Let me explain what happened at the Open Mic last Thursday evening as I read an excerpt of the essay that inspired my Friday Happy Hours on Substack. The essay is about marital growth, which can be stormy. Indeed, the scene I’d read last month was an all-out battle between two strong egos. This time, I read the next part, my reflection about the fight. One word sparked rather loud, uncharacteristically negative audience response.

Here’s the passage: “Knowing my screaming was a symptom, not the cause of my anxiety, I launched yet another search for rules to follow. Legalism, a perfectionist’s approach to problem solving. As a dedicated reader of Pastor Alistair Begg’s Truth for Life daily reflections, I’d received a free audiobook titled Lasting Love: How to Avoid Marital Failure. The first chapter dealt with the biblical qualities of husbands, including integrity, honesty, ability to lead boldly, think for himself, and love sacrificially. To me, within reason, Keith looked like a model husband. Then for wives’ qualities: initiative-taker with sacrificial submission, builds her husband’s qualities, controls tongue, sense of humor that braves adversity, tender and tough…” 

Did you catch that one word?

Let me explain about love

Here’s our story with explanations by Mike Mason in his book The Mystery of Marriage: Meditations on the Miracle.

After our first face-to-face meeting: “So, are we having a second date?” Keith asked. We kissed, and I said, “Yes,”

Mason: “…the great mystery is that one cannot fall in love at will. It is one of those things that just happens, and whether the mechanism that makes it happen be termed kismet or coincidence, accident or grace, we are nevertheless at its mercy.”

A month after we met: “So, is this leading to marriage?” With heart racing, I said, “Yes.”

Mason: “One of the ways we know that love is from God, and that it is love, is that it always comes in a form and a manner we never could have anticipated.”

The following summer, I had a ring on my finger. Two summers after that, Keith and I married. 

Mason: “To go forward from love into marriage is to take a step of faith. It is to stake life upon a spiritual experience.”

Let me explain about marriage

Recently, for some reason, I’ve been reading quite a few books about marriage, all recommendations, which to me are Spirit nudges. Mason’s book was recommended by my Sage Forum colleague Dorothy Littell Greco, author of Marriage in the Middle: Embracing Midlife Surprises, Challenges, and Joys. But the recommendation came in a round-about way: Dorothy’s article titled “The Promises of Marriage Books” published in the Autumn 2025 issue of the magazine Common Good.

Greco: “Though the majority of marriage books focus on practical tips and solutions, some wax philosophic. Except for Mike Mason’s classic Mystery of Marriage, which I regularly reread…” I immediately purchased the book. And I have been blown away by how much I didn’t know, even though Keith and I have been married nearly twenty years.

Mason: “…the conflict which marriage uncovers is always… some version of this tension between the needs for dependence and for independence, between the urge toward loving cooperation and the opposite urge toward detachment, privacy, self-sufficiency.” Our individualistic society favors the latter.

In other words, true marriage is countercultural in our society, and it is spiritual warfare between husband and wife. And in both cases the battleground is about that one word.

Let me explain about submission

Writers are accustomed to submitting their work for consideration, the Open Mic being an informal version. But my use of the word carried a different meaning. Rather than presenting my work to others, I said the biblical qualities of wives start with being an initiative-taker with sacrificial submission, meaning yielding to someone, and thus the outcry. Interestingly, no one had batted an eye about the husband’s quality, to love sacrificially.

Mason: “Much has been made of the fact that Paul’s advice to wives is to ‘submit to your husbands,’ while his advice to husbands is to ‘love your wives.’” (Ephesians 5:22-25) In context, it’s clear that husbands and wives are to submit to one another. And that love and submit are synonymous.

Submission is trust. Precisely the relationship God wants with us. Precisely the reason why this message causes loud outcries in protest. Precisely why submission and trust in love and marriage are crucial.

Linkup with Five Minute Friday

Notes from Vanaprastha Podcasts on my YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@CaroleDuff