Thoughts on a 25th Wedding Anniversary that’s coming up

Beth and I will celebrate (Lord willing) our 25^th wedding anniversary on June 1. Marriage is a very special thing, and a 25^th wedding anniversary marks a tremendous amount of living. And given what we’ve been through in the last year, we’re already doing a lot of reflection on this.

I found the following selection, which speaks about the Creation account of marriage, men and women, husbands and wives, and the sexuality of marriage:

The vision of marriage found in the Jewish and Christian Scriptures is one of reuniting male and female into an integrated sexual whole. Marriage is not just about more intimacy and sharing one’s life with another in a lifelong partnership. It is about sexual merger—or, in Scripture’s understanding, re-merger—of essential maleness and femaleness.

The creation story in Genesis 2:18-24 illustrates this point beautifully. An originally binary, or sexually undifferentiated, adam (“earthling”) is split down the “side” (a better translation of Hebrew tsela than “rib”) to form two sexually differentiated persons.

Marriage is pictured as the reunion of the two constituent parts or “other halves,” man and woman. This is not an optional or minor feature of the story. Since the only difference created by the splitting is a differentiation into two distinct sexes, the only way to reconstitute the sexual whole, on the level of erotic intimacy, is to bring together the split parts.