Stop Looking for the Perfect Spouse. They Don’t Exist.

The Idolatry of Marriage

If we want to talk about a sin that is constantly running rampant, it’s idolatry. If we want to talk about the form that is most prevalent among today’s younger (and some older) Christians, it’s marriage. A wife. A husband. A family. (I’m writing this because I’m guilty—just to get that out of the way).

Idolatry has existed since the first sin. One could make an argument that pride, which had its heavy-handed nature all over Adam and Eve’s first transgression, is one of the worst forms of idolatry—if it could be argued that one idol is worse than another—that is, self-idolatry, making oneself above God in importance. If I were to hazard a guess, it is my belief that every person on the planet commits this sin perhaps once a day if not even more often. The most popular story of idolatry is probably the Israelites at Mount Sinai, but I’m going to take us through this in a bit of a different manner here.

The Problem of a “Perfect” Spouse

The issue I’m tackling isn’t just the idolatry of marriage. That’s a well-documented struggle among everyone for all time. What I want to tackle is an issue I see on social media a lot (go figure) and has to do with a specificity for idolatry that I’m sure has come up before, but I have personally never seen this widespread. It might be because of trends, and it might be because we, as a Church, have slipped farther into a Christianity-tangential spirituality, but regardless, it’s dangerous. I’m talking about the type of idolatry that causes people to believe their spouse is going to be perfect.

It seems like I’m lambasting women and young ladies, but that’s not my goal; I’m a single guy, so I’m more likely to come across social media feeds of single women, so that’s just what I see (and I have absolutely seen guys falling into a similar heretical idolatry, and I will touch on it). Still, I see frequently posts online along the lines of, “A man of God will not…” and they’re always statements that look like really good things—some of them are—but a lot are pure idolatry.

We have two examples: 1) “A man of God will not make excuses for his faults but will seek God to renew him.”

2) “A man of God will not lead you into sin.”

You might be thinking to yourself, “Wow, both of those seem pretty fair, actually.” And you would be wrong. Point in fact, we have one man of God who did the exact opposite of both of those things in the father of all Israel. In Romans 4:2-3, it says, “If Abraham was justified by works, he has something to boast about—but not before God. For what does the Scripture say? Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him for righteousness.” This is clear evidence of the tenet of Christianity that we are justified by faith, not by works.

Imperfect People Cannot be Justified or Approved by Works

Because if we were approved by works, Abraham would have never been chosen as the father of Israel. If we read closely enough, we can see exactly how Abraham fails on both the accounts of the statements above, specifically with his wife Sarah. Genesis 12 gives us the account of Abram and Sarai traveling to Egypt because of famine. There, Abram fears death because Sarai is beautiful and the Egyptians could kill him and take her. So he has her lie (leads her into sin) to say she’s his sister (not his wife). Technically, Sarai was Abram’s half-sister, but as the story goes, we find that God doesn’t care about this little half truth. What He does care about is Abram forcing Sarai into adultery with Pharaoh in order to save his own skin, as seen by God striking Pharaoh with plagues. So he leads her into two sins.

And then he does it again in Genesis 20. Granted, Sarah is not forced into adultery this time; God saves her from that, but she is to lie yet again for Abraham’s sake—something that he asked her to do. Right after, however, Abraham commits the first of these offenses a man of God will not commit. In Genesis 20:11-13, it says, “Abraham replied, ‘I thought, “There is absolutely no fear of God in this place. They will kill me because of my wife.” Besides, she really is my sister, the daughter of my father though not the daughter of my mother, and she became my wife. So when God had me wander from my father’s house, I said to her: Show your loyalty to me wherever we go and say about me, “He’s my brother.”’” Here is Abraham, a man made righteous, a husband, giving excuses instead of just accepting his fault.

Not to say Sarah is perfect, either. We’re talking about the woman who gave her servant woman to her husband, most likely unwillingly, because she didn’t trust God to give her a child as He said He would. Sarah forced Hagar to procreate with Abraham and then hated Hagar from then on.

How Does This Relate to Marriage and the Social Media Trend?

Okay, let me wrap this up. The problem I see here is that we (both men and women) are forcing each other into situations where it’s impossible to please one another because we’ve turned marriage into an idolatrous transaction of works-based perfection. I have been on the receiving end of this myself—perhaps not because I was expected to be perfect by her but because I expected that she expected me to be perfect. Furthermore, I expected out of her things that I could have only gotten from God. We made mistakes, just as every person makes mistakes. It’s not the work that gets us to marriage but the grace of God to show off the relationship of Christ and His Church—an imperfect showing off.

