Do you trust me?

As I approach my 35th wedding anniversary, which will fall just days after my third son gets married, my thoughts keep turning to the miracle of marriage. I mean, what’s the chance that two people can make a commitment decision for a lifetime that involves so much sacrifice and learning and growing on both parts and have it all work out? It’s astonishing, really, that anyone takes the leap and that so many people are very happy they did, even decades later.

Perhaps there is no greater moment of vulnerability than the one when one person asks another to marry. Will you have me? All of me? Forever? Would you do that? Take that chance? Sign up for that kind of service? Do you trust me?

That’s it.

Do you trust me?

Do you trust me to love you well, even though I’m just learning to love, and even though learning to love well takes a lifetime? Do you trust me to be honest with you, to let you know the real me, without guile or manipulation?

Can I trust you? Can I trust you to love me, even when I’m so very far from perfect? Can I trust you to be honest with me, to really speak the truth in love, with love?

To make marriage work, you have to be willing to be honest with one another — really, truly honest. I always thought I was honest. I abhor lying. But what I missed as a young bride and over several years is that it’s not truthful to swallow hard and never “make a fuss” when the situation actually calls for an honest reckoning. A beautiful thing about marriage is that we help one another to holiness. This doesn’t always mean that we are made holy by gritting our teeth and bearing one another’s faults with silent determination to never make a fuss. Sometimes, it means that we grow in virtue by having difficult conversations and challenging one another to stretch toward sanctity. For a person who wants to please people, it’s challenging to be honest when conflict arises, to override the drive to avoid conflict at all costs. But there is growth in the conflict, when the conversation happens in truth, with kindness and compassion.

To be honest during conflict is to honor one another. It is to affirm that the other is neither too proud nor too stubborn nor too unwilling to want to grow and change. Honest conversation can yield good fruit. People pleasing denies you both the opportunity to become better human beings and holier souls.

Conflict can be scary. It requires vulnerability. It calls you to ask the question again and again and to affirm the answer just as often. Will you have me? With all my imperfections and my fears and my baggage? Will you hear me and seek to understand me and still have me? Will you listen, and together can we discern how and where to change and grow?

Can we expand our capacity to love and in so doing become more and more the people God created us to be?

Do you trust me?