What Shopping Can Reveal About Marriage

Shopping with my wife, Sarah, and looking at footwear, the following conversation took place:

Me: What about these Ugg boots?

Sarah: Nah, they’d make your feet sweat.

Me: Oh yeah, you’re so right. You know my feet.

She knew, somehow, that woollen lined boots would make my feet feel hot even in winter. She knew before I had realised it, but as she said what she said I had the immediate recognition that she was right. Amazingly, she knew me. Such comfort was ushered through me as I thankfully shopped with my wife. What Sarah didn’t know was how much my soul was brimming and alive in her that day – as God shone his mighty revelation in me through this little and typically insignificant marital encounter.

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Shopping tells us a lot about our marriages. Shopping is indicative and predictive of the amount we know about each other. As marriage partners there are venues and situations and avenues of knowledge that marriage reveals. And this is for confidence – that our partnering together isn’t a waste. We invest so much of ourselves in marriage; it is just so nice to see the fruit ripen in accordance with God’s promises.

Marriage is wonderful in that we can so know our spouse as to know them instinctively. This is the oneness in marriage that we signed up for. It’s “me into you and you into me,” in such a way as to merge into the oneness of the other. We want to vanish into our partner and to become them in some ways – to lose nothing of our individuality, but to gain everything of them.

It is “your needs are my needs – and to know your needs fulfils my needs” and marriage is the unification of two souls who are made better and more functional as individuals.

And that is it. The best of marriage – the unification with the sanctifying of both individual such that they are made better individuals – is manifested in the knowledge of one in the other and vice versa; proof of oneness is knowledge and implicit acceptance of the other.

One of the great blessings of marriage is to know our spouse – to know them back to front with confidence, acceptance and safety. It is beautiful to be known so intimately and thereby be loved.

Marriage marries minds, hearts and souls in a fusion of devotion; one to another and reciprocated.

© 2014 S. J. Wickham.