Encouraging young couples to build trust is akin to encouraging a teenager to develop healthy eating habits: it’s rarely thought of. But just like health, trust takes time, intention, and effort to develop and preserve. So, whether you’re engaged or in your first years of marriage (or many years beyond), how are you and your spouse deepening and strengthening trust in marriage?
Traditional wedding vows include the phrase “forgoing all others” as a promise of exclusivity “as long as we both live.” in his book To Severe Mercy Sheldon Vanauken includes an image that offers both a sobering warning and a powerful insight into marriage, one that my wife and I have personally benefited from.
As non-believers, Sheldon and his wife Davy cherished their relationship so much that they didn’t want anything or anyone to come between their love for each other. That’s why they vowed to maintain a “light barrier” around their marriage to preserve the exclusivity of their love. They swore never to have children, lest little troublemakers invade their light barrier. So that death would not break that barrier, they even promised to sail out to sea one day to sink their sailboat and be able to die together. In retrospect, the converted Sheldon judiciously titles the section about the young woman and his distorted commitment to their vows to each other as “Pagan Love.” As Christians, we recognize in your marriage a sober warning: a relationship so given to itself excludes and replaces God.
Face-to-face trust grows when spouses seek to know and be known by each other.
However, Sheldon and Davy’s commitment to radical exclusivity in their marriage also highlights a powerful idea: marriages thrive on trust. Sheldon and Davy valued their “infatuation” and feared that the breach of trust would destroy it. So they tried to cultivate and foster that trust. My wife and I tried to do the same, although without resorting to Sheldon and Davy’s extreme exclusivity. We do this by seeking out one another in three distinct but overlapping ways: face-to-face intimacy, back-to-back fellowship, and side-by-side friendship.
face-to-face intimacy
Face-to-face trust grows when spouses seek to know and be known by each other. This intimacy can occur on a weekly date night, or during bedtime prayer, or morning walks, or playtime with each other throughout the day. Of course, also in the sexual preliminaries and in the consummation. But we are naive if we reduce intimacy to sex. Because, as lovers well know, sex is but one part of a far greater beauty. “Being in love, like seeing beauty, is a kind of adoration that drives the lover away from himself,” observes Sheldon (To Severe Mercy, 43). Thus, face-to-face intimacy is a contemplation of the loved one, a look that turns away from oneself and the world to really see the other.
Contemplating the loved one will be different at different stages of marriage. However, in each season, intimacy is an emotional, physical, and spiritual opening to your spouse. This requires vulnerability on the part of both. In fact, trust and vulnerability run parallel in intimacy. Thoughtfully and consistently sharing your joys and your burdens, your fears and your successes, and then trying to hear the same from your spouse, engenders the kind of trust that healthy marriages are made of.
For many couples early in their relationship, emotional and physical intimacy can come easily. A soft caress. A word in the ear. A quick look. Eros it makes us want to give ourselves body, soul, mind and heart to our beloved. In most marriages, you quickly accumulate more face-to-face time with your spouse than with anyone else. But it takes work to develop a deeper and more lasting intimacy.
in your song World Traveler (World Traveler), Andrew Peterson describes how his young, small-town self dreamed of traveling the world to discover “the afterlife.” However, he “had hardly seen a thing” when “I gave her a gold ring / to the one who gave me his heart”. He then became a different kind of world traveler when “she opened the door and took my hand / and led me to the mystical land / where her galaxies flutter”. For a deep and lasting trust to take root, we must walk through each other’s souls with a kind of patient, unhurried attention that is open to wonder and delight.
As we contemplate our spouse, we seek to give and receive the true reward of face-to-face intimacy: to be truly known and loved. Ultimately, we will only find this in communion with God; however, He commands marriage as an image pointing to that future heavenly reward (Eph 5:25-33). However, that face-to-face trust is fragile and requires a different stance to guard and protect it.
back to back companionship
When couples, knowing each other’s strengths and weaknesses, try to protect each other, they develop a kind of back-to-back mutual trust. We all have blind spots, persistent sins, and weaknesses that our spouse comes to know through the consistent face-to-face of everyday life. Spouses can use those lines of sight and their own strengths to protect each other. Sin lurks (Gen 4:7), Satan roars like a lion (1 Pet 5:8), and both seek to devour your marriage. Like two heroes with enemies in a circle, couples stand back to back, trusting each other to point out threats, shout encouragement, and celebrate even small victories together.
Couples, of course, can partner back to back without an obvious enemy like sin or Satan. External pressures from difficult circumstances, a demanding boss, high expectations from family or friends can create an environment in which a couple needs to practice that back-to-back togetherness. The in-laws arrive in town, and their informal, do-it-yourself style throws off the wife’s well-planned and thoughtful itineraries. Her husband’s parents unwittingly ignore her gift for planning, and after her first day with them, she feels exposed and frustrated. She’s tempted to take her frustration out on him, and he’s tempted to shrug off her concerns about being too sensitive. Both spouses are tempted to start shooting each other at the moment when they most need to take care of each other, building trust by standing back to back. By acknowledging the impulse to attack him, she can instead generously acknowledge the praiseworthy qualities of her in-law, while he can start a frank conversation with his parents about following through on the plan for the second day.
Mutual trust strengthens marriages to bear the heavy burdens we carry together in a fallen world.
When we recognize the threats facing us and protect each other, we reap the rewards of stability and resilience. Back-to-back mutual trust strengthens marriages to bear the heavy burdens we carry together in a fallen world. However, the intimacy of face-to-face and the strength of back-to-back mutual trust can be weakened if we neglect another posture to cultivate trust.
friendship side by side
Couples who seek to contemplate and search for something together cultivate trust side by side. This side-by-side posture is marriage as friendship.
Friendships are formed around the mutual contemplation of a shared pleasure. When you discover another who shares your interest in something you appreciate, you say: “You too? I thought he was the only one ». (C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves , 248). Friendships can include many mutual interests or just a few, but any time spent side by side fosters the kind of trust that comes from having something in common beyond the relationship itself.
Many romantic relationships initially form around something you shared together. Perhaps you met because of your love of music, a common academic interest, or a business venture. However, life’s demands and trials often act as a centrifugal force over time, pushing previously shared interests to the periphery. I suggest that, as much as possible, you keep those common interests, whether old or new, in the usual rhythm of your life together.
Maybe you host an annual festival in your backyard, or join the praise team together, or play together with other board game fans. Whatever your common hobby, invest in it together. If you don’t share the same interests, find one of your spouse’s interests that you can also learn about. Sheldon loved literature; Davy excelled in music. Out of love for the other, “they felt at home in both worlds” (To Severe Mercy38).
Intimacy on the way to God
Investing in side-by-side trust is essential because a “stealthy breakup,” Sheldon and Davy rightly warn, is often a “love killer” (37). As they discovered later in their conversion, the greatest resistance to this centrifugal force is not the mere common search, but the greatest search: contemplating God together. For this reason, even if shared hobbies and interests seem scarce, always try to go together in the direction of God, since Christian marriages are not built around a mere Eros either filiabut around sharing a receive and give love agape with God and with each other. Therefore, together as a couple we must value the worship of God at home and with the people of God.
The beautiful thing about these three confidence-building poses is that they reinforce each other. You cannot grow in intimacy if you do not work to protect the other from temptation and sin, disappointment and burnout, or simply to protect the time you spend together. The opposite also is true. You can’t grow in your ability to help each other see your blind spots if you don’t grow in face-to-face fellowship. Both face-to-face trust and back-to-back trust flourish in consistent side-by-side friendship directed toward God.
Originally posted on Desiring God. Translated by Eduardo Fergusson.