If You Think You May Have Married The Wrong Man

“How can something become the right thing when it clearly started out as a wrong thing? Traveling the wrong way on a street can never lead to the right destination, no matter what you do,” Linda said to me during her counseling appointment. She and Tom had been married for six years when her mom died at a relatively young age. The effect of her mother’s death had caused Linda to rethink the things she valued in life. Unlike Tom, she had grown up in a Christian home and had begun to follow Christ at an early age.

Like many youth, when Linda moved away to college she wandered away from the anchoring truths she had learned at home. One of the things she had always been taught was that it would be a serious mistake to date an unbeliever – being “unequally yoked” – that was the biblical phrase her parents had shown her. But by the time she met Tom at a fraternity party, rules from back home about whom to date and not date were the last thing on her mind. Tom was fun to be with. He seemed to value her and make her feel good about herself. He told her often how beautiful she was. He made her laugh. Little by little, she found herself falling in love with him.

As their relationship became more and more serious, she had wondered at times about Tom’s spiritual life but she couldn’t bring herself to ask. It’s not like she had been the model Christian in front of him, so what right did she have to ask Tom about his spiritual life. That’s the kind of logic that had led her.

Finally, Tom proposed to her and she accepted. Her mother had asked her about Tom’s relationship to Christ and Linda had told her that he was a Christian, although the truth was that she didn’t know what his thoughts were about all that. They soon married and through the years it had never been an issue – until now. Her mother’s death had changed something in Linda and now both hers and Tom’s spiritual lives mattered to her for the first time.

She and Tom had talked about life after death when her mother died. For the first time she asked him about his own spiritual history and his view on the matter of faith in Christ. He told her that he had never given it much thought and that, while he respected her view and even her renewed interest in spiritual things, it wasn’t something that particularly interested him. He said that he was happy with his life the way it was.

In one of our early counseling sessions together, Linda said that she believed Tom thought her renewed interest in spiritual matters would subside as she adjusted to her mother’s death. But it didn’t happen that way. Instead the desire to live out the faith of her childhood only intensified as the days passed.

She began to read her Bible every day. She found a growing hunger to read books written by Christian authors and began to be involved a newly formed Bible study she had been invited by a friend to attend. She even had gone to a Christian Women’s Retreat one weekend with another friend from a local church congregation in the area.

Tom didn’t oppose any of this and, while Linda was thankful for that fact, it wasn’t enough. Her problem was that he didn’t particularly support it either. His attitude seemed to be a “live-and-let-live” perspective on the matter. She wanted more than that from him.

“I know I should be thankful that Tom isn’t against my growing faith,” she said, “but I want him to share it with me and I don’t know how that can possibly happen since he’s not even a Christian and seems to have no interest in all this. I can’t help but think about the fact that, although Tom and I have always loved each other, I might have been wrong to marry him. The Bible does say not to be unequally yoked with an unbeliever and that’s exactly what I did when I married Tom knowing deep down that he probably wasn’t a Christian.”

Linda’s frustration about her husband is far more common among Christian women than many realize. It’s one thing to be married to a man who is a Christian but not as enthusiastic about his faith as a wife might like, but what about when you come to realize that you’re married to somebody who doesn’t even share the basic core values of your faith? If the foundation of your life is Jesus Christ and a relationship with Him isn’t even on the radar of your husband’s personal interest, is there any way that God can bless your relationship? The Bible plainly says that light can’t have communion with darkness, so how can God do something that would seem to be in contrast the that very fact?

It’s a legitimate question that deserves an answer. If you find yourself married to an unbeliever and you let your mind come to rest on the spiritual differences you see between the two of you and on how there is such a spiritual gulf that you can’t seem to bridge, it will certainly lead to a place of apprehension and fear about any possibility for having a strong Christian marriage. Let your thoughts stay on that road and meditate on it long enough and it’s possible to even reach the place where you wonder if you even should be married to your husband. So, before we move on to an answer, let me go ahead and tell you plainly. If you’ve been thinking this way, you’re going to have to change the way you think. Appropriating negative faith about your husband, his spiritual condition, and your future together isn’t going to help the matter.

