How God Restores Broken People in Marriages

Dan Doriani: Hello, and welcome to Working with Dan Doriani, a podcast where we explore faith, work, culture, and the way believers can make a difference in their corner of the world.

Good day, everyone. I’m so glad to have Dan Allender as my guest today. I had him on a couple of years ago, and we had a delightful time. We haven’t lived in the same place much, but we’ve known each other for twenty years and had a number of good conversations.

In case you don’t know, Dan Allender is a therapist, an author, and a professor whose work focuses especially on trauma, abuse, and trauma recovery. He does that in his private practice by counseling people, by writing books, by giving public lectures, and by teaching formally in accredited schools. He has a PhD in counseling psychology from Michigan State. He’s written a number of books that many, many people have read. I’ve certainly profited from The Wounded Heart and To Be Told; both meant a lot to me as I worked on some issues. He has written multiple books on marriage, and the most recent is the one we’ll talk about especially today: Deep-Rooted Marriage, which he wrote with his friend and colleague Steve Call.

I’ve got to tell you, it’s a good book. All your books are stimulating. All your books are fun. I wanted to throw this one across the room once or twice. First of all, did I introduce you properly? And what do you think when somebody says, “I read your book, I loved it, I marked it up, and I threw it across the room”?

Dan Allender: Dan, being with you is a great honor. And then to actually be propelled through the air by your good hand and your good heart—I am very honored. I said to you that I would have thrown my own book, but it was on a computer, and in that sense it was too valuable to throw. But I think anything that sits at the intersection of the idea that we’re deeply broken and deeply beautiful disturbs us on both counts. So I’m honored.

Dan Doriani: That’s good. There’s a teaching in Romans 9, 10, and 11 that the Jews became angry when the Gentiles were coming into the covenant—I’m half Jewish, and you’re more than half Jewish. You know somebody’s really listening when they get angry. “I got angry at your book” is one of the highest compliments you can pay. It means I couldn’t dismiss it. I couldn’t just put it aside. I had to throw it, because it was getting under my skin too much. Your books have that effect on people, and I think that’s a compliment. How do you make sense of the fact that people love your work and yet find it—boy, it’s like a worm that got into your foot, traveled up your blood vessels, and got into your heart?

Surviving a Difficult Home [03:10]

Dan Allender: I think two things. One is that I loved the education I got at Westminster Theological Seminary, particularly in the era when I went. There were men who loved Jesus so deeply and yet were so honest about their own brokenness and their own need for grace. It opened up a world where I could begin to tell the truth about the nature of my own humanity—and there, as you know, are a lot of flaws, past, present, and no doubt future. So that’s one.

The other, and we’ll get into this to some degree, is my way of surviving a mother who was—to use the technical term—borderline personality disordered.

Dan Doriani: People don’t know that. And no dad, just to make it clear. You lost your father when you were very young.

Dan Allender: Yes, at about age four. My mom remarried a man who couldn’t have been kinder, but who—and I say this literally—seldom spoke a full sentence. He was a monosyllabic man. So there was a really kind face, but an absence at levels that are almost incomprehensible. I was caught in the web of a relationship where I was the life-giving source—in some ways the proverbial husband to my own mother—as a four-, five-, six-year-old, at least as far back as I have memory.

My one saving grace was when I caused trouble. If I got sent to the principal as a young boy, or later, in junior high, if I got caught stealing a car, if I got caught selling drugs, if I got caught in trouble, it was the one spot where, for maybe two to four days, my mother wouldn’t speak to me.

Dan Doriani: Which was life-giving for you.

Dan Allender: Oh, it was like being sent to the Bahamas on a resort trip. So what I learned was—

Dan Doriani: Wait, draw this out. Was it because she was very critical, because she was harsh? I’ve read the book, but most of our listeners haven’t. Why did you need three days’ respite, and engage in criminal activity, to get a break?

Dan Allender: I remember telling my best friend, Tremper Longman, when we were about 15, that my mother was like a black widow spider and I was in her web. If I moved too much, she was going to come and devour me. I think a lot of us had very critical, or very disconnected, or—in my case—very absorptive parents. In her need to devour, she used me as the source of her life. The only way to cut myself out of the web was to cause trouble.

I’m not claiming this is what makes a good prophet, but in certain ways, those who aren’t afraid of making waves are often able to say things that good-hearted, rule-bound insiders tend not to say. I think you can see how that plays out in my books, my writing, and my teaching. But it also plays out in marriage. We can be in a fight, and it’s not going to be pretty. I’m verbal, I’m bright, but I can be absolutely obstinate and defiant. That creates a lot of heartache and debris in a marriage.

