Marriage, Part Two

This week on The Allender Center Podcast, in part two of our Marriage series, Dan and his wife, Becky Allender, continue last week’s conversation about what it looks like to leave our families of origin and grow in love and loyalty for one another.

Dan: “Marriage always begins with death. And it’s always moving, if faithful, to the reality that we made an oath that we would not divide until one of us departs. So you begin with death, you end with death, but you also believe that death does not have the last word.”

By reflecting on their own experiences of leaving, Dan and Becky discuss the interplay of leaving and honoring—telling the truth about where you come from and stepping fully into the marriage relationship, but still desiring goodness for your family of origin.

Becky: “Having had a very talkative father, mother, and then husband, and children who like to talk too, I think I’m having more compassion for my anxiety, too, that comes with filling up space. […] It’s a war, really, with still trying to leave my parents. I think it stems from a very young age.”

Becky shares about how, by diving into her own story, sharing her story with others, and learning about her relational attachment style, she realized that her marriage relationship was echoing and replaying patterns from her childhood. Leaving, in that sense, calls on each spouse to call the other into new and ever-increasing levels of beauty, truth, and goodness.

Dan: “We’re always meant to be leaving our mother and father. This is not a singular event, or a handful of events. Like repentance, like forgiveness, it’s an ongoing issue that we are to be involved in for the remainder of our lives. […] We still have scars and debris from years of not doing well with one another’s own history and how that story plays out in relationship.”

Becky: “I think we are coming to reflect God more and more in how we relate and love our families.”

Leaving, though, is just the beginning. Next week, Dan and Becky will talk about cleaving together in a way that opens the door to newness and to the hope of resurrection.