Last week I wrote about the need to feel loved, and how it sits underneath everything else we want from marriage. That post left a question open, and it has been sitting with me for a long time. If the need runs that deep, can one person actually meet it?
Fulton Sheen says "No". And somehow, he says it like it is good news.
The claim that sounds like bad news
Three to Get Married came out in 1951. I expected something dusty when I first opened it and ended up underlining half the book. Sheen's claim is simple. Your spouse cannot fill you. Nobody can. The hunger you carried into your marriage is bigger than any human being, because it was never sized for a human being in the first place.
Most of us learn this the uncomfortable way. The in-love season promises everything, then delivers a person. A real one, with moods, tired days and two trips to Woolworths in one week to get the groceries done. Somewhere in there a quiet voice starts up: "this is not what I signed up for".
Sheen's answer to that voice is the reason I recommend this book. Disillusionment is not proof you married the wrong person. It is the moment your heart finds out what it was asking for all along. Something infinite. And you had been asking a finite person to supply it.
It takes three
The line the whole book hangs on: "it takes three to make love". The husband, the wife, and God between them.
That word between matters. God in a marriage is a source, and Sheen spends the book showing what flows from it. When two people try to draw everything from each other, love eventually circles back on itself and tires. Every couple I know has felt some version of this, usually a few years in, usually without a name for it. When each of them also draws from God, there is more to give than either one brought to the wedding.
Scripture put it in a single image long before 1951: "a cord of three strands is not quickly broken" (Ecclesiastes 4:12). Two strands make a rope. The third is what makes it hold.
The triangle
Here is a picture teachers of marriage have been borrowing since Sheen's generation. Draw a triangle. Put God at the top point and the two of you at the bottom corners. Now move either person up the side, towards God, and watch the distance between the two of you. It shrinks. Every time. You never got closer by asking each other to be enough. You got closer by looking up at the same thing, and then looking back at each other with better light.
Maria and I have tested this without meaning to. The seasons when we pray, even briefly, even with me doing it badly and half asleep, are the seasons we argue less and laugh more. For a long time, I assumed that was coincidence. Sheen would say the geometry was simply doing its work.
What this looks like on an ordinary day
None of this means bolting a religious to-do list onto an already full week. God is already with you both. That part was never in doubt. The invitation is smaller and stranger: to let Him into the room on purpose.
So here is this week's practice. I call it One Grace, One Meal. Once this week, at a meal you share, one of you says a single sentence of thanks out loud before you eat. One sentence. Anything true. "Thank you for this food and for the person across the table" is plenty.
If praying together feels awkward, welcome to the club. Almost every couple finds it strange at first, the way holding hands felt strange at fifteen. Start where it is awkward and let it become ordinary. The third strand is not asking for eloquence. Pick it up in whatever words you have.
One more thing
If you have ever been told not to judge a book by its cover, here is the perfect example. A seventy-year-old book by a bishop, with a title that sounds like arithmetic, does not promise much to a modern couple. Yet Sheen wrote it for couples who suspected marriage should be more than an arrangement between two tired people, and the suspicion has not gone anywhere since. If this stirred something, the book is worth your time. It is shorter than you expect and kinder than its reputation.
And if you would like a slower way to practise paying attention to each other, our free 31-day challenge sends one small step to your inbox each morning. No pressure, no homework marathons. Take a look when you are ready.
— Leo
