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Marriage: Honesty

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We’d been married for half a year already when my new husband told me some things: some very important things about his own past that hadn’t been shared yet. Six months in and on a dark mountain road on the way up to a church retreat he began to talk.

It wasn’t as if he had been keeping these things from me, it was just that we hadn’t “gone there” yet.  And we talked for an hour, alone, trying to make it safely up the winding road.

It was honest and it was very, very good.

We all know that marriage is supposed to be a place of intimacy and beautiful give and take in a place of extreme honesty. We know that marriage thrives the best when we can be 100% open and vulnerable with our spouses. And we know that the best relationships are built on the trustworthiness and integrity that this kind of openness involves.

Maybe we start out that way, whether it’s before the I do’s or a little while afterward when we feel the vulnerability easy before us like a dark, safe car with only your new spouse. We open up our “suitcases” on the floor of the metaphorical bedrooms and invite our spouses to peek. We give up the details of past relationships, past indiscretions, old sins, and the hurts and pains we’ve collected as we’ve grown up. We allow him to gently move things around, ask some questions and show his love and concern about the past.

But as time moves on, things slip a bit. We are busy building families or careers, we don’t have as much time to talk as we’d like to. Our life stages don’t lend themselves to long walks on the beach any more.

Sadly.

It’s not like dishonesty is ever the goal, but when he’s busy and I’m busy, I’d rather just deal with my own struggles myself. When I’m worried and he’s worried, I’d rather just work it through without bringing him into it. It’s a slow, self-preserving dishonesty that disguises itself as independence.

The fact is for our marriages to work right we have to be honest: both in the beginning and continuing through the hard, busy and endless stages of raising families.

Chad and I have gone through different iterations of honesty in our marriage. Early on it came out in his dishonesty with me (porn addiction) and my dishonesty with him (an adulterous affair). And there has been our dishonesty with ourselves: that we didn’t need to get help.

And then in recent years, the slow, selfish dishonesty that, on the surface doesn’t seem that bad has begun to pervade our lives. It looks an awful lot like independence but it really is a shade of dishonesty.

In any healthy intimate relationship, honesty is crucial.

The simple, most helpful piece of advice I’ve ever received about creating a healthy marriage from an unhealthy one is to begin to tell the truth. Begin telling the truth to your husband, to yourself, to the people around you who love you. Begin opening and sharing your heart so that the two of you can come back to a place of emotional intimacy and interdependence.

I won’t lie: honesty is scary. The reason we DO keep things from each other is because we are scared of what he will do, what he will think or what might be required of us. But what we fail to realize is that freedom lives on the other side of the scary.

Honesty releases us from having to be perfect and from having to be someone we are not. And in honesty is where God can begin to create the marriage you’ve never had or bring you back to the place you thought you’d always be.

Today, if you do one thing for your marriage, try to be honest. Even in the things you don’t think are that important. The more open we are, the more intimate we can be and the healthier our hearts and our marriages grow.

 Do you struggle with honesty in your marriage? When have the two of you been the most honest? What factors led to that?

By Sarah Markley, Allume 2012 speaker who blogs about grace, second chances and relationships at sarahmarkley.com. She’s actively trying to work to be more open, more vulnerable and more honest in her own marriage daily. You can read her marriage story here, find her on Twitter here and join her community here.

Join Sarah on Tuesdays this month when she’ll be sharing some of what she’s learned about marriage in the last 16 years.

Comments

  1. yes, we are in this place now of honesty. it is risky to share your deepest truths, mine being that I can no longer pretend I believe in God. He still does. I’m scared; he is, too.

      • I’m praying for you too Tessa!!
        What a great blog post about marriage! My dishonesty or lack of communication stems from my hubby not thinking I “have it all together!” I’m a stay at home momma of 2 boys and work hard to keep up with everything with a smile on my face but in all reality I’m crumbling! And I feel my hubby and I work so hard on everything but leave “us” to just make it without the work but in reality our marriage is the foundation of it all! I am very blessed my hubby is a Godly man and we both are seeking the Lord on how to live life with the right priorities which are GOD, US, then our KIDS! It’s way easier to type than actually do! Only by God’s Grace!

  2. great post…yes..honesty is key…and to create an honest marriage we must become a safe place for our spouse to be honest.  If each husband and wife would cultivate a place of safety for one another…so many of our marital problems would be healed. My husband was this for me…and i had to learn to be a safe place for him.  Now 31 yrs. later…there is not place safer than with each other. blessings as your share your heart here.

  3. Wow, this is really deep, honest, transparent and most of all brave.  I love reading your blog posts, they have so much depth and substance.  Thank you.

  4. Thanks for this. Honesty is hard and scary. I’m afraid of it, but I know I shouldn’t be because marriage is about trusting and loving through it all…even the hard things, especially the hard things!

  5. This was so refreshing. Honesty is so scary, but its essential for us to grow in our marriages. Great job on this!!!

  6. I struggle greatly with honesty. Somewhere a long time ago, I believed the lie that I could create a life to escape my real circumstances and that the lies would make it all go away.  For more than 30 years, I operated this way.  Telling little lies or exaggerations in an attempt to earn much needed attention from others. It took an earth shattering, heartbreaking explosion in our marriage for me to understand that I am loved by God- no matter what.  And He is the ONLY person that I need to please. I won’t say that the lies stopped, because old habits are hard to break.  BUT, they are much fewer and more easily recognizable.

