Each spouse comes from a home planet if you will. Those planets were very different and again the differences cause attraction, then alienation. For example in the area of ROLE EXPECTATIONS.

When Johnna and met, I was attracted to the home Johnna grew up in. It was a more easy going than my home about relaxing and about spending money on fun stuff. That was tremendously alluring to me because we didn’t sit back too much in my home before we started to feel guilty about doing something – anything! And even if we had money, on my home planet there was ALWAYS a cheaper way to do it.

Now, after we got married, things changed, I found I liked things on my home planet just a bit better than I had originally thought. I liked the fact that my dad was a fixer BUT he hated spending money on the right parts, or the best tools. He figured he was smart enough to use whatever makeshift thing he could find to fix anything he set his mind to. You’d be amazed what he can do with a butter knife.

Johnna’s dad was complete opposite. His garage was like The Home Depot. He has the tools and the supplies to fix every gadget in the house. He has the tools to fix the tools to fix every gadget, alphabetized and categorized. But here’s the thing: Johnna’s dad hates tinkering on stuff. He’d rather be fishing or watching sports. His motto is,
why do something yourself when you can pay someone $100/hr?


If you got these two guys together - Howard’s ingenuity, and Gary’s spare parts – they could assemble the Space Shuttle. But here’s how the differences in just one aspect of our home planets created alienation. After Johnna and I get married, every time there’s a breakdown, I feel I should just fix it myself or make do with whatever’s lying around. And Johnna feels that getting the job done is worth money spent and time saved.

I can’t believe the stuff she’s willing to spend money on. On my planet, we don’t just rush out and buy stuff, we see if we can handle it ourselves. On my planet we make do, on my planet...
all the butter knifes have twisted ends.

My wife on the other hand, says, “on my planet, we have backup plans for the backup plans because we can’t trust ourselves to just ‘make something work’. On my planet, if you’ve got to spend money, so be it.”

So we’re all set up for alienation because of homes of origin. The Bible has a very specific wisdom about those homes. It says, leave. Leave them decisively so you can build a new, unique home with the spouse God gives you. Genesis 2:24 says
“a man shall LEAVE his father and mother and be JOINED to his wife.”

You must leave that home emotionally and spiritually or else you bring heavy expectations with you and poison the union. Some married people have never made that break, from expectations. So the new union can never develop it’s own pace, it’s own rhythm, it’s own life. Meddling in-laws make this very difficult. Which may mean hard talks will have to be scheduled.

But the point is this: we have family differences that might even draw us in
- I like her parents
- I like the way his family takes this more seriously than my family did
- I like the way her family is more involved in that than my family was

Then later this same attraction turns around to be a point of conflict. The Bible says, that whole home of origin thing, it had it’s great points and it left it’s scars… your job is not to carbon copy it… your job is to take the hand they dealt you, thank God for the good parts and leave it emotionally to form a new union. It’s not going to be like it was growing up, and that’s OK.

Now, let’s look at…

What’s so interesting is how attracted we are to opposite personality styles. Why is that? We instinctively know that we have weakness, that we have wounds that we need balancing, we need help. So we’re drawn to people that we perceive can compensate for those shortcomings.

Now let me just define for you a shorthand way of summarizing four main personality types which are not meant to be boxes but broad descriptors. No person fits in any one category, we’re unique blends, but we may have dominate personality preferences. Hippocrates first named these temperaments:
- Choleric
- Sanguine
- Melancholy and
- Phlegmatic
o Choleric’s are powerful take charge people LIONS
o Sanguine’s are playful life of the party people OTTERS
o Melancholy’s are perfect ordered and artistic people BEAVERS
o Phlegmatic’s are peaceful, easy going, introverted people. RETRIEVERS.

So have you ever watched how you can predict the hook up patterns for these animals?
- Lions like to be in charge and Retrievers like someone else to take charge.
- Otters need depth and Beavers are deep.
- The Beaver needs a front man and Otters love to be in front
- The Lion has no mercy and Beavers are bleeding hearts.

At the beginning, this arrangement works fabulously! BUT, here’s a marriage truism: the personality traits that initially attracted you to your spouse eventually leads to alienation. What you love will drive you nuts. For example, a Lion marries a Golden Retriever. He’s drawn to this woman’s shyness because frankly he has no verbal self control. It intrigues him, fascinates him, it challenges him.

