Spaces In Our Togetherness?

Spaces in Our Togetherness?

Work hard so you can present yourself to God and receive his approval. Be a good worker, one who does not need to be ashamed and who correctly explains the word of truth.

2 Timothy 2:15

Ever feel like you’re living under scrutiny and surveillance—in your own home? After all, marriage is the closest bond that is possible between two people. Legally, socially, emotionally, physically, there is no other means of getting closer to another human being. Our desire for this extraordinary closeness propels us into matrimony. We sometimes call this kind of intimacy the rocket fuel of marriage. It enables couples to transcend themselves and explore the universe of love.

Eventually, however, seasoned couples also discover that such closeness can be exhausting. Intimacy, it seems, leaves nowhere to hide. That’s what Robert Louis Stevenson is getting at when he says that marriage willfully introduces a witness into our lives. It causes us to submit to the humility of being known in all our phoniness and pride, in all our frailty and the blackness of our sin. And who cares, really, to be known that well by another person?

Shortly after we were married and living in Los Angeles, our friend James Scott Smith gave us a collector’s edition of poetry by Khalil Gibran. In it we found the famous words Gibran penned concerning the invasion of intimacy in marriage. So many years later in our own marriage, these words now make so much more sense.

Let there be spaces in your togetherness,

And let the winds of the heavens dance between you.

Love one another, but make not a bond of love:

Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls,

Fill each other’s cup but drink not from one cup.

Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf.

Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let

each one of you be alone,

Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they

quiver with the same music.^a

We’ll say it again. Marriage is the closest bond that is possible between two people. And the price marriage puts on intimacy is to be in the spotlight of our spouse. That’s why having spaces in our togetherness becomes important.^b

Love is missing someone whenever you’re apart, but somehow feeling warm inside because you’re close in heart.

—Kay Knudsen

^a 184

^b 185