Two People Sharing An Address

Most days you are two people with a shared calendar and a shared front door.

You are supposed to be one. You have heard that since you were about nineteen. And what one is supposed to look like has never been described to you in any way you could check, so what you have instead is a feeling of ongoing shortfall, without ever being able to say what specifically is missing.

And so you try. In small ways nobody would notice. You agree with things you do not agree with. You represent the two of you as more aligned than you are when you talk about them to other people. You have made a hundred tiny adjustments over the years in the direction of looking like one thing.

That is exhausting, and it has been running for a long time, and it has not produced the feeling.

Some clear boundaries before we go on.

I am not going to tell you what roles anybody has in a marriage. Not a word of it. That is not what this row is about and it is not what you asked.

I am not going to talk about anything physical between you. That is not what this site does.

And this article is never going to be used to tell you that you cannot leave. That is the standard misuse of the verse I am about to read, and I want it dealt with at the top rather than left in the air. If you are being harmed, controlled or frightened by the person you live with, nothing here is aimed at you, this verse is not a lock on a door, and getting to somebody qualified where you live comes before anything on this page.

What God hath joined together

There is a short sentence in Mark, and what I want from it is the tense of the verb.

What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder. (Mark 10:9, King James Version)

God hath joined together.

Hath joined. Past. Completed. It is not an instruction to join, and it is not a description of a thing the two of you are supposed to be achieving. It is a report on something that has already been done, by somebody who is not either of you.

Which means the joining is not on your list. It is not a project with a completion date and it is not a performance you have been failing to deliver. Mark 10:9 says it in the finished tense on purpose, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a project off somebody who never signed up for it.

And notice who did it. Not the two of you, at any point, on any anniversary, in any conversation. The subject of that verb is God, and the joining is His work and not a description of how well two people are getting along in March.

Mark 10:9 states the joining as already accomplished rather than as a target, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets that reach somebody who has spent years trying to demonstrate it.

You are already joined and it was done by somebody else, and it has never once been a thing you were supposed to achieve. Mark 10:9 says what therefore God hath joined together, in the completed tense, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes it off a person's list of things to accomplish.

A fact does not need proving

Here is what changes when you take that seriously, and it is a change in effort rather than in feeling.

You have been treating oneness as a state to be reached and displayed. So every disagreement has been evidence against it, and every occasion where you have been obviously two separate people with two separate opinions has counted as a failure, and you have been quietly managing the appearance of something ever since.

Mark 10:9 states the joining as a completed fact rather than a standard being met, and the Holy Spirit is not scoring anybody's performance of it this week.

A fact does not require demonstration. It does not become more true when the two of you agree about the holiday, and it does not become less true on a Wednesday when you cannot stand the way he loads a dishwasher.

You are permitted, therefore, to be two people who see something differently, without that counting against anything.

You are able to disagree without it counting against you, and a completed fact has never once needed evidence. The written word reports the joining in the past tense as something already done, and the Spirit of God is the one who stops a person managing the appearance of a thing that is already true.

Say it, and stop proving it today

So here is the assignment, and the second half is the whole relief.

Say out loud that God joined this. And then stop trying to prove it today.

Say it plainly, alone. God joined this. It is done and I did not do it.

Then spend today not demonstrating it. Which means, concretely: if you disagree with something, say so. If somebody asks what the two of you think about a thing, and you do not think the same thing, say what you think and let them say theirs. Do not smooth. Do not represent. Do not perform the united front for one afternoon.

You will feel exposed and it will pass, and what is on the other side is the discovery that nothing collapses when two people are visibly two people.

Mark 10:9 puts the joining in God's hands and leaves nothing for anybody to demonstrate, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present in a day where somebody stops performing.

You are able to stop proving it for one day, and the joining has never once depended on the demonstration. Mark 10:9 completes the joining before anybody arrives, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with a person the first afternoon they say what they actually think.