The Meaning of Marriage

The working definition arrives early and it is deliberately unromantic. Marriage is two flawed people coming together to create a space of stability, love and consolation. Not a match, not a soulmate located, not a list of requirements satisfied by the right candidate. The Kellers set that against the search they think most people are actually conducting, which is for a partner who will never require anything difficult.

The book is an exposition of one passage. Ephesians 5 is worked through at length, including the two verses that make readers put it down — the husband's sacrificial love in verse 25 and the wife's submission in verse 22 — and neither is skipped or softened into something else. The method is to treat love as an action that produces the feeling rather than the reverse, and to make friendship the load-bearing part of a marriage rather than a pleasant addition to it.

Chapter six is Kathy Keller's, called 'Embracing the Other', and it is the chapter the book stands or falls on. She makes the complementarian case for roles in marriage, and adds an appendix on how a couple actually reaches a decision. That is the honest reservation: a reader who does not share the position is not being handled gently, and the argument is not quarantined in one chapter. It runs through the reading of Ephesians that the rest of the book is built on.