The key to moving through this kind of situation is to change your focus. Putting your attention on what you may believe to be spiritual deficits in your husband isn’t going to take you to a good place in any way. Focusing on whether you made a right decision or a wrong decision then doesn’t offer an ounce of help now. While nobody would wisely suggest that the best scenario is for a believer and unbeliever to marry each other, there’s no benefit in going back now and reliving the past. We’re not talking about premarital advice here. We’re talking about a marriage that has already happened. The relevant question isn’t what should you have done. The question is, what do you do now? So stay focused on the right question.

Our Father has identified Himself by the name, “I AM,” not “I WAS.” In other words, He is a present tense God who will work in your situation right now, regardless of what has happened in your past. So the first thing for you to do is stop living in the past by focusing on what you should or shouldn’t have done. It’s done now and it is what it is, so don’t torment yourself by living back there. So the first thing to do if you think you may have married the wrong person is stop living in the past and stop focusing on that question at all. It will lead nowhere good.

The next thing to do if you think you married the wrong man is to put your eyes on your Sovereign God. Set aside biblical questions about believers and unbelievers marrying each other. What does that have to do with you now? Again, it’s done and you can’t go back in time and do things differently even if you wanted to. What value is there in wallowing in doubts about decisions already made? There is none, so don’t do it.
Instead, focus on your Father and who He is to you.

When you’ve stopped obsessing on the rightness or wrongness of your decision to marry your husband, you’ll be able to focus on the reality of who your Father is and how He figures into this whole situation. When your faith moves you in that direction you’re going to find the mental relief you need about all this.

Sometimes in life we have to come back to foundational truths to stand on in order to find a sense of security. In this case of whether or not you married the right person, here’s an eternal truth that will give you a strong foundation if you choose to stand upon it: Your Heavenly Father has always been and will always be in control of your life. Nothing you’ve ever done nor ever will do is outside His supervision or beyond what He allows you to do.

That may sound simple but it is actually very profound and can bring peace to you if you’ll embrace this truth. Your Father, who loves you more than He loves His own life, has always had control over everything you’ve done and that includes the decision you made to marry your husband. He could have stopped it and He didn’t, so you can trust that He will work it out now in a way that is for your highest good and His greatest glory.

How could God take a wrong thing and turn it into a right thing? The same question could be asked about the cross of Jesus Christ. Was it a right thing for evil men to crucify Jesus? Not at all, but our God stands above all decisions made by humans and has the ability to redeem them for His glory. He took the wrong thing they did at the cross that day and transformed it into the best thing that humanity will ever know or experience for all eternity. So if He could take something as evil as men crucifying His own Son and turn that around into something good, do you really think that the fact you married an unbeliever is going to tie His hands behind His back so that He can’t work in your marriage to accomplish something good?

Remember, I’m not writing now about the wisdom or biblical teaching concerning whether or not one following Jesus is to marry an unbeliever. I’m writing for the person who already has entered that marriage and I’m seeking to help that person. The best help I can offer you is to stop analyzing the whole thing, stop worrying about whether you’ve crippled any chance of a blessed marriage, stop thinking negative things about your future and put your hope in the One who loves you more than anybody ever has or ever will.

The Bible says that One has written out the diary and filled in the calendar for your lifetime before you lived a single second of them. Setting aside the question of whether He decreed it or simply wrote what He saw in advance, the fact remains that nothing in your life ever catches Him by surprise. He knew it all before any of it happened and that certainly would include whom you married. So, if your Father knew in advance and He has permitted it, you can be sure that He isn’t biting his fingernails right now and worrying about the dismal future you’ve set in motion and that He can do nothing about. He has everything under control. He always has, so you don’t have to live with fears and doubts about the past, present or your future.

You can safely assume that you are with the man your Father wants you to be with in life. You can know that He loves your husband and is working in His life right now, whether you can see it or not. You can trust that God’s Spirit is more interested in your husband’s spiritual fulfillment that even you could be and that He certainly isn’t going to give up on him.

The bottom line is that you can relax and know that your life and marriage aren’t moving forward in a helter-skelter sort of way. The Divine Architect of your life has everything under control and He will see that it all comes together according to his plan and His schedule.