The problem, as I see it, is that we’re expecting potential spouses to be perfect, and it’s just not possible. At the shallowest end of this, we’re expecting the person we marry to check off all the boxes in the beginning that ought to be checked off after 50 years of marriage. At the most egregious, men and women are literally expecting their wives and husbands to be as perfect as Christ from the onset. We forget that marriage is not a works-based gift. You don’t get it because you’re good enough or no one would be married. God gifts spouses to teach us about who He, Christ, and the Church are and to sanctify us more fully. Consequently, this is why a lot of marriage hopefuls never get married; their bar is so high it’s impossible to reach because the second someone makes a mistake, the relationship is over. There’s not enough grace in relationships, especially among the single population.

The Refined Gold Blessing’s “Miraculous” Transformation

I want to round out my points by bringing things back to the statement I made earlier about Israel’s idolatry at Mount Sinai because I believe it gives a fantastic illustration of what kind of relationship a lot of people expect nowadays. In this case of idolatry, Aaron makes a golden calf for Israel to worship while God gives Moses the Ten Commandments. Most people know that story, but most don’t really pay attention to what happens after because it’s a single-line excuse from Aaron in Exodus 32:24, “So I said to them, ‘Whoever has gold, take it off,’ and they gave it to me. When I threw it into the fire, out came this calf!”

We know that Aaron meticulously crafted this calf out of the gold he received. We also know that gold doesn’t just come out of a fire in the perfect image of a calf. What we have is a perfect example of what people do with relationships. That gold was a gift from God, perfectly provided to Israel by God through the people of Egypt as they escaped into the wilderness. It was provision from God for knowing who He is. Moses had just received the commands on turning that very same gold into the fittings of the tabernacle and the holy instruments to worship God. If they had allowed God to use and refine the gold as He saw fit, they would have grown and been blessed with His presence among them at all times in the tabernacle. They would have been set for life.

Instead, rather than accepting this blessing and allowing God to work in the time He desires, they sought to refine the gold themselves. They set its boundaries and limits, and they expected it to do things it could never have done all while claiming it was a miracle. The Israelites worshiped the golden calf as the god that brought them out of Egypt, and they made an image that was perfect to them. But it could do nothing.

This is the perfect image of creating a characteristic list that can’t be fulfilled. We’re taking the qualities God says a husband and leader should have (or a wife and follower should have) and adding to them, shaping them, coercing them to be what they weren’t meant to be because of our impatience and lack of refining ourselves. If God says a person should follow after him, we turn it into a person should be perfect. This is like saying, “whoever has gold, take it off.” Then, we put that in the fire and shape it into the perfect idol, the perfect husband or spouse (which doesn’t exist). And when someone asks us what we expect in a relationship, we claim our hand-shaped calf is the godly person, the one who will be perfect for us, and, furthermore, that we didn’t command it but that God did, knowing, deep down, that we made it our own god.

What it really comes down to is stop expecting people to be perfect. They will always fail. Always. As you’re looking for a spouse, don’t settle for someone evil, but don’t expect them to be perfect either. Throw away your expectations and trust God to give you someone who will help refine you. Throw away your expectations and work on letting God refine you as you are now. We get marriage incredibly wrong; it’s not just for your enjoyment, it’s to make you a better believer, a more faithful child. So stop throwing away perfectly good men and women because they don’t meet your absurd expectations of perfection; your golden calf is doing you no good at all. And until you let God take that down, you’ll always be disappointed by the person He brings you to marry.

Fear Not, Your Soul is Not Tied to That Person You Kissed

To be quite honest, I could tackle this issue in two paragraphs with ease. The most used Scriptures to defend this erroneous belief are easily debunked for deliberate misinterpretation. The only other Scripture that could be used to defend this idea comes from a one-line statement about Jonathan and David in 1 Samuel and is also deliberately misinterpreted, just like it is by the crowd that uses it to defend homosexual relationships.

Where Does the Idea of a Soul Tie Come From?

