Greater Than The Sum Of Their Parts

Two are better than one, because they have a good return for their labor: If either of them falls down, one can help the other up.
But pity anyone who falls and has no one to help them up!

Ecclesiastes 4:9–10

WITH A 30 HANDICAP, BOB ANDREWS MAY SOUND LIKE AN AVERAGE GOLFER.

Until you learn that he’s blind.

Bob lost his eyesight during an attack while walking a Marine Corps patrol in Vietnam. Though he returned stateside stuck in a coma, his girlfriend, Tina, stayed by him. “I had to,” she said. “My whole life was lying in that bed.”^a

When Bob came out of the coma, he felt little excitement about life, wondering what a blind man could possibly do. Tina challenged Bob’s unilateral thinking; if he were to think in team terms—he and Tina together—the limits would vanish. “Look,” Tina assured him, “we’re two people. We’re a team. We can do anything we want!”

Bob and Tina got married within two months of his return and immediately embarked on a life more active than most couples could imagine. Together, they have a business as building contractors. They have three sons, they sail, they fish, they bodysurf, and yes, they even golf. Tina lines up Bob, tells him how far to hit it, and Bob lets it fly. When he putts, Bob reads the greens with his feet.

After caddying for Bob one time, sportswriter Rick Reilly watched as Bob and Tina “sat next to each other like high school sweethearts. I half expected them to put two straws in his beer.”

What’s the secret to their happiness? Tom Sullivan, a blind actor and recording artist, gave Rick Reilly a clue:

Every blind person is told at first that he’s going to be dependent on others his whole life, and so they react wildly. They do anything they can to be independent. You know, walk into traffic, take up dangerous sports, stuff like that, stuff that will prove to the world that they don’t need them. But it only makes them unhappier. Eventually, through love, they recognize that the only way to be happy and at peace is to live interdependently, to live knowing that they need others and others need them. And that’s what blind golf is, a symbol of that lesson. The notion that we all need each other, blind or sighted.^b

Rick’s own reflections are equally touching: “I saw then what a team they had become—the broken soldier and the lost girlfriend. They were so much greater than the sum of their parts.”

So many married couples resist this interdependence. They don’t necessarily resent the person as much as they resent the relationship and its assumption of two people being shaped into one. They start doing selfish things to assert their independence, and they begin saying things like, “I can go do whatever I want! Why should I have to check with you?” “Who are you to tell me how I can spend my money?” “Look, you’re not my mother [or father]. Get off my back!”

These and similar statements are cries for independence—but we gave that up the day we got married. We’re part of a team now, and we have to think like a team. Maybe it’s fear that makes you lash out like this; maybe it’s pride, or maybe it’s selfishness—whatever the cause, the effect is the same: disaster for the marriage.

We’re part of a team now, and we have to think like a team.

You’ll find true joy only in learning to work together and play together, and even in becoming dependent on each other. Burn your boats! Throw yourself recklessly into this marriage, as if there were no way out. That’s the way to build interdependence and to experience the oneness the Bible describes as characterizing husband and wife.