Dan Doriani: As always, there are so many things I want to ask you all at once. First I’ll comment, to make it clear, that one thing you and I bond over is that I grew up in a very difficult home. Not in the same way yours was. My mother was very kind, very loving, very nurturing—and very disorderly. My father was extraordinarily brutal verbally, and also prone to violence at times. So we have similarities. And I think your interest in this book is partly to make sure we face our past and don’t just say, “Hey, that’s the past. Let’s move on”—and, if I understood you correctly, to make sure people know that whatever happened in the past shapes the way we try to make our way through the world with less pain.

When I would go home as an adult with my wife, she would say, “You change when you enter your parents’ house. Maybe not the minute you walk in, but five minutes after, you start to check out. You start reading something, you’re over in a corner, and whatever happens, it’s like you don’t even hear what’s going on. I hear it.” And I said, “Well, I was the invisible child. I didn’t try to help my mom. I didn’t try to help my dad. They didn’t want my help. I was the invisible one.” It’s so easy to fall back into being invisible. You would say it’s not only interesting that I realized I did that when I was thirty-one, but that I do it in some ways at home. Somehow, in my marriage, I’m going to bring that survival mechanism, and it’s going to cause trouble even if I don’t know it or acknowledge it. Does that sound right?

Dan Allender: Brilliant. You should have written the book.

Dan Doriani: No, no—I should have enjoyed the book. Go ahead.

Loyal to the Structures That Helped Us Survive [09:05]

Dan Allender: The bottom line is that we are literally being shaped in a way of thinking and a way of being. Our very personalities are being shaped, particularly between about one or two and four or five. Literally, we have over a trillion cells in operation between two and five. Then there’s what’s called neural pruning, and by the time we’re about five, six, and seven, we’re down to about three or four billion. But a trillion cells are shaping—

Dan Doriani: In the brain, that is.

Dan Allender: In the brain, yes. So we begin to get a sense that those early learning classrooms shape core implicit structures of how we operate in the world. But I love the reality of neuroplasticity: our brains, our cells, our connections and synapses can change. That’s the core reality of how we approach this, if we have the integrity to name what’s true. You cannot change what you have not named.

And I’d say the same for me. Becky would often say to me, “You’re not allowed to take a book into your own parents’ home, because I know what you’ll do. Instead of causing trouble, you’ll dissociate and leave me to tend to your silent father and your crazy mother, and I just don’t want to do it.”

Dan Doriani: That’s why Genesis 2:24 talks about leaving your mother and father. It’s not physical—not in the ancient Near East. It’s not financial. It doesn’t mean you move to another state. It means you emotionally separate, right? A loyalty.

Dan Allender: Yes. And we’re not just loyal to people; we’re loyal to structures that enabled us to survive. So what my wife—and your wife—is calling us to is repentance. It’s a kind of “I don’t want to see you become four or eight or ten years old. I want you to be the man you are,” even in what, for most of us, if we’ll admit it, is one of the most dangerous environments to be in: being with people whose blessing we still long for, even if they’re no longer on the earth. So a deep-rooted marriage has to actually be faithful to leaving our mothers and fathers. But to do that, we have to name the heartache and the structure of how loyalty got played out in the synapses of our brain, in a way that has to be engaged today.

When Your Family Was Good [12:05]

Dan Doriani: Let me offer a point—maybe two thoughts—and you decide what you want to do with them. First, just for our listeners: there are trillions of cells in the human body and billions of cells in the human brain, but many of those billions have innumerable connections through the synapses. So what Dan Allender is saying is physiologically correct. It’s not an exaggeration or a figure of speech. People believe there are more connections in the human brain than there are stars in the universe—at least far, far more than stars in the Milky Way, and maybe more than in the universe, because nobody really knows how many stars there are. So this is a literal statement about the plasticity of the brain and about reshaping the brain. The cells go down, the connections go up, and that’s how we can relearn things at a physical level.

Then there are two directions I want to go, and I’ll let you choose. On the one hand, there’s somebody like my wife, who grew up in a truly blissful home: love, care, order, never any doubt about food and clothing, no cruelty, no meanness—really close to an ideal home. It reminds me of when I dropped my third child off at college. We had one last talk before I left, and I said, “I have one concern about you, and one only, as I drop you off at college: nothing bad has ever happened to you.” That wasn’t true of her sisters. They both went through things—not terrible things, but things. And she didn’t disagree. She said, “It’s true, I’ve never had anything really bad happen.” By now she has; everybody does eventually. But people who’ve had a blissful life have a hard time understanding a spouse or friend who comes from a much more difficult background. When I said to my wife, “You need to read Deep-Rooted Marriage, because it’ll help us understand each other in our marriage,” she kind of said, “I don’t get it. I’m not resonating with this book. I don’t have traumas.”

