You may have heard someone say “marriage changes you.” It should! Of course, life changes you. And following the way of love is supposed to change you. It’s what we’re signing up for!

There is a challenge for the modern person who must wrestle with the idea of being good as we are and also in need of being changed. That we are blessed to be who we are and are blessed by being called into something new.

Much of the way we talk about mental health and success in life seems to reject the language of change, let alone transformation and repentance! We want people to feel good about who they are—often because they have an unhealthy relationship to themselves, seeing change as not so much necessary or desirable, but a source fixing them. Perhaps we are being too clever by half, however.

Committing our lives to a cause, particularly a cause of living as a new thing: not just as a spouse within a couple but as half of that new thing being created: is neither simple nor ordinary. It is an act of transgressive rebellion toward a new autonomy, combined grace, of embodying something completely new.

We aren’t so much rejecting who we were or losing ourselves to be something with someone else; nor are we combining forces as if we are two halves of one whole and therefore complement each other. None of this accurately articulates the truly profound reality of this commitment.

In marriage, then, we are rebelling against the individualistic nature of western culture. We are refusing to see ourselves as better or less than who we were, but to speak only of who we have become. It is making a foolish commitment to be more than bound to another: transformed with another as a something powerful and free.

Marriage is not a stodgy or traditional institution in the eyes of Jesus, but a rejection of those regressive elements of his inherited tradition. It is transgressive, potent, redemptive to offer oneself in faith. To be made something that looks like you, but secretly, entirely new.