What Do You Do?

Enjoy life with your wife, whom you love. . . . For this is your lot in life.

Ecclesiastes 9:9

THE HERO OF OBLOMOV, A RUSSIAN NOVEL BY IVAN GONCHAROV, GETS ASKED, “What do you do in life?”

Is there a question we get asked more frequently? Probably not in today’s society. Yet this character responds with something refreshingly different: “What? What do I do? Why, I am in love with Olga!”^a

What a refreshing change of pace for us Westerners! So often we reply to such a question with a word about our vocations or our hobbies: “I’m an executive at Bank One, and I like to golf and sail on the weekends,” or, “I work in marketing for a printing company, and I lead the women’s ministry at my church,” or even, “I homeschool our three children.”

But what, really, is our biggest charge? If we’re married, isn’t loving our spouses at least in the top three? And yet, how often do we mention it or even think it? Have you ever listed your duty to love your spouse when someone asks you what you do? “What do I do? I focus on loving Bill!” “What do I do? I romance my wife, Melissa.”

Maybe it’s not helpful to pit vocation against marriage—after all, we do have to earn a living—but isn’t something wrong with our sense of priorities, or even our way of thinking, when someone asks us what we do, and loving our spouses doesn’t even come to mind?

This may be the core disease of marriage in the West. We don’t give enough to it, and we don’t derive enough from it. During the week, we’re married after we work all day, read the newspaper after supper, and watch television all evening. On the weekends, we’re married after we take the kids to their sporting events; repair what needs fixing; go to church on Sunday; and catch up on laundry, lawn work, and washing the car.

Marriage gets the leftovers—leftover energy, leftover excitement, leftover creativity, and leftover thoughtfulness. We do everything else first, and then, if there’s time and we’re not exhausted, then we’ll see if there’s something special or loving we can do for our spouses.

I wonder what would happen if we flipped this around, if we started working after we focused on being married; if we fit our play and recreation around our duty to our spouses; if the kids had to occasionally give up something in order for Mom and Dad to get together—instead of the other way around. What would our marriages be like then?

I like Oblomov’s response to the question “What do you do in life?”

“What do I do? Why, I am in love with Olga!”