As part of the launch for my new book, I invited some friends to share how they make their marriages beautiful. The road to beauty is not always pretty or easy. We often find ourselves in dark and difficult places and don’t know where to turn for help or companionship. One of my main goals in writing Making Marriage Beautiful was to vulnerably offer my experiences so that others would not feel so alone or hopeless. This series seeks to give more glimpses into the lives of diverse men and women who have partnered with God to create and sustain satisfying, joyful marriages.
How Do You Make Your Marriage Beautiful? Through Mutual Sacrifice, by Dorcas Cheng-Tozun
Most of my twelve-year marriage has felt unfair.
For the first two years after our wedding, I worked full-time, earning a tiny ministry salary while my husband racked up tens of thousands of dollars in business school debt. Then he and a few graduate school classmates started a multinational business that has, for all intents and purposes, taken over our lives.
The years since then have been full of sacrifices I’ve made—jobs, friendships, plans, even my own health—to allow my husband to give everything he had to this business. We have lived abroad in three different places and moved almost every year. No matter where we are located, I take on a disproportionate share of the household and parenting responsibilities. Every time I want to go back to working full-time, I have been stopped by the recognition that I cannot juggle a demanding job if my spouse is too consumed by his own work to back me up.
I have often been tempted to count the costs of being married to an ambitious entrepreneur—and to wonder if this is truly the way God intended our marriage to be. Surely God wanted something that felt more akin to equality, something that provided both partners a comparable measure of purpose and opportunity.
I wanted fairness, but God gave me perspective instead.
I have learned to look beyond my own losses and to recognize that my husband has actually made plenty of sacrifices for me too.
He has flown more red-eye flights than I can count, minimizing the lengths of his work trips for my sake and to the detriment of his own health. He has stayed up late and woken up early to work, reserving those precious twilight hours for time with family. When I was struggling with depression and anxiety in mainland China, he went so far as to open a new office in Hong Kong so we could move there and I could be healthier. When I began pursuing a writing career, he gladly took on the role of primary financial provider for our family and has never uttered a word of complaint about it.
For everything I have sacrificed for my husband, he has sacrificed something for me. Most of what we have given to one another cannot be measured or compared or quantified, nor should they be.
Ours is a marriage of perpetual giving and giving up for the sake of the other. It is not about fairness or equality or keeping score, but simply sacrificial love.
My husband and I are practicing, on an almost a daily basis, what it means to put our spouse’s needs before our own. To be honest, I don’t think it’s the practice I would have chosen. I am constantly having to confront my own selfishness and pride, my resistance to laying down what I want for the sake of what is good for another. I am constantly challenged to be more generous and more understanding than I want to be.
But regularly sacrificing for one another has had a remarkable impact on our characters. It has sanded down the sharp edges of our egos, reminding us over and over again that we do not always need to be the central characters in our own lives. We can, instead, dedicate ourselves to the flourishing of others—beginning with our spouses. Such acts also have deep meaning and purpose.
I don’t know that my marriage will ever feel fair. But I know that it can be, and already is, extraordinarily good.
Dorcas Cheng-Tozun is a columnist for Inc.com and a regular contributor to Christianity Today, The Well, and Asian American Women on Leadership. Her writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, BlogHer, Red Letter Christians, Relevant, Think Christian, and dozens of other publications and anthologies in the U.S., U.K., and Asia. Her book Start, Love, Repeat: How to Stay in Love with Your Entrepreneur in a Crazy Startup World is forthcoming from Hachette Center Street in late 2017. Follow Dorcas at www.chengtozun.com or on Twitter @dorcas_ct.
To read more in this series, click here.
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