A friend of mine (actually my book editor) picked up on an off-hand illustration that I used in a sermon recently about why Christian marriage is a life-long affair and fleshed out the reasoning that undergirds my thinking.

He writes, in part:

“When we become serious about someone and in due course enter into a committed relationship, we are still hiding a large part of ourselves. We are hiding because we can’t believe some parts of us are lovable. We even try to hide these parts from ourselves much of the time.

But as time goes by, if our authenticity is allowed to grow and we show more and more of who we are to the other person, we find that this person has always known we are the very person we think we have been hiding—and they have loved us as this person we have been trying to hide.

It’s now that we can finally relax into loving ourselves.

Commitment isn’t about two people propping each other up, covering for each other, pretending together that their flaws and weaknesses don’t exist. It’s not about keeping masks in place. It’s about becoming increasingly authentic, and thereby learning to accept all the parts of ourselves into ourselves and at last own who we truly are.”

Read the full article here.

David has a lot of interesting things up there. He’s even gotten me to finally read “The Little Prince”. Enjoy.