And on the other hand, other people say, “That’s a good point about becoming a different person when I go home. My spouse wants me to be my whole self there, but it’s too painful. I think I’ll never go home again”—or not for five years. So pick up whatever you want from those threads.

Dan Allender: This is where I don’t want to challenge your wife, because I know she is a remarkable human being.

Dan Doriani: Here comes the “but.”

Dan Allender: But what I’d have to say is, “Do you believe your mom and dad are sinners?” I know she’s theologically sophisticated. She’s going to—

Dan Doriani: She’s sophisticated enough to say yes.

Dan Allender: She’ll admit yes. Sure. John covered that by saying that if we say we have no sin, we’re liars. So then I’d say, “Tell me quickly: what’s the nature of sin?” And I might remind her that it’s good to begin with Matthew 5. “Mom and Dad struggled with lust, didn’t they?” “No, they didn’t.” “Oh, so they’re not sinners? Okay. But they were angry, right?” “No.” “Oh. So they’re not sinners.”

The very nature of sin requires you to face that all of us have an ache for what only eternity can provide, and that at some level we’re looking for something or someone to fill it. That’s lust—desire gone mad. If there was absolute purity of desire in both her mom and dad, I’d say, “Wow, then they weren’t sinners.” But how did they make you pay? When we don’t get what we crave and demand, we’re going to make someone pay. It might be us—we may make ourselves pay—but we’re going to make someone pay.

Now, if Allender is saying it, of course it’s hyperbole. But Jesus kind of says, “You think lust is a problem? It’s really adultery. You think anger is an issue? It’s murder.” So she grew up with two adulterers and murderers. Here’s my point: the better your family, the keener your sense of how harm shows itself in your own life should be, not the opposite. Somebody who’s had crystal-clear blue skies, where you can see the proverbial twelve or thirteen miles, ought to be able to see even in small moments how far we all are from what we were meant to be—fully like Jesus. When we see him, we will be like him.

What I’m getting at is this one phrase: the more subtle, the more satanic. I do know a handful of people who had really, really good mothers and fathers. I don’t question that that can happen. But because they had such good moms and dads, entering the subtlety of their own parents’ sin feels too dangerous—almost like making a big deal out of something so small. Well, the “so small” would have brought Jesus to the cross. Nonetheless, it’s hard, with a very good background, to enter into the reality that every world east of Eden carries some of the heartache, but also the longing for what heaven will be.

So if you have an almost perfect dad, let’s say, there’s a really good chance that Dad was maybe overly concerned with being a perfect dad, or loved the kids so much that he neglected Mom a little and played little games of disequilibrium over which relationship was most important. That doesn’t mean he wasn’t a great dad overall.

Dan Doriani: My kids think I’m a good guy overall, but they hit me pretty hard on overwork, which is idolatry.

Dan Allender: Yes. In many ways we’re all aware, to some degree, that failure is part of the nature of life—and of the ability to name it to a child: “I’m angry. I don’t know if you can see it or feel it, but right now I’m angry.” If your wife’s mom or dad didn’t confess their own lust or anger, that alone is a failure of love, because our children need data. Research indicates—this is amazing—that by age four, children know when a parent is not telling the whole truth, or not telling the truth at all. So we mostly socialize children not to name what’s true. But my guess is that your children, when they were younger, had the freedom to know, “My dad is a good, good man, but he also struggles with lust and anger.” That’s the freedom to name what’s true: you are broken, but you are stunningly beautiful.

Dan Doriani: This is amazing, because I have a four-year-old granddaughter who is a delight to hang out with right now. On the subject of truth-telling: I was sitting on the sofa with her, and she leaned over to me in the most conspiratorial tone and posture any adult has ever pulled off—you know how people lean in when they’re going to tell you a secret they aren’t sure they should tell? She said, “Papa, you know, we watch you on TV sometimes.” Of course, she was confessing that they didn’t go to church.

Dan Allender: Exactly.

Dan Doriani: She knew she shouldn’t shout, “We didn’t go to church! We went to sofa church and watched you on TV!” She was four years and two months old, and her body said, “I know about truth-telling. Some things are true, but you don’t talk about them openly.”

