With the kids tucked in the other night, we decided to treat ourselves to an episode of a BBC series based on Middlemarch, one of Ever’s all-time favorite novels. You might say that frigid winter + covid + our-home-as-virtual-learning-center = the need to escape from time to time. 

But instead of an escape, George Eliot’s masterpiece presented us with an instructive view on marriage. Both of the main marriages depicted were entered into with high hopes that they would enable the protagonists to get just what they wanted out of life. Unsurprisingly, each spouse imagined the future relationship according to their own plans.

But like most marriages, the spouses’ knowledge of one another at the time of their courtship and wedding was limited. That meant that once the marriage was truly underway, the spouses were constantly bumping up against their relationship’s limitations, shortcomings, and unrealistic expectations, willing their real-life spouse to be something more like what they had wanted.  

“Certainly,” Eliot wrote in Middlemarch’s classic English understatement, “the mistakes that we male and female mortals make when we have our own way might fairly raise some wonders that we are so fond of it.” Precisely. Having “our own way” in marriage may “work” for a few minutes, but then new obstacles arise.

Marriage, you might say, is an arena in which God continually invites us to surrender “our own way” and discover a new, deeper intimacy. “God is always working to bring us to an acceptance of our poverty, which is the essential condition to our being able to receive Him,” writes Sister Ruth Burrows, OCD, in a meditation from her book To Believe in Jesus. 

Sister Ruth’s description of God’s action could double as a commentary on Middlemarch, and points to how God works precisely in and through our limitations: “the petty frustrations, the restrictions, the humiliations, the occasions when we are made to feel poignantly and distressingly hedged around, not in control of the world, not even in control of that tiny corner of it we are supposed to call our own, are His chosen channel into the soul.”

Many experience much more harmony in marriage than the two main protagonists in Middlemarch did, but the point is well-taken. God only has certain arenas in which to convince us that we must utterly depend on Him, and He allows us to experience trials in our marriage relationships in order to do just this.

Once we accept our poverty and inability to solve marital issues on our own, we arrive at the intended goal: letting God work in our lives to create the persons and relationships that He wills (and not necessarily the ones that we imagined)! Little did we know that the very things that seemed like insurmountable obstacles can bring us to a place where we can enjoy truly godly relationships!