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But even when two believers marry, there can still be important spiritual differences. Both of you are only partly grown Christians. Both of you still have some worldly notions that don't match God's. Especially when these involve such important matters as authority and submission, or how to train children, or how to handle money, these differences can bring enormous stress into a marriage. If there is anything that should draw you to some serious searching of the scripture during your courtship, it would be these kinds of concerns.
Another class of differences are what I'll call "ordinary" differences. You were raised in different social circumstances, maybe even completely different cultures. You have different tastes, different priorities, different traditions, different habits, even different senses of humor.
You know the storyline. You like sports, she likes theater. You like dogs, she likes cats. You like spicy, exotic food, she likes hamburgers and milkshakes. You like to sleep in a cold room with the shades up and music playing. She likes warm, dark and quiet. It's the stuff of newly-wed trauma, and you can't ignore it or wish it away.
You can, however, choose: will it be a fight, or a challenge to your creativity? If the issue could be drawn like a line in the sand, would you be on opposite sides, or can you stand on the same side and face this obstacle as a team?
Let me give you a hint that has helped me through this process. Don't assume that because your spouse is one way today that he (or she) will be the same ten years from now. People actually change. The worst thing you can do is make a battleground out of something, for that tends to set it in stone. Patience, prayer, flexibility...and a sense of humor...can carry you through many of the conflicts of those first years. And then one day, you two will wake up a whole lot more alike than you ever thought possible (and just maybe you'll be the one who changed the most!).
The kind of differences I really want to discuss, however, are the differences that exist because you're a guy and she's a girl. Don't ever listen to anyone who tries to tell you they aren't there, or that they're simply a matter of training or cultural conditioning. Men and women are SO very different, and it's one of most exciting and annoying ideas God ever had! :o)
For example, a few weeks ago someone told me that men can actually think about NOTHING for a real stretch of time. That's incredible! I can never think about nothing. However, I was also told that men can't think of more than one thing at once. Hey, that's easy for me. Not that I'm thinking three things at precisely the same instant, but I can definitely keep three trains of thought jammed into the same timeframe without getting confused.
If this is really true for all males and females, then no wonder our conversations can be so complicated. If a man is in a no-thought zone, the woman assumes he's hiding something from her, or that it's her job to fill in the gap. Another thing she doesn't understand is that if she is talking, he has to choose between listening to her or else thinking of the next thing he's going to say. For us females, it's easy enough to do both.
You probably know a whole list of these differences yourself, so I won't get into a long Mars/Venus discussion here. But I'd like to spend some time talking about an important difference I mentioned earlier in our conversation: a man's need for significance vs. a woman's need for security.
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