Dan Allender: Yes. So all we’ll do is come back—

Small-t Trauma [20:25]

Dan Doriani: Can I pick you up on something particular here?

Dan Allender: Oh, sure.

Dan Doriani: Truth-telling connected to trauma. The first time I encountered your work on trauma, I thought, “Ah, trauma. I hate that word.” I hate the word abuse. The way I finally negotiated my childhood, as I think I told you once, was that I couldn’t bear to apply the word abuse to what happened in my home, so I called it warfare. Children at war. My older brother and I were at war with my father all the time, and sometimes with my mother. Even when we were having fun, there was an angular, jockeying, power-driven something going on. We were constantly at war. It wasn’t abuse, all right? Then I read your book—face your trauma, face your abuse, and so on—which I hated, but needed.

The analogy I use is the study of football players. I know you played football, and I played enough to know about blows to the body. Concussions are one thing, but the micro-concussions are the real deal. It doesn’t matter how many times you formally entered concussion protocol. What matters is how many times your brain jostled around in a way that isn’t healthy. That’s small-t trauma. If small-c concussions do the real damage to a football player’s brain, which is what the science seems to indicate, then it’s the small-t traumas we all need to address, even if we never had a capital-T trauma—a mom saying, “I’m leaving you. I’m out of here.”

The Baked Potato [22:10]

Dan Allender: Totally right. Part of that is looking at where you get triggered. Triggers aren’t just an indication of trauma; they’re an indication of how we defend ourselves. Becky and I had a moment a couple of weeks ago where we got into a nasty interaction over whether a baked potato was actually done. Forty-eight years of marriage, and we’re standing in front of the oven. The baked potato’s out. We cut it in half, and it’s not done. It’s not done. And she says, “It’s done.” Well, it escalated—I won’t take us into the particular language—into minutes of interaction, not just over a baked potato but over each of our characters, over past slights, over the fact that I’m making too big a deal of it, she’s making too big a deal of it. We’ll just say it didn’t go well.

Dan Doriani: Trigger. Why would a baked potato—or “You parked in the wrong space”—possibly escalate like that? Okay, what’s the answer?

Dan Allender: For us, the kitchen was a war zone. For me, Swanson dinners were the absolute best meals we ever had, because my mom hated cooking and resented what it required of her. So meals were horrible. For Becky, the kitchen was the only context where her hypercritical and at times cruel mother would show any regard or care, through giving food. So for both of us, it’s a war zone, just as you put it. Would people say, “Oh, you were abused”? I don’t think eating a Swanson dinner constitutes abuse. But it’s where we both feel very, very vulnerable. So with the baked potato, I’m challenging her capacity to feed me and to be a good cook—

Dan Doriani: Which is the way she loves you. That’s the way she knows love.

Dan Allender: And again, I have to say she knows a thousand other ways, because of who she is. But in that moment it’s, “I love through food, and you’re not letting me love you through food. You’re challenging me—basically saying I’m not competent.” And I’m saying, “You’re not listening to me, just like my mother. You’re giving me food that’s bad, just like my mother.” Thank goodness we’ve done enough work to catch the fact that this isn’t two plus two equals four. In this context, two plus two equals ten—no, it equals bananas plus gorillas.

Becky said it first: “Can we leave the baked potato? Can we actually leave the kitchen? You go for a little walk; I’ll go for a walk. Let’s meet back in about five minutes. We can reheat the potato.”

Dan Doriani: I’ve read that the amygdala fires during these interactions and it takes fifteen or twenty minutes to calm down. You’ve brought it down to five. That’s good.

Dan Allender: Yes, and that’s really true, because we have a sense of when we’re being triggered and know there’s more going on than just unreasonableness. So after five minutes each, we came back and started laughing. Some of the things Becky said were brilliantly hilarious. But we still had to eat, and she said, “Here’s a very simple solution. My half is done. You do whatever you need to with your half.” We were able to resolve it only because we have the capacity, with more compassion, to be curious about what’s getting triggered in the other. When you have a sense of heartache for the other and also an understanding of context, it changes the dynamic of conflict. It doesn’t resolve it, but it gives you ground on which to engage one another in a very different way.