But I won’t do that. Instead, let’s go to the source of this current that is gaining quite a lot of steam today, especially among women and young girls looking to be married, like a number of other poor beliefs about relationships that likely spawned from a misappropriated purity culture, which, in itself has numerous issues. A lot of sources also contribute this belief to the New Age Spirituality that is running rampant through the Church. New Age Spirituality is a combination of numerous belief systems, which essentially means that those who practice it believe whatever makes their own lives and inner thoughts easier, although it largely combines eastern religions like Buddhism with metaphysical thought practices and esotericism. I liken it to Gnosticism, but to give an example, it’s the same belief system that gives us statements like manifesting and asking the universe things, which is to say it’s prayer to self and rampant idolatry.

Another basis for this belief comes from an innate human desire to believe things that make life easier on us in combination with very real physiological processes. The fact of the matter is there are physiological and emotional processes that cause people to come together;  a number of hormones create connections in the brain and cause pleasure from physical and emotional acts that two people perform when they’re together: sharing fears, desires, planning a future, hugging, kissing, and sexual intercourse. You can go find the studies that prove these things. They’re literally all over the place.

 My point is that, knowing this, it’s easier to believe that you’re permanently tied to a person in a way you can’t touch/influence than it is to do the work of detaching yourself from someone who did not choose to love you. It’s easier to believe your soul is attached to someone who made you happy than it is to believe that, eventually, you’ll be able to move on to love and be loved again. It’s easier to live in a fantasy, a knight’s tale, than it is to believe life doesn’t work out like the princess stories all the time, and sometimes you have to grieve and move on.

What Does Scripture say?

I won’t touch the passage on Jonathan and David in 1 Samuel 18:1. It’s clear to me that you have to apply Scripture incredibly liberally, such that you must conclude a falsity about homosexuality being approved by Scripture before you ever append that passage to the soul tie argument, and that’s not a can of something incredibly straightforward and simplistic I’m going to open.

Instead, let’s look at the other two passages: one in the Old Testament and one in the New. Genesis 2:24 says, “This is why a man leaves his father and mother and bonds with his wife, and they become one flesh.” Proponents of the soul tie will argue this passage explicitly states that the two become one while conveniently ignoring the very next word, “flesh.” This passage is repeated in 1 Corinthians 6:16. In both cases, the operative word here is “flesh.” And in the original languages of Hebrew and Greek, both verses also clearly state “flesh,” and there is no way to mistake the words for “soul,” “spirit,” or any approximation of something that is not bodily in nature.

The Scripture, actually, is quite clear abut this in other places, too. For the Pharisees once confronted Jesus, attempting to trap Him, and He told us exactly why souls cannot be tied to each other in Matthew 22:20, which says, “For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage but are like angels in heaven.” If soul ties are legitimate, then marriage should be an insitution in heaven simply because it is the soul, the spirit, that resides there until we receive new bodies. Furthermore, it should be an institution in the new heaven and new earth, but this is also not the case so far as Scripture determines by Jesus’s own statement. This is because it is not the soul of two who are tied together but the flesh, the bodies, and we will receive new bodies in the resurrection.

If it were the case that souls are tied, then, effectively, God would have to divorce each believing couple (or, even worse, a believer and non-believer couple) upon their deaths in order for this Scripture to remain true. And not only do we know that God hates divorce (Matthew 19:8-9) and only allowed it because of the hardness of human hearts, but we also know that he’s not going to allow His people to be tied and sealed by Spirit to any but Himself. If that were the case, then He would allow room in a saved person, sealed by the Holy Spirit, for other spirits to reside, and the Scripture is also clear that this is not the case.

So How are People Tied?

There is a reason death parts the married couple; it is because they will no longer be tied together after death. It is the flesh of this body that is tied to the flesh of another body because the two are to become one entity. As Paul writes, the mystery of marriage is of Christ and the Church, the bride and bridegroom becoming one in work and purpose (Ephesians 5:31-32). So just as our relationship with Christ is a covenant as His bride, so, too is marriage a covenant; a promise. We are held together by the idea that our yes should be yes and our no should be no.

As we reside as spirit in heaven until the resurrection and then gain new bodies as well as a clear understanding of Christ and the Church as His bride, we no longer need the institution given to us to procreate and understand how the Son relates to us. So, no, soul ties are not a real thing. Rest in that truth. Your sin and mistakes will not haunt you for this life, nor ever, unless you let them. You are forgiven and whole in Christ, not half tied to a man or woman you once slept with.