THE SECRET TESTAMENT OF MARRIAGE

Marriages do not usually die of catastrophe. Catastrophe is survivable, and survived marriages are frequently strengthened by it - there is a physical law in this book that explains exactly why. What kills marriages is smaller and quieter and almost entirely preventable: a weight nobody was assigned, a resource left unspent until it decayed, an offence left unrepaired until it hardened into an identity, a distance that accumulated by half an inch a month for eleven years. The costs come first and the rewards come late, and the couples who leave almost always leave shortly before the arithmetic reverses.
This volume is an attempt to say the things that should have been said in that room before the promises were made.
It is written in fourteen Books. It sets one hundred and fifty-three diagnoses against one hundred and fifty-three scriptures. It opens twenty-three marriage passages in six languages, because a word can be over-read in one and not in six. It argues that the ten - and then the twenty-eight - laws that govern a bar magnet also govern a household, and it does so on the ground that the God who designed the covenant also designed the field and did not use two different sets of principles. It reads Esther, Ruth, and Zipporah as three case studies rather than three edifying stories. It follows fire from a bush to an upper room. And it ends by naming the four things all of it rests on.
A word to the reader about how to take it.
Some of what follows is lexical, and can be checked against a standard lexicon; some is exegetical, and can be argued with on the same ground; some is structural, and is offered as a model that earns its place by explaining what marriages actually do; and some is empirical, and belongs to the social sciences, where this volume reports the literature rather than asserting on its own authority. These four registers are marked throughout, and the reader is entitled to know at every point which one is being used. A book about covenant should not commit the discourtesy of blurring its own claims.
And one further word, which is the reason this book exists at all.
Marriage is failing, worldwide, at a rate without historical precedent, and it is not failing because people stopped loving each other. It is failing because a design was handed down for four thousand years and then, in about two generations, stopped being taught. The instructions were not refuted. They were mislaid.
What follows is an attempt to find them.
- Dr. BenyPowerful