Criticism and Tenderness [26:30]

Dan Doriani: That’s terrific. Just to help people appropriate this, and I’ll let you comment: one more reason I wanted my wife to read the book is that I’m ordinarily very thick-skinned. If you don’t like my sermon, my lecture, my hair, my teeth—whatever it is you don’t like—I don’t really mind all that much. I know it’s a matter of taste. I was out there doing my best. You don’t like it? Fine. I’m flawed. But when my wife gives me an irrational or unfounded criticism, that taps into my father, who was ceaseless in irrational, unfounded criticism. So it’s not criticism that bothers me. It’s irrational criticism from somebody who should be fair and loving. That’s why I wanted her to read the book, so we could talk about that very issue.

Dan Allender: We have the privilege of talking about your wife, and you engage her well. My comment to her would be: you know something of the wildness of this good man’s heart. You probably know better than anyone, except perhaps your children, how tender he really is. But tenderness in the face of deep hatred—not just criticism. In some ways, your father hated you—

Dan Doriani: Oh, yeah.

Dan Allender: —and took joy—hear the phrase—took joy in humiliating you. So there has to be a deep, deep reserve, a watchfulness, an almost implacable “You will not get to me. I won’t let you have the pleasure of getting to me, because I know you want to.” So your dismissiveness is brilliant, and yet you’re a very tender man, from other interactions. No wonder you’re in some ways spellbinding to the world around you: you have the ferocity and yet the tenderness and the vulnerability to name all that’s happening in one interaction with your wife. That’s why she loves you.

Dan Doriani: You’re being way too kind to me. I’m worse than you think—let me make that very clear. But I think you’re absolutely right. What we try to do is protect ourselves. In a sense I say to a lot of the world, “You don’t know me well enough to criticize me enough to hurt me.” But if somebody knows me well enough, that’s a different matter.

Dan Allender: And what I’m saying underneath that is that the quality of dismissiveness is not your truest heart. You are troubled by people who don’t like your hair—though not in the sense that you depend on the gravitas of a compliment to nourish deep parts of your soul.

Dan Doriani: See, you’re making me uncomfortable again. You do this all the time.

Dan Allender: But that’s why I’m very fond of you—because of your integrity. You are a mess, and you are beautiful. In engaging most of the people I work with, it’s such a hard thing for believers. I don’t know why. This is where I still feel like an outsider to Christianity. Why can’t we tell the truth? “I’m a killer—aren’t you? I’m an adulterer—aren’t you?” And honestly, for most people it’s, “No, no, no, I’m not that bad. Leave me alone. Jesus was just making a point about some people.”

The reality of what’s happening in a marriage is this. As I’ve said publicly many times, I have never known the kind of love that I believe will be eternal for me in heaven like I have known through Becky. But I’d also say—not that the baked potato is a lesser example—that there have been moments of heartache, loneliness, and shame in our interplay where I’ve tasted something of what I will never have to taste for eternity, and that’s hell. So a marriage that really is good is not one without conflict. It’s one where conflicts have the potential to expose us—past and present, and something of the nature of our heart—and also to invite us, not just to change, but into a love where there is no condemnation and no division. That’s the kind of love that brings a marriage to the point of saying, “You are the face of God on my behalf.”

Seventy Percent of Conflicts Don’t Get Resolved [31:40]

Dan Doriani: That connects to one of your points I thought was very important, somewhere in the last half of the book. I didn’t write the page down. You say—I think you’re quoting John Gottman here—that 70% of all conflicts are irresolvable. The second I read that, I thought, “That sounds exactly right.” We don’t mean we can’t work our way through them. We mean: you like hip-hop and Motown, and I detest hip-hop and Motown. You like murder mysteries; I hate murder mysteries. You like science fiction; I hate science fiction. You like rom-coms; I like thrillers. Can we agree on anything in the world of entertainment? And the answer is, it’s actually fine to say, “We disagree a lot about music and about what makes a good vacation day, and we still love each other.”

And it’s not merely compromise—meeting in the middle, playing hip-hop half the time and, I don’t know, jazz improvisation the other half. It’s not fifty-fifty. It’s something else. It’s more like, “Yes, we totally disagree, and I think it’s funny or strange that a calm, placid woman like you likes murder mysteries. But I can respect it. Tell me about your book.” How would you counsel people who think, “What on earth? Dan Allender—and for that matter, Dan Doriani—how can you approve of the idea that seventy percent of all conflicts are irresolvable?”