In marriage however, getting her to share her feelings is like pulling teeth!
Same character trait, first it makes you lovesick, then it just makes you sick!

Let’s do a little case study: Besides Johnna’s spiritual commitment, and the way we related as equals and the physical attraction, I was also drawn to the oppositeness of her personality.

I'm telling you, she was captivating! It was fascinating just to watch her operate. Then, we got married. Suddenly the fascination turned to frustration. I realized I was living with an alien. I began to resent the very qualities that drew me in – it became clear I would need to humanize her.
- First, there was the friendship issue. If I had known about personality types back then, I would have known that Beavers like quiet. How Weird is that! Well, I wanted to be with my friends in our spare time and spend all our money on fun – my fun. This inexplicably made her mad!

- She had a real problem in that area. But she had some verbal issues too. Witty comebacks are fine when you’re kidding around, but in the heat of battle, she was a little TOO quick on the uptake. She had this nasty habit of always telling the truth. Beavers take every little thing you say as if you mean it – who does that? I would have the “gist” of a past event, but she would remember every detail. How are you supposed to win an argument with a person like that?

- And don’t get me started on her “structure issues”. She simply could not live with question marks. We went to Disneyland for our honeymoon and she actually got out he map of the park and charted the rides we would take instead of just drifting from thing to thing. She always wanted to know the plan. Like what when I was coming home or what career moves I was planning on making - in advance!

That’s just the beginning of my list of resentments. What attracted me to her, now alienated me from her. I had loved her independence, here was finally a woman I was not going to have to emotionally babysit, a confident, self assured Joan of Arc type that could be in the cavalry charge with me! (And she was cute too… )

That’s powerful seduction! Yet, in a couple of years of marriage I was saying,
can you please need me, respond to me – just a little?

The Bible tells husbands, “live considerately with your wives. Wives, respect your husbands.” That means simply to consider who they are, their differences in how God has wired them up in their gender and their personality – and then affirm that. Celebrate it, cherish it, honor it.

It took us years to get this and my wife and I are convinced that the initial attraction of every marriage must undergo a PHOENIX experience with the help of God. That is, when the differences that drew us in which turn into disappointments, are reborn into genuine appreciation.

But friends, instead of learning to celebrating these differences and learn from them, here’s what we do… we try to compensate for them. And this just drives us further apart.

Beaver Tom is a very prompt person which tardy Otter Mary was originally attracted to. As the marriage goes on, however, Tom becomes the Time Nazi because he’s trying to compensate for what he sees as a deficiency in Mary’s character. Meanwhile Mary’s a very social and outgoing person which Tom loved because it helped him open up, but Mary starts to push Tom into social situations to compensate for what she thinks is a social impediment.

The longer they go, the more entrenched in their oppositeness they become.
- Mary says, “Well, if Tom is going to be so anal about time, I'm just going to slow down even more, teach him cool his jets.”
- Tom says, “Well if Mary is going to go to party after party, I'm going to just sit here on this coach, have another bag of potato chips!”
o Then Mary & Tom say, “I married the wrong person!”

Both are wrong. God says, in the Bible
“as iron sharpens iron, so one man (or spouse) sharpens another.”

The Bible teaches us to celebrate the diversity in every marriage. Even if it drives you nuts sometimes, the fact is,
- you need this person
- they sharpen you
- they balance you
- they compliment you
- they enrich your life
- they are gift to you
 

And so today I can say…

- because Johnna is more introverted than I am, our home is a refuge.
- because Johnna is so precise with her thoughts, I’ve learned to share exactly what I’m thinking even if it brings me pain so we can resolve our conflicts quicker.

- because Johnna is so structured, we have a budget that works, we have no credit card debt and we’re free to be generous with God’s money.
 

CONCLUSION
Friends, this isn’t just a cute little talk on little differences, OK? Marriages are disintegrating because of smaller things than these. Oh at the end, it’s an affair, or an addiction… but it starts HERE in differences.

So put your hammer and chisel away friend. You marriage only needs one of you. It’s God’s job to humanize your spouse. Your job is to celebrate their uniqueness and all the challenges and richness that comes with it.