Note: This thirteen-week blog series will share a snippet from each chapter of our new book, Staying Together, Marriage: A Lifelong Affair by Steve & Mary Prokopchak. This book is now available through House to House Publications.
Before you were married, did anyone advise you that your marriage would need room for failure, forgiveness, loss, brokenness, disagreement, or even sin? If not, a full and honest disclosure was missed, and you may have entered into marriage a bit naïve or ill-advised. Marriages fail because we fail God, each other, and ourselves. We fail to love, we fail to honor, we fail to forgive, and we fail in keeping at bay our own personal struggles with selfishness. And that’s where prayer can come in.
You can be sexually intimate with almost anyone, but you cannot pray with just anyone. In order to really open up our hearts and pray together, we must know we are in a safe place. We must know we are not being judged for our heartfelt prayer. And we must know that the one to whom we divulge our heart will maintain confidentiality and that we can trust them with our deepest, most secret sins and needs. Praying together within marriage is so intimate that if these factors are not present, we will almost always divert ourselves to a same-sex prayer partner for that level of prayer.
Can we not have a conversation with Him together about our marriage, family, business, or life questions? Would we be amiss to entertain for one moment that God has stopped caring for those He created to bear His image after Genesis 3? It is this discussion that takes us to the most intimate act of marriage—prayer.
In chapter twelve of Staying Together, we also discuss growing our friendship and a marriage evaluation retreat.
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We seemed to have reached a desperate part of our meeting with a middle-aged couple pastoring a small church in New York. In tears, the wife declared, “We’re not intimate!” We asked what she meant by that statement. She said without hesitancy, “We don’t do fun things together; we don’t hold hands; we don’t sit close any longer; we rarely have sex; and our conversations have become predictable, boring, and too infrequent. It’s like we’ve taken a break from closeness, from our friendship…from intimacy.”
How does a couple stay sexually active when there are jobs, a family, household responsibilities, and civic commitments, along with children’s sports and school, and then local church involvement? All of these good things can rob us of intimacy as married couples and can even become priority over our sexual thoughts and desires. Sometimes life gets a hold of us, and all too often we’re too exhausted to take a hold of one other.
On your wedding day, you spoke something called vows that probably sounded something like this: For better or for worse; for richer or for poorer; in sickness and in health; ’til death do us part. Rarely do we imagine having to face such issues. But truth be told, we will face some of these things and, perhaps, already have. If you think about it, these vows prepare us for reality long before reality sets in; they help prepare us for inevitable disappointments in marriage.
Infidelity can affect all of our marriages because we can all be tempted. We are all potential vow-breakers. If we think it can’t happen to us, we can become sloppy and less guarded, not alert to the enemy’s schemes. In 
We sat down to interview Jon and Amy (names have been changed), a couple we have encountered who have a pain-filled story. With their permission, we are about to share with you their loss, brokenness, hope, and redemption.
If your goal was to tear apart your marriage, money arguments would certainly help. But marriage is not about me and mine; it’s about us and ours.
We will ask you to complete a budget in 
We made a major discovery early in our marriage. When it came to conflict, we could choose to “fight and argue,” or we could “pray and agree.” Disagreement is powerful, but agreement is even more powerful.
It astounds us to discover how many couples do not know why they are married. This is the question this chapter will probe—what is your mission together as a couple? For what reason(s) has God called you together into this union? Those who once were two have been called to move as one.
Prior to marriage, we spend hours communicating face to face and, when apart, by phone, text message, e-mail, and Facebook. We study one another and practice our listening skills to really hear each other’s hearts. We attempt to win the other through our attentiveness, our affirmation, our words of love, and our body language of acceptance. One couple told us communication was so easy and came so naturally to them that they could not understand what the big deal was about the subject of communication within marriage.
What happened? Were we faking it? Were we trying to expose only our good side? It was fun having our heads in the clouds and not needing to worry about all that could go wrong. Reality during engagement is different from reality during marriage, neither of which is necessarily good or bad. So, what’s the issue?
Healthy relationships bring happiness to our lives. They add fun, reduce stress, and decrease anxiety as we give love to and receive love from the people around us. The opposite is true of unhealthy relationships. They increase stress and anxiety in our lives. They bring broken hearts and spirits.
If we don’t maintain an awareness of our distinction from others (where one person ends and the other begins), we will be incapable of being who God has called us to be as a healthy individual. Instead, we will attempt to be who we think another desires us to become. If we do not set healthy boundaries for ourselves, we empower others to manipulate and control us to be who they selfishly want us to be (to meet their own personal needs) rather than who God has designed us to be. Oneness within a marriage relationship is never about control or manipulation but, rather, love that respects personal boundaries. Control and manipulation are about exercising power, while love is about freedom.
When we buy a new car, we enjoy the new-car smell. We appreciate the fact that it doesn’t break down from age and worn parts. We love that it’s clean and shiny, without a single stain on the carpet or scratch in the paint. However, unless we provide the proper maintenance in the months and years that follow, our car will eventually break down.
Steve Prokopchak 