Dan Allender: Well, look at what that seventy percent covers: the issues we fight over—sex, money, in-laws and family, and children. Should we discipline in this moment? Should we offer more grace in this one? There’s hardly anything that matters that doesn’t involve some degree of difference between you and your spouse. Most of the time you have an angry or angrier person who sets the agenda by a certain degree of intimidation, and often a quieter, more compliant person who doesn’t truly agree but prefers to avoid conflict. That often gets labeled “the man’s supposed to be the leader; the woman’s supposed to be submissive.” All I want to say to that is to come back to a core issue: we differ on almost everything. Seldom is desire equal in anything. Can we engage that with honor, curiosity, and an understanding of how desire gets shaped in each of our bodies and lives, so that instead of judging the difference, we honor it and are curious about it, even when it challenges us? Then it leaves us with the sense that “I couldn’t live with you without the differences that make us whole.” So—brilliant point—not compromise, but a creativity that comes because we don’t hold one another or ourselves in contempt. Back to grace.

Dan Doriani: Contempt is the killer.

Dan Allender: The number one killer.

Dan Doriani: Disagreement is one thing; contempt is another. Let me flesh this out for our listeners and see if we’re aligned. Say two parents are both totally committed to love, justice, mercy, and faithfulness with their children, and they even have a generally similar view of where the line between discipline and mercy falls. The child’s tired—let it go, if it’s a three-year-old. Or: this child is eleven, this is becoming a pattern, and we’ve got to address it—and the other parent thinks, “Is it really a pattern? I don’t know if I see a pattern yet.” No matter how close we are, one parent will occasionally be quicker to discipline, on the justice side, and the other will occasionally be quicker to be merciful and overlook flaws. If we’re not careful, we can let that minor disagreement get bigger and bigger until we’re in a conflict we’re not resolving properly, instead of saying, “Look, we both have a perspective, and we sometimes disagree about how to apply it.” We could say the same about sex or money or how to spend a vacation day. No matter how close you are, you’ll always have disagreements, and the best way to address them is with love, respect, and dialogue. Yes?

What Draws You Together Can Push You Apart [36:40]

Dan Allender: Amen. For me, justice was crucial, because I needed boundaries with a boundaryless mother. Becky, on the other hand, craved touch and kindness—some of the attributes of mercy. What drew us together was that I was strong and attentive in ways she had never encountered before, and I felt her delight and honor. And yet she, coming from a cruel mother, needed no one. She was never going to be weak. So we were a perfect couple: I’m strong and verbal; she’s kind but also deeply independent. That works until people start maturing a little in Christ. Then all of a sudden the patterns begin to be disrupted, and the very things that drew you together often become the very things that begin to repulse you.

Dan Doriani: Can you explain that a little? I thought it was one of the most important points, and I wanted to make sure we talked about it. The traits that draw you to your spouse repel you. How can that work, Mr. Counselor-Therapist?

Dan Allender: My wife was highly engaged, but quiet. I’m a storyteller. I can talk forever, because that’s how I made my family work. As an only child, I was the one who kept the two of them together and somewhat sane—

Dan Doriani: By talking.

Dan Allender: By talking. Becky loved hearing my stories and hearing me talk. But eventually you think, “I’d like to get a word in edgewise.” When she did, it was disruptive for both of us.

Dan Doriani: You had to stop talking.

Dan Allender: Yes—just be quiet. On the other hand, I needed her to be very much in control of her internal life, and she was. But here’s the craziness: the more I loved her, the safer she felt to begin asking me for a level of connection and love that terrified me, because it felt very absorptive. So, crazy as it may sound, the things that drew us—her quiet and a certain invulnerability—eventually reached a point of “Ooh, this doesn’t feel good.” Bottom line, we look to one another for redemption, and when we don’t find the redemption we thought we were going to gain, we begin to get angry. That’s how marriage becomes an idol.

Dan Doriani: A lot of the criticism of certain approaches to marriage is that they seek everything in a spouse: you should be able to talk about everything and enjoy everything together. What nonsense is that? That’s asking your spouse to be almost godlike in their interests.

But your book answered a question that has bothered me for years: why do people keep asking my wife and me, “How did you two meet?” That’s the most banal question imaginable. We were standing on a sidewalk, and we bumped into each other. It has nothing to do with anything. But I think what they’re really asking is, “Why did you two connect?” And that’s a question worth asking. For us, her family was so safe and so proper and so organized that I seemed a little bit dangerous, and she was probably looking for a little danger. At the time my hair was on my shoulders, and I was an intellectual wearing clothes that probably came out of a used-clothing bin somewhere—some of them actually did. So it was, “He’s safe, he’s a Christian, but he’s also dangerous.” And I was looking, whether I knew it or not, for someone whose life was so much more put together than my disorderly home, which had a lot of love and fun conversations but was just so chaotic. I looked at her—her hair was in place, her clothes were chosen carefully—and looking back, your book helped me see that this alone attracted me to her, even though I had no awareness of it whatsoever.

