Loneliness Under One Roof
Spouses can share a household for years, raise children and faithfully attend church, yet remain strangers to each other.
Sometimes you look at a family from the outside, and it is a pleasure to see. The dishes are washed, the apartment is tidy, the children are well cared for and nicely dressed, and on Sundays the whole family stands decorously at the Liturgy. But if you look behind this flawless facade, its other side is revealed. People live in the same home for years, yet share only kitchen chores and mortgage payments.
Each one shuts himself away in his own inner world, retreating into a phone screen, work, or conversations with friends. Nobody, it seems, is unfaithful to anyone, and there are no scandals with smashed dishes, and yet the couple feels a certain chill in the silence between two strangers who have happened to end up in the same living space.
At some point one of the spouses catches himself thinking: living apart seems painful, but being together is frighteningly lonely. One cannot help asking why this happens to people who once promised before the altar to love each other to their last day.
The Virtue of Sensitivity
Saint John Chrysostom, in discussing the Apostle Paul's words about the marriage union, draws attention to the fact that Scripture says: "A man shall cleave to his wife." Not simply "be settled beside her," nor "manage the household together." The saint stresses that the ancient text uses the word "cleave," denoting the utmost degree of unity, when two lives are fused into one whole. Living together under one ceiling and spiritual attachment to each other are quite different things, you must agree.
Living out of habit, according to Chrysostom, people in time cease to marvel even at the boundless sky, though in the first days of creation even the angels admired it. What, then, can be said of a loved one who moves about before our eyes every day? His presence becomes a taken-for-granted background.
The bishop asks husbands a thoroughly modern question: why spend the whole day with friends, giving your wife only a dreary evening, and then be surprised at her reproaches? And he immediately adds an unexpected thought: if your wife voices complaints to you, do not hasten to be angry. Understand that her reproaches come not from insolence but from ardent love, from the fear of becoming an empty place to you.
Estrangement almost never begins with catastrophes. It grows out of trifles. In the Old Testament Song of Songs there is a dramatic episode. The beloved knocks at the door in the dead of night, his hair wet with the dew of the night. And the bride behind the door hesitates and reasons: "I have put off my garment; how shall I put it on again? I have washed my feet; how shall I defile them?" When she finally decides to open, no one is there. The beloved has turned and gone. She calls him but receives no answer.
This is a most precise portrait of our domestic routine. A husband wants to share his joy, some successes or achievements, and his wife brushes him off: "Not now, my dinner is burning." Sometimes the wife too sighs, waiting for support, and the husband buries himself in the monitor: "Let me rest, I'm tired from work."
Modern researchers of family psychology observed dozens of couples over the years and noticed that spouses who preserved a warm marriage responded to each other's small signs of attention, such as a casual sigh, the remark "look out the window," or a quiet question, in about 86% of cases. Couples whose marriages fell apart responded to such bids in only 33% of situations. We kill intimacy not even by infidelity, but by hundreds of missed requests, when we are simply too lazy to tear our eyes away from the screen.
The Diary of an Old Testament Wife
In Genesis there is the story of the Old Testament righteous woman Leah. She found herself in a marriage with the patriarch Jacob in which the everyday side of family life was fully in order. Only the main thing was missing: her husband's love. Jacob preferred Rachel to her.
But the most touching thing is the names Leah gives her newborn sons. In their etymology lies a genuine diary of a woman's loneliness, written in the margins of family life. Her first-born is born, and she names him Reuben, saying to herself: "The Lord has looked upon my affliction, for now my husband will love me." A second son appears, Simeon: "The Lord has heard that I am unloved." A third is born, Levi: "Now at last my husband will be joined to me."
Each time, pressing an infant to her breast, this woman hoped that the new child would become that very bridge which would at last draw her husband's heart to her. But a person cannot give another what he does not have. Jacob remained cold.
The turning point comes with the fourth son. A boy is born, and Leah suddenly says quite different words: "Now I will praise the Lord." And she names him Judah. She stopped demanding fullness of love from her husband. Leah stopped asking of a human being what only the Creator can give. She relied on God, and found inner dignity. Incidentally, it was from the tribe of Judah that the royal line of David would later come, from which the Savior was descended.
When we demand that our spouse become for us the only source of happiness, meaning and emotional warmth, we place an unbearable burden on him. No mortal person is able to fill all our spiritual needs. When we stop expecting divine perfection from a husband or wife, resentment goes away too. It becomes possible to see beside us not an ideal, but a living, tired person for whom things are hard as well.
Small Steps Toward Unity
In the Orthodox wedding service the priest prays to God not merely that two people would live under one roof. The petition sounds different: "Unite them in oneness of mind; crown them into one flesh." Here we see petitions for like-mindedness and mutual complementarity of the spouses, so that a person would not remain alone for his whole life.
Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh said that we often do not know how to love, but only how to feast on human relationships. We like it when we are cheered, comforted, cared for. But true love begins where a person is able to stand boldly together with another person before the face of the world and of God.
Spiritual closeness does not arise during a single conversation at the kitchen table. It is built from small, almost imperceptible steps.
Saint John Chrysostom advises spouses to pray together and at least sometimes to talk at home about what was read and sung in church. Simply ask each other: what did you remember today? What were you thinking about?
Do not wait for the other to take a step toward you; act first. Chrysostom says: "You love, you fulfill your duty." At least turn off your phone when your spouse walks into the room. Stop brushing off his questions and needs. Try sitting together in silence, in a warm quiet in which you can hear only the ticking of the clock and the breathing of your beloved. And then, through the cold wall of everyday routine, the first shoot of real, deep unity will surely break through.
