To be honest, and this is not easy for me to admit, I’d been feeling the pressure to ‘seal the deal’. The first time I heard a friend my age getting married, my reaction was goodness aren’t we a tad too young to settle down? The second I found out of another peer’s wedding, I thought maybe they know something I didn’t. But after the fourth and the fifth time, I started wondering if I was the one who was not getting with the program.
Oh, not to mention the interrogations have started. From aunties, uncles, friends of my parents’… I’d always been one of the youngest in most family occasions, so I have been spared of these incessant and invasive questioning from the oldies while my elder siblings took the heat. But now that my brother’s married with a kid, and my sister’s nowhere near firing squad… ‘So when’s your turn?’ ‘You’re not that young anymore you know…’
So I got flustered after a while. I didn’t put a gun on the boyfriend’s forehead and drove him to the nearest Poh Kong, but the issue came up from time to time. I liked how things were going, but well-meant(?) comments and observations from the outside have prompted me to wonder if I was being too complacent with things. I felt like Jennifer Aniston in that chick flick He’s Just Not That Into You, only it was ridiculous for me think this way because my relationship was only ten months old, not ten years like hers.
Then I had a conversation with a BFF of mine, and what she said showed me how blindsided I have been by all these things that I have allowed to bother me.
You don’t get married because everyone else expects you to. Or because you want to be one of the first to do so. Or because you want take pretty wedding pictures to put on Facebook. Or because you feel like playing house with your boyfriend.
It was so simple. You decide to marry only when the man is willing to love the wife as Christ has loved the church, to love her as he loves himself, to give himself up for her, and only when the woman is willing to respect and submit to the husband in everything, as the church submits to Christ.
Ephesians 5:22-33
Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.
Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated his own body, but he feeds and cares for it, just as Christ does the church— for we are members of his body. "For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh."This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church. However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.