  8. Wowza. I asked God last night to show me how to take the first step to reconnecting with my husband. We have just fallen away from each other. I am a Christian; he is not and it makes it difficult for me to talk about matters of faith in my home (we have no children). So, I have started keeping pretty much everything to myself since my faith has just become interwoven into all areas of my life. I’ve built up some bitterness and resentment since he doesn’t want to hear me talk about faith or God at all. It makes things really hard.

    Then I read this post. But I don’t know what to do with it quite yet. But, thank you. I needed to hear it and be convicted. God answered my prayer with this post today. Thank you.

    •  wow, thank you jen. it’s so hard to carry secrets by ourselves. i hope you find the right path in this. thank you so much for your honesty and openness!

      • Just a quick update for you… God is a redeemer… He has restored my heart. Although I still struggle to communicate and am working very hard on that, He has brought me so far this past year. I’m not carrying the bitterness and resentment I once was. I am on a journey of forgiveness now and I owe it all to a Mighty God who is always faithful and never fails. <3

    • I’m going to be praying for you, Jen.  I am also married to an unbeliever.  It is difficult to be unable to share so much of who you are with your husband.  It is very lonely.  I hear you when you talk about bitterness and resentment, and more so, for me, disrespect.  I very nearly hated my husband and doubted that we would survive.  I can honestly say that the Lord has done a miracle in my heart and has replaced the resentment with love and acceptance for him.  I’m still on this journey and I have my days – mostly just sadness, especially when seeing other couples worshiping together or hearing a man talking of leading his family spiritually.  Although I can’t tell you what the first step for you will be, I know that it is possible to reconnect.  The love and prayers of friends have been vital to me during this time. 

      • The Lord has worked a miracle in my heart this past year. I’m not carrying my bitterness and resentment any longer. I am on a forgiveness journey now. He healed me and brought me through. I continue to deal with some issues, but I am on a path to wholeness now. I owe it all to Him and His grace and love.

  9. This is really encouraging. Thank you for sharing all of this. And I loved how you said freedom is on the other side of scary, I needed that reminder!

  10. Beautiful post Sarah! It made me think of the “revelation” six years in that my husband had always wanted to have a farm. I was raised on a dairy farm and NEVER wanted to farm again. Not that I wasn’t thankful for my early days. I enjoyed them really, but it was the “tied-down-daily-never-leave-your-home” thing I wanted to avoid. Needless to say, I was a bit shocked. We found a compromise on a hobby farm eventually and it’s been a blessing for our family. But I laugh that we had been together so long without me knowing that.

    That is a light story, but your words are so so true! There is a saying “openness leads to wholeness as secrecy leads to sickness”. True on the inside of our own hearts as well as in any relationship. I love your transparency and the wisdom you have gleaned from life with Jesus. 
    Blessings,
    Kathy

  11. Wonderful post. I have gone through some similar experiences in my marriage. 7 years into a very peaceful marriage, our world was rocked wen years of dishonesty was exposed. Sin and failures thrive in the darkness.  The light of exposure does amazing things, healing and strengthening what was broken!!! Thank you for sharing!!

  12. yes, yes, and yes. what i’ve sadly found through blogging is how people are NOT honest about marriage, and paint it in a pristine light. while there are definitely good days, the rough days are the ones that stretch us and let us grow. i vowed two years ago that i would choose to be honest about my marriage and allow myself to be stretched in the process.

    jordy liz
    http://www.jordylizblogs.com

  13. Beautiful post. I have also gone through similar maritial issues as you but the infedility was on my husbands part. I carried so much pain and resentment towards him and blamed him for my unhappy life. After 13 yrs we are still married but have been separated for 11 yrs. I realized that the pain was a way to bring me to my knees and develope a relationship with God that I never knew I could have. God created an opportunity to reveal His glory and power through me. So I had to ask my husband for forgiveness. Even though he was the one that commited the adultery. I had to release him from the shame I made him feel for so many years. My unhappiness was not due to his sin but rather my lack of faith. I had to remember that no matter what I was confronted with God is still in control and is always faithful. I used my husbands sin to manipulate him and play guilt trips on him. That was my sin. Whether he realizes the power of that confession or not I know it healed my heart and allowed me to let go of the pain and surrender to God’s will.

    That was my honest moment where I allowed my heart to be vulernable, yet free. Thank you for sharing and being so real.

    •  Monica,
      Thank you so much for writing this and being so honest. What I didn’t mention in my comment above is that my husband was also unfaithful (an emotional affair) and I’ve built up a lot of resentment and bitterness about it. God has been speaking to me so much about forgiveness lately and I am having such a hard time with it because I feel like I need to tell my husband “I’m sorry”. It just didn’t make any sense to me. But when you wrote that you had to ask your husband for forgiveness, it just struck me deep in my core. Even if he doesn’t understand why I’m doing it, I think I may need to do it to begin a healing work in ME; to begin to let go of the negative feelings I’ve built up.

      Thank you for sharing your heart.

  14. “self preserving dishonesty that is disguised as independence” Wow. That describes me perfectly. Thank you.

  15. Struggling with whether or not to tell my husband certain things that I passively and actively let happen.  I can’t even go into it here…don’t know if that would help at this point, since it’s over.  Emotionally and spiritually, I struggle with it, but don’t know that it would help to bring it up with my husband now. 

  16. I want to specially thank Dr Wisdom of drwisdomspelltemple@gmail.com for casting a love spell that brought back my ex husband in three days i really do not know what i would have done if not for you Dr Wisdom,i want to inform you that your spell did not only brought back my ex but has also brought happiness to our lives.thank you very much for your kindness.contact a address drwisdomspelltemple@gmail.com

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