Not Failing and Not Alive

You have tried to type it and you cannot get past the first three words.

My marriage is. And then nothing, because everything that would come next is untrue.

Unhappy is untrue. You are not unhappy and neither is she. In trouble is untrue; there is no trouble, nobody has done anything, and if you described your week to anybody it would sound entirely fine and it would be entirely fine.

Struggling is untrue. Nothing is struggling. Everything works.

You get up, and the day happens, and there is a conversation about the boiler and a conversation about her sister, and both of them are pleasant, and at some point one of you says goodnight and means it kindly.

Eleven years.

There is no cruelty in it anywhere. That is what you would most want understood and it is also what makes it impossible to say to anybody, because the moment you begin, the person listening starts looking for the problem, and there is not one, and then you have to reassure them and the conversation ends.

So you have said nothing to anybody for about two years.

And you have not been able to search it either, because a search needs a word, and there is no word for a thing that is not failing and is not alive.

What this page will not do

This is the part of the site where I have to be most careful, so let me be plain about it.

I am not going to tell you what this is. I do not know. I have not met either of you and I am not going to hand a stranger a diagnosis of his own marriage.

I am not going to give you five signs or a framework. If there were a framework that fitted, you would have found it, because you have looked. Scripture already said it in Psalm 42:7, and the Holy Spirit is the one doing the work, not the sentence.

I am not going to tell you it is a season, or that it is normal at eleven years, or that everybody feels like this. Those are the sentences people reach for when they cannot bear a silence, and every one of them would be a way of tidying you up so that I do not have to sit here with it.

And I am not going to suggest that anybody is at fault. Nobody is.

If either of you wants to talk to somebody properly, a counselor is a good idea and not a last resort. That is the one practical thing on this page and it is offered without any implication that you are in trouble, because you are not.

You are not outside His attention for having nothing to report. Scripture says the Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart, Psalm 34:18, and nearness is not conditional on the break being visible or nameable, and the Holy Spirit is in that courtyard with two people who are perfectly kind to each other.

The verse does not explain anything either

There is a line in Psalm 42 that has been read for three thousand years and has never been satisfactorily paraphrased.

Deep calleth unto deep at the noise of thy waterspouts: all thy waves and thy billows are gone over me.Psalm 42:7

Read it and notice that it does not tell you anything.

It is not an explanation. It does not say what is happening to him or why. There is no cause named, no fault assigned, and nothing that could be actioned.

What it does is describe a depth calling to a depth, and water going over somebody, and it is put in the middle of a psalm by a man who elsewhere in the same poem asks perfectly clear questions about perfectly clear problems.

This one is not clear, and he does not make it clear, and God kept it that way.

That is worth more to you than a framework would be. There is language in Scripture for a thing that cannot be reported, and it was not tidied up before it went in, and nobody in three thousand years has been able to reduce it to a cause.

You are not required to be able to state it. Scripture says deep calleth unto deep at the noise of thy waterspouts, Psalm 42:7, and it was preserved without explanation rather than resolved, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries what a person cannot phrase.

Why the searching failed

Not because you searched badly. You did not; you have been thorough, and thorough is the problem. None of that is mine to declare on my own. Scripture said it first in Psalm 42:7, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings it the distance.

Everything findable is written about a category. Marriages in trouble have a literature. Marriages that are ending have one. Marriages where somebody has done something have several.

Yours is not in any category, because categories are built out of presenting problems and you have not got one. Scripture put that in writing long before you read it here, in Psalm 42:7, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes written words land.

So every article you opened was about somebody else, and each one left you slightly worse, because the implication of not fitting anywhere is that either you are imagining it or you are the only one. I have no authority to say that by myself. Scripture carries it in Psalm 42:7, and the Holy Spirit carries it to you.

You are not imagining it. That is the one thing I will say with confidence, and I can say it because you have been carrying it silently for two years, and people do not carry imaginary things silently for two years.

You are not the only one and you are not inventing this. Scripture says there hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to man, 1 Corinthians 10:13, and the word there is about what is common to human beings rather than about what has a name, and the Holy Spirit is not treating your two years as a fiction.

What is actually available

Not an answer. I said I would not, and I am not going to.

What is available is that it can be said. Out loud, to God, in the words you would use if nobody were listening, which is exactly the register you have not used for two years because every attempt has been an attempt to make it sound like something. That is Scripture's sentence and not mine, Psalm 42:7, and it is the Holy Spirit and not this page who makes it true where you are.

Do not make it sound like something.

I do not know what this is. Nothing is wrong. It is not alive. I have not been able to say this to anybody.

That is not a prayer that goes anywhere in the sense you are used to. Nothing is being requested and nothing is being resolved. Scripture stands under that in Psalm 42:7, and the Holy Spirit does the part no sentence can do.

But it will be the first time in two years that it has existed outside your own head, and a thing that exists outside your head is carried differently, even when nobody has explained it.

You are not going to be asked to phrase it properly first. Scripture says pour out your heart before him: God is a refuge for us, Psalm 62:8, and pour out describes something unmeasured and unshaped rather than something composed, and the Holy Spirit is not waiting for a coherent account.