In a previous incarnation, I was a psychotherapist at a community mental health clinic. For about six months, I had two interesting couples scheduled for the same day, one at 2:00 p.m. and the other at 3:00 p.m. They provided me with two different visions of