Dan Allender: Absolutely. If I were in a conversation with your wife, I’d say, “You saw in Dan a danger that relieved something of the monotony and boredom of perfection.” Perfection in anyone other than God is not only tedious but idolatrous.

Dan Doriani: So you promote the idea that we don’t know we’re looking for A, B, and C, but we sense it. We know so many things without knowing why or how we know them. We sense that this person is going to do something for us that we’ve never received and can’t imagine getting except through an outsider—which is what you mean by redemption. People don’t consciously seek eternal salvation through a spouse, but they do seek the healing that none but the Lord can give.

Dan Allender: Right. And if we understand, as you do, that redemption isn’t just eternal—not just in heaven—but the restoration of all things, then we actually are seeking redemption. Not the forgiveness of sins, and not, in one sense, the restoration of relationship with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but something of what Eden held and what the new heavens and new earth hold for all of us: shalom.

The Kintsugi Marriage [43:00]

Dan Doriani: That connects to the last two points from your book I want to talk about. One, I think, is from one of Steve’s chapters, but I’m sure you agree with it: kintsugi—

Dan Allender: Yes, kintsugi.

Dan Doriani: —the Japanese art of putting supreme value on a vase or piece of art that’s been broken and restored, and making it beautiful. It connects to something a pastor friend once said to me. To be honest, one of my daughters was most cruelly abandoned by her first husband—without reason, which he was very open about. “There’s no reason. I just don’t want to be married anymore. Goodbye.” He told her that, and he told me that to my face at length: “It’s not her fault. I just want to leave.” Later she married a wonderful man who is the father of her children. She asked me to officiate at her second wedding, as I had at her first, and I couldn’t figure out what to say. I was stuck. I talked to a pastor friend, and he said, “You know, second marriages can be the most beautiful of all—a second marriage after the early death of a spouse, or after a tragic divorce. To see God bringing somebody back to healing and health…” He said most of his favorite weddings were actually second weddings.

That reminded me of kintsugi, and of everything you’re saying: that we’re seeking either a return to the pre-fall condition of Eden or, more realistically, something I call supra-Edenic—Eden, but better than Eden ever was. The restoration of all things, where we know how things went wrong and how much we’ve been saved from when all things are set right again. I think that’s a vision of marriage we share. But expatiate. You’re the expert. Say more.

Dan Allender: Our audience can’t see it, but I can show you: right there is a kintsugi bowl. It’s a bowl that was shattered—not on purpose—and then its broken parts were held together with gold. The Hebrew notion of glory is kavod, and as my good friend Tremper would say, kavod holds the idea of something thick and strong that also sparkles with luminescence. It’s beautiful, but also ferociously strong.

That’s the core reality when we own our brokenness, past and present—when we have the humility to say, “I’m so sad about how I handled the baked potato,” and even more, about how the kitchen has been a war zone for us. We can’t, quote-unquote, “resolve this” and snap our fingers and get out of it, but we can begin to tend to it, talk about it, pray about it, and become more and more sensitive to what a bad meal can stir up. It all comes back to this: the strength of entering into brokenness is not discouragement, but the freedom to say, “Our living God really does restore broken people. We are broken. Our marriage is broken. And it is stronger than it’s ever been.”

We’re forty-eight years into marriage at this point, and again, the book really helped us. That’s the crazy thing about being a writer or teacher: by focusing on what I know to be true, I’m much more aware, she’s more aware, and in that we’re much more free. When you begin to play out the promise of a coming kingdom, you begin to borrow from the future into the present in a way that isn’t as laborious or difficult. There are still tears, and still the hunger for redemption in the final sense of being fully who I’m meant to be.

Seeing a Spouse Home [47:10]

Dan Allender: I pray that we will have many more years. One of the big changes over the last year is that Becky began to say, “You anticipate dying first, don’t you?” And I said, “Yeah, I do. Actuarial tables would tend to predict that.” And she said, “Have you begun to pray about actually seeing me home—that one of your last acts of courage and honor would be to see me home?” It was disruptive—

Dan Doriani: Oh my goodness, yes.

Dan Allender: —at the level of, “I can’t predict and I can’t control, but I can pray that I have the honor, and the heartache, of seeing my wife depart this earth first.”

