course of true love never did run smooth, and all that.

So, my point is, you have achieved that which frankly seems nigh on impossible from where I’m standing right now, namely arranging a state of affairs in which I am in a romantic relationship. Well done. Good job. I congratulate you. And I also congratulate you for your quite astonishing selflessness in being willing to put up with me for the rest of your life, because, just in case you hadn’t already picked up on this, I am really annoying. I am pretentious and pedantic and virtually incapable of finishing a conversation without ranting about linguistics or ancient history or theology or preferably a combination of all three; I am arrogant and selfish and obsessed with other people’s opinions of me; I am lazy and hypocritical and tend towards Pharisee-esque-ness as far as spiritual matters are concerned. So you are to be highly commended for your humble willingness to deal with all that for the next however many years. Again, well done.

That’s the thing, though – you are going to have to deal with all that. Likewise, I’m going to have to deal with whatever flaws and failures you’re bringing to the table. It’s going to take work on both sides, some of it probably very hard work. The mere status of being married is not going to magically transform either of us into a mature, responsible, brilliantly godly adult, and it’s severely unhelpful to expect it to. It is not going to make the sins I struggle with now magically disappear, even, say, sins relating to sexual immorality; if I’m not fighting them now, why should things be any different once my life and self are joined to another imperfect, fallen human being’s? So I reckon the best way I can prepare for the marriage which, assuming you exist, we will one day have, is to be fighting sin, striving for godliness, following Christ with everything I’ve got. That way, I’ll be slightly less of a pain to be married to than I would otherwise have been. Plus, awfully conveniently, it’s actually all stuff I ought to be doing anyway.⁴

Then, once we’re married, we can fight sin and strive for godliness and follow Christ with everything we’ve got as a team. You are a Christian, of course. I wouldn’t have agreed to marry you otherwise. Some people have a long list of qualities they want in a potential spouse; mine is only two items long:

1)    He has to be serious about following Jesus.

2)   We have to enjoy spending time together.

Hopefully you won’t be offended by my saying that I’m not actually very fussy about anything other than that. (I mean, come on, neither are you. You agreed to marry me, after all.) We have to have enough in common that we actually really enjoy one another’s company, and we have to be focussed on the same ultimate goal. The idea of marrying someone who ends up, in spiritual terms, growing cold, falling away, turning out to have believed in vain,⁵ really scares me. There are, as it is, enough people I dearly love who don’t recognise Christ as Lord and Saviour; I don’t think I could cope with being married to one. Also, I know what I’m like, and I wouldn’t trust myself not to follow an apostate husband down the path of least resistance, off the edge of the cliff. So don’t you dare stop believing. I’d rather you didn’t exist.

The prospect of you not existing doesn’t actually fill me with inexpressible horror or anything. For a certain period of my life, it was basically my ambition to become an eccentric maiden aunt (I think I’d make quite a good one). On the other hand, there are several reasons I would be pleased if you did exist. For one thing, I think I quite want to have children and you’re kind of a necessary component for that purpose. For another, it would be nice to have someone to just do things with. I suppose most of us are scared of being alone. Introvert that I am, I’m probably less scared than many. Actually, the idea of not being alone, of having to share every bit of myself with someone else, of being known in that much detail, is probably even more terrifying a prospect than that of being lonely.

It’s not as if you’d be the first to know me in that kind of detail, though. God already knows me in greater detail than you ever will. And, in a way, it confuses me that Christian subculture seems to be so obsessed with marriage, when marriage is ultimately only a picture of that greater relationship. Jesus himself said that, after the resurrection, people won’t get married any more.⁶ We won’t need to. The picture will be redundant, because we will have the real thing: Christ the Lamb as bridegroom and the Church as his bride.

“Hallelujah!

For the Lord our God the Almighty reigns.

Let us rejoice and exult and give him the glory,

for the marriage of the Lamb has come,

and his Bride has made herself ready.”⁷

So I suppose, in the end, dear future husband, my point is this: I don’t really mind whether you exist or not. Single or married, my ultimate aim, my ultimate identity, my ultimate destiny, doesn’t change a bit. I am Christ’s before I am anyone else’s. So if you do exist, so be it; and if, on the other hand, I never have anything closer to a romantic relationship than my peculiarly archaised interactions with that randomer in the Arena queue, if I finish my life exactly as clueless about the whole sphere of romantic relationships as I ever was, then likewise, so be it. Why obsess over whether or not I’ll experience the picture, when my experience of the real thing is guaranteed?

Yours sincerely,

Your Possible Future Wife

Footnotes

¹ Now known as Unit 1. The institution that is Cheesy Tuesdays remains. http://www.unit1nightclub.co.uk/exeter/. Now there’s a link I never anticipated myself posting in a blog footnote.

² It is, in my opinion, a brilliant and incredibly underrated film, but it flopped at the box office, hence why Eilonwy never achieved the coveted status of Official Disney Princess. Some talented human has remastered this rarely-seen trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2FMSrKOdKs.

³ Birks Grange Village and Moberly are both halls of residence at Exeter. If you’d like an idea of what kind of place Moberly is, this video, made a couple of years before I arrived there, remains hilarious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MfhU2yOxCR4.

⁴ Credit owed to Phillip Holmes at Desiring God for this argument: http://www.desiringgod.org/articles/single-you-will-be-the-married-you. I take full responsibility for any heretical corruptions present in my adapted version.

⁵ Expressions picked up from the following Bible verses: ‘growing cold’ from Matthew 24:12; ‘falling away’ from various including Matthew 24:10 and Hebrews 3:12; ‘having believed in vain’ from 1 Corinthians 15:2. While I absolutely believe in the principle of once saved, always saved – try, for instance, John 6:39, “And this is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day” – I am also very well aware that some people have every appearance of being in Christ but are ultimately proved not to be by their failure to persevere to the end. It’s heartbreaking.

⁶ In answer to a riddle from the Sadducees, a faction who didn’t believe that the dead would be raised; the story is told in Matthew 22, Mark 12, and Luke 20. Here’s the Mark, because why not: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Mark+12&version=ESVUK.

⁷ From Revelation 21: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Revelation+21&version=ESVUK. If you have any liking at all for choral music, check out this setting of the opening verses of the chapter by Edgar Bainton: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bo5MExlE8oU. (This video selected for the high quality and rather lovely shots of the interior of St Paul’s Cathedral.)