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There are three things that amaze me – no, four things that I don’t understand:
how an eagle glides through the sky, how a snake slithers on a rock, how a ship navigates the ocean, how a man loves a woman (Proverbs 30:18-19, NLT).
A book entitled The Mystery of Marriage was published thirty years ago. Reading this book back then, I hand-copied a quote, which I later typed into my computer and have kept close since then…
When the prison door of love clangs shut, the only thing to do is to become more in love than ever. There is just no other way to get out of it. So: we are caught in the steel trap of marriage, and we do a lot of squirming and struggling, but over and over we must wake up to the fact that there is only one way to get untrapped, and that is to relax and start learning more about love than we ever wanted to know … Some people go into marriage thinking that they will not have to change much, or perhaps only a little bit along lines that are perfectly foreseeable and within their control. Such people are in for a rough ride.
Admittedly, it’s a difficult quote, as marriage prose usually talks of sunsets, holding hands, and bliss, not phrases like “when the prison door of love clangs shut” or “steel trap of marriage.”
And yet all of us who have been married know that — sooner or later — no matter the profession of a lifetime and the commitment of love at the marriage ceremony, relationships deteriorate into a feeling of being trapped, not understanding how to free ourselves. Too often, we take the easy road of affairs and divorce, and if not taking this separation approach, we endure each other, dead inside, and ask what happened to that love we once knew.
Let’s come back to the copied and then stored on my computer quote that I’ve had for decades…
We must wake up to the fact that there is only one way to get untrapped: to relax and start learning more about love than we ever wanted to know!
From this quote, when I officiated a wedding ceremony, I would use the following dialogue, which originated from this statement: “learning more about love than we ever wanted to know.”
Pastor (that’s me) to couple…
There are three stages of marriage: The first stage is believing that the other person can do no wrong. The second stage is realizing that the other person has faults, but nothing we can’t change in them. And the third stage is — reality!
In marriage, we find that we are imperfect, that love doesn’t mean changing the other person, but becoming more in love than we ever intended.
Thank you, Mike Mason. I never gave you credit for your ideas in any of my marriage officiating, so here it is now, a few decades late, but heartfelt just the same. Recently, I reread Mike Mason’s book, which was a 30-year anniversary edition published in 2025, and found this quote…
Love wins over selfishness by actually making the whole concept of self obsolete, or at least by redefining it out of all recognition. For it is the special magic of love to demonstrate convincingly that the real goal of self, which is total self-sufficiency, can be achieved only by way of total self-sacrifice.
As I would also say to couples at their wedding, “Love is doing what is best for the other person at the expense of self” (my quote, not Mike’s).
Click this image to purchase Mike Mason’s book on Amazon…
