Example Speaks For Itself

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A couple years ago I wrote about my friends. They were the perfect couple. The husband and I roomed together in college nearly 40 years ago. While I struggled to make C's, he breezed through with all A's. After graduation while I was going through my hippie phase and hitchhiking across the country, he was going to medical school. And later when I was trying to get my construction business off the ground and I could barely afford to put food on the table, he and his wife were building a house that I could only dream of one day owning. And finally, when it seemed that all we did was referee our kids who were constantly fighting with one another, they raised four daughters whose worst sin was calling someone dumb in a fit of anger one day at school.

But his wife, the mother of the most perfect family I know, wrote us last year to say that her marriage was in serious trouble. Her husband, my friend for the past 40 years, was having an affair. At that time she said they were getting counseling and hoped to heal the rift in their marriage, but apparently it didn't help them. Last week she called to say they had separated and it looked like their 30-year-old marriage won't survive.

Yes, I know that a lot of marriages end up in divorce, but not this couple. They had everything going for them. They both came from good families who really cared for one another. They are deeply committed in their faith. They have no financial worries that can destroy even the strongest marriages. And when I say their kids were the ones that everyone would compare to their own children and ask, "Why can't you be like their girls?" that is no exaggeration.

So what went wrong? The obvious answer was the husband's affair, but like all marriage problems, the root causes are often far more complex than that. So, my wife and I did what we all do when our friends are hurting - we drove 200 miles to see them, to talk with them, to try to help them through their crisis.

What we learned was that their marriage was not nearly as perfect as we thought, even from the beginning. The husband said when they were first married and he was struggling in medical school, he thought about dropping out and going into real estate, but his wife made it clear that she had married a doctor, not a salesman. "I can't tell you how bad that made me feel, like she didn't even care about me," he said.

And she said that he spent more time with his patients than he did with his family, and that made her feel like he didn't care about her.

Both said they have felt all alone, married but living separate lives all these years.

I wanted desperately to have some insight into their problems, to be able to offer them some amazing bit of advice, to be able to help them somehow magically break through 30 years of hidden hurts and loneliness, but there was nothing I could say. I just listened.

Later that day when we were all driving back to what was now just the wife's house, on the busiest road in town, my car just stopped running, backing up traffic behind us for blocks. So I put on the emergency blinkers and called 911, and for the next hour all four of us stood there, stuck in traffic 200 miles from home and waited for the tow truck to arrive.

My and I didn't think we said anything special, but when we left our two friends that night they both thanked us for what we said to them on the side of the road about their marriage.

"But we didn't say anything about marriage there," I said. "We mostly talked about where to get the car fixed."

"That's what we mean," they said. "You didn't get angry or blame each other. You just talked about how to work out the car problem together. We've never done that, but maybe we can try that now."

Tony Hall, who spent 24 years in Congress and is now the chief United States spokesman in the world fight against hunger, once said that he would rather see a sermon than hear one. I think that's what our two friends were saying. For most of the day my wife and I talked and talked and talked with them about how to treat one another, but it wasn't until they actually saw it lived out in my wife and I waiting for a tow truck in the middle of a busy intersection that they actually heard us.

Like the commercial says: "Tow truck - $100. Car rental - $150. Transmission repairs - $300. Helping two friends get back on the right track - priceless."