Dan Doriani: And we’re terrified of that. We don’t want that to happen. We love our spouses.

Dan Allender: Everything in me is—shall we use the word—repulsed at the thought, until I begin to think, “I would give my life if someone were to attack her. I would stand in the way. Why wouldn’t I then ask Jesus for the privilege of protecting her in this way, in her last hours?” So every marriage is a tapestry that reveals something of the knotted back but also the glorious front. Holding both and seeing both increases our wonder at being loved by God, and also our dependence on taking in even more of what the Spirit offers of the presence of Jesus.

Closing [49:05]

Dan Doriani: Thank you so much. I’ll say two or three things in closing. Number one, I’m deeply impressed—the theological label for it is progressive sanctification—that you can have a conflict about a baked potato and need only five minutes off. I think a lot of people, and I’d put myself in that camp, might need an hour and a half after a conversation about potatoes. So: progressive sanctification, putting in the work. That’s one.

Very tenderly, I’ll tell you that not long ago I went to my doctor. He did blood work and listened to my heart and lungs, and he said, “I don’t know if it’s good news or bad news, but you’d better prepare to live to be 100, because you’re the kind of person who lives to be 100.” When I got home, I said, “Honey, you need to sit down. I’ve got to tell you something. You’re going to have to live to be 98″—because she’s two years younger than I am. “If I’m living to 100, you’ve got to live to 98, so take care of yourself, sweetie, because I don’t want to live without you.”

Dan Allender: Indeed.

Dan Doriani: I’m sure that’s how we both feel, but we have to face harder things than that. The last thing I’ll say is that Dan Allender is a really good writer and a great conversation partner. Thank you so much for your candor and honesty in this conversation, which is consistent with the amazing candor in your books. If anybody is looking for help with a past trauma, small-t or large, The Wounded Heart, To Be Told, and The Cry of the Soul are really good resources I recommend as strongly as I can. You can get those books at a discount through our website, or from Amazon and other places. We link to our authors—not only this book, but also Intimate Allies. Those are two really fine books about marriage. Thanks for your time and for your decades of service.

Dan Allender: Thank you, Dan. It’s always a delight to be with you.

Bonus: Falling in Love [50:50]

Dan Doriani: Hello, everyone. Dan Allender and I kept talking after our interview formally ended, and as we chatted, I realized I’d forgotten to ask him a question that was important to me. In the book, he compares falling in love to being high on cocaine, and we discussed why that matters. I hope you enjoy this bonus content, or outtake—whatever you wish to call it.

We didn’t talk about this: falling in love is like being on cocaine. Come on, say a few words. We’ll splice it in. Dan, why on earth do you say that? It jumped off the page.

Dan Allender: Falling in love is like being on cocaine because it gives you a hit of dopamine, oxytocin, and adrenaline, and that’s God’s way of getting us to bond with somebody long enough to begin learning how to actually love them. Without the biochemicals, I think most of us would have enough sense to know, “This will ruin our lives.” But when you’ve got dopamine flowing through you, that really is literally equivalent to cocaine.

Dan Doriani: It’s the same kind of physiological chemical. Go ahead.

Dan Allender: It doesn’t shut down, but it lowers—

Dan Doriani: Diminishes.

Dan Allender: —your left frontal-lobe processes, particularly Broca’s area, which manages language. So you’re stupefied in a state of love where all the qualities that would disturb you, you don’t even see anymore. You get biochemically suckered into love so that the maturing process can eventually begin. Research indicates that by about fourteen to eighteen months—

Dan Doriani: It’s gone.

Dan Allender: —it’s back to, shall we say, the normal processes of dopamine and oxytocin. So why are you sniffing your nose like that?

Dan Doriani: I’ve always sniffed my nose like that. What are you talking about?

Dan Allender: No, you didn’t. You didn’t have eyes to see it, because you were stoned. And I thank God this is not a fault. This is, again, God’s playfulness—his willingness to let us follow desire, knowing that at the core, the deepest desire we have is to be like Jesus.

Working with Dan Doriani is a production of the Center for Faith and Work St. Louis. We seek to promote faithfulness in the workplace, in education, in discipleship, and in the stories of believers who’ve applied their faith at work. If you want to put your faith to work and change your corner of the world, visit faithandworkstl.org. We’ll help you start a cohort with like-minded believers who also want to practice their faith at work. This podcast is donor-supported; to keep us going, please donate on our website. Maybe more importantly, you can support us by listening, subscribing, sharing, and posting about us on your favorite platform—or go old school and tell a friend