The Danger of Marriage
A reflection in honor of our 17th wedding anniversary
Welcome! I’ve got a few housekeeping notes before we get to today’s post.
First, over 100 of my subscribers are new to Chelsey Crouch Writes in the past month, and most of you found me because of my posts about books. I do write a lot about books, but every couple of weeks, depending on my whims, I write a more personal essay. This is one of those, and if it’s not up your alley, maybe you’d enjoy reading this post from the archives: Chelsey’s 2025 Nonfiction Summer Reading Guide.
Secondly, this is a post about marriage, and specifically about my marriage. Some people are actually in dangerous, harmful, and abusive marriages. If you are experiencing physical, emotional, financial, or spiritual abuse, please reach out for help to The National Domestic Violence Hotline.
I walked into my parents’ room and found my mom fiddling with something on her bedside table. She looked up at me, who at 23 did not often wander into her room. “What’s going on, sweetie?” That was all it took for me to start crying, which I hadn’t wanted to do, because I wasn’t even sure I should be telling my mom what I was about to tell her.
"There’s something wrong with Christian’s car,” I said. My mom looked at me compassionately, but she seemed confused.
“It’s already had some problems,” I continued, trying to say as little as possible but still ask the question that was burning inside me. “And he’s already spent a lot of money on it. And it seems to me that the car is just a waste of money, that he shouldn’t put any more money into it.”
“What does he think about it?” my mom asked.
“He just keeps saying we should trust the people at the car place!” I wailed. The snowball had begun to roll down the hill and was picking up speed. “And I think that is a dumb idea, that he’s being really stupid!”1
Here was the avalanche: “And I just keep thinking, Dad would never make a dumb decision like this.”
Once I got the words out, I felt some relief but also dread. I had already read several books on marriage, and I had gone to a study on a book called The Excellent Wife2 at our church, and I had just broken two of the cardinal rules of being a good wife as I understood them. One: Don’t complain to your parents about your husband. Two: Don’t compare your spouse to your parent of the same gender. I hoped that maybe, because we weren’t going to be married for a few more days, this wouldn’t count.
Because she is my mom, and because she is a good mom, she knew what I was asking. Am I about to marry a super dumb guy? Should I marry a super dumb guy? I felt shame that I had revealed to my mom how dumb my future husband was. He had moved states away to get to know them before he asked my dad if he could marry me, and now my parents knew the truth: Christian was stupid, and I was about to marry him.3
My mom scooted over to me on the bed and put her arm around me as I continued to cry.
“Sweetie,” she said. “Your dad made all kinds of dumb decisions when we first got married. You’ve only seen him make decisions when he’d learned things and had some life experience. You guys are young. You’re going to make mistakes and you’re going to learn from them.”
I wasn’t one of those girls who had doodled pictures of her wedding dress and planned out her wedding and chosen names for her future children. I’d never imagined having a husband. I wasn’t opposed to it, but it wasn’t the topic of my daydreams. When I met Christian, though, I knew very quickly that I wanted to always be with him. I could be my insecure, nerdy, weird self around him. And he didn’t just tolerate it; he liked it. We thought so many of the same things were funny. And yet we were also very different. He could talk to anyone, and I had yet to meet a person who didn’t like him. I wasn’t good at being surface-level friends or being friendly, but as I spent time with Christian, he helped me be more comfortable around other people, and I I started to feel like I could be myself.
I was thrilled at the thought of being married to him, because it meant we would live in the same place, and we’d go to sleep at night in the same place, and we’d wake up in the same place, and we’d both be working at our jobs during the day, but in the evenings and on the weekends we’d get to be together the whole time.
In those days before our wedding, though, as I realized that I was going to be inextricably joined to someone who sometimes might make dumb decisions, I felt anxiety creeping in. It wasn’t a question of whether I wanted to marry him — that was not up for debate. It was more a fear of how I would handle the fact that I was going to be in a relationship that by its very nature required a loss of control, a death to self, a forced relinquishing of the right to assert what I thought was the best thing to do. He could make dumb decisions about his car on his own time, but once we were married, that was going to be hard for me to stomach. It would be our car, our money, our life.
The selves we were when we got married were, by all quantifiable accounts, pretty great. We were both firstborns, both ambitious, both recent college graduates, both well-read and hard-working.4 I had received so much money from college scholarships that I got paid to go to college, and I had squirreled away most of the money. When we got married, we put a huge chunk of that money toward Christian’s student loan debt.5 We were able to pay off the remainder of the debt right before our first child was born, which was nine months after we got married.6 We didn’t have a lot of money, but we were doing pretty well for what we had to work with.
It was these early years of penny-pinching, learning how to be a mom when I knew no other moms my age, and supporting a husband who was working and going to graduate school at the same time that turned me into an adult really quickly. It was a fast-track to a level of maturity most people in their mid-20s did not have.
Parenting and childcare was almost entirely on me due to the demands of Christian’s combined work and school schedule. I managed the budget and our finances (because I wanted to and was good at it). I did most of the household tasks, though if Christian was home and available he always pitched in. He just wasn’t home very often. This is not me complaining about those years, although they were difficult and I have repressed most of my memories of having two children 15 months apart within two years of marriage, but rather it is me realizing now that what those years required of me also began to nurture a belief that was already latent within me, one that had first been planted in high school:
I am responsible for keeping myself safe.7
In high school, keeping myself safe looked like getting all the best grades and scoring a 1580 on the SAT and getting a full ride (plus some) to college. I had taken care of myself—I wasn’t reliant on my parents to pay for college or even to give me spending money. I had done the work, and I had done it well, and everything was fine.
This is why Christian’s decision about the car right before our wedding sent me to find my mom. He was not doing something that would keep us safe. In my mind, he was being foolish with money, and everyone knew that money was the primary way to ensure safety. If you had enough money, you could pretty much make sure everything would be OK.
Once we got married, instead of seeing Christian as my partner in making good decisions for us, I continued to act on the belief that I was the person best equipped to make decisions to keep us safe. But the push and pull of being in a position where I had to depend on Christian, but I didn’t really think he would be able to keep me safe, but I also had these kids who depended on both of us, led to great anxiety.
Over the past decade, Christian and I have done pre-marital counseling with many engaged couples. One of the sessions is always focused on what the Bible says about marriage. This inevitably leads to a discussion about Ephesians 5 and the dreaded word—submission.
What I think gets missed in the ever-going argument about submission in a Christian marriage is the fact that you only have to submit if you have something that you could exert over the other person. We don’t use the word submit when talking about an employer and employee. For example, His boss asked him to complete a project, so he submitted to his boss and did it. Of course he did it; that’s literally his job—to do what his boss tells him to do. But in our marriage, when Christian asks me to do something, or when he thinks that his idea about how to do something is better than mine, I have the choice to submit or not because there is another option for what I could do.8 I could tell him, “No, I don’t want to do that.” I can tell him, “Your idea is super dumb. We should do it my way.” I do have the ability to put myself in a position of power and authority over Christian—in the words I say, in my body language, in my actions—but submission looks like choosing not to do those things out of love.
I believe at least one reason the Lord says that wives need to submit to their husbands is because it is our natural tendency to think that we know best, that our way is the right way, that we need to control everything. And in the same vein, he tells husbands to love their wives not because that’s the only thing husbands are supposed to do, but because the natural bent of a husband is to treat his wife in an unloving way.9 It doesn’t actually remove any power from me by telling me to submit, and it doesn’t imply that I am inferior to him10. What it does is challenge me to put myself in a position where I’m not relying on myself, which is something I have thought would be enough to keep me safe for my entire life.
That is the danger of marriage, then—that you make yourself vulnerable by becoming dependent on another person and by promising to love the other person in such a way that you have to lay down your preferences and desires in sometimes painful ways.
Christian and I came into marriage with the agreement that divorce was never going to be on the table. The only way our marriage would end would be if one us were to die. Even though most traditional weddings, Christian or not, include the vows that talk about staying together “as long as we both shall live,” functionally, most marriages do not operate with a death commitment, because it is as scary as it sounds. We are both on the Titanic, and the iceberg is coming sooner or later, and there are no lifeboats. We’re both going down with the ship.11
So since we’re both here, we now have the choice to keep operating as though we have control over our lives and don’t really need to depend on anyone else. Or we can, with great relief, begin to see and accept that our safety and well-being is not dependent on ourselves or our spouses. As Dallas Willard says, because of what Jesus has done, “this world is a perfectly safe place to be.”
Getting married felt dangerous, but as it turned out, the only real danger is that I’d start to look less like my anxious, self-absorbed self and more like Jesus. And that turns out to be a really good thing.
April 18, 2026, was our 17th wedding anniversary.
Being married to Christian is the best thing that ever could have happened to me.
In a few weeks, I’ll be sharing my Grownup Fiction Summer Reading Guide, which contains more than 30 book recommendations. It will be automatically accessible to paid subscribers and will be available at a small cost for everyone else. If you’re finding my Substack worthwhile, consider becoming a paid subscriber now so you don’t miss it!
Growing up, “stupid” was the S-word to me and my sisters. I knew that using that word would get my mom’s attention, because it was still not a word I used flippantly.
I am not linking to this book, because I cannot recommend it.
Know that I did ask Christian for his permission to tell this story. In retrospect, he agreed that that particular decision was not the wisest one he ever made. Thankfully, we now have not one but two local mechanics who we trust to fix our vehicles.
He says I am the smartest person he knows. I think he’s the smartest person I know. There are certainly many people in the world smarter than both of us, but it’s good that we think this way because we both know that if the other spouse wanted to, he/she could verbally rip the other one to shreds. It is a mutually assured intellectual destruction that has kept us out of some nasty conflicts.
He had received a full tuition scholarship to college, but he went to a small, private liberal arts college that cost $$$.
You will get to read more about the details of our early years of marriage if I ever get to that point in my serialized posts, The Crouch Chronicles.
The book The Spiritually Healthy Leader was so helpful in using the language of “vows” to explain these beliefs we come up with, usually in the early years of our life.
For the record, I cannot think of a single time in our 17 years of marriage when Christian has demanded that I do something I didn’t want to do or when he has decided to do something without asking what I thought about it and taking my perspective into account. We’ve also never had one of the “tie-breaking” situations that is often brought up in conversations about submission.
I love what Jonathan Leeman says about marriage in Authority: “The bigger picture is that a man should not be concerned about getting his way, but about knowing his wife and helping her grow in grace and godliness and in their dominion together as one. The husband’s possession of authority is less about making the big decisions and more about taking the initiative to love his wife and to bear responsibility for their livelihood together every single minute of every day of his life.”
A careful read of the Old Testament in particular makes it hard to believe that God thinks women are inferior to men. Abigail and Hannah strike me as two examples of women who seemed to be considerably wiser than their husbands yet whose humble actions pleased the Lord and blessed the people around them.
My friend Billy has a great metaphor for how to deal with conflict in marriage: You’re both locked in an escape room and a fire just started inside the room. (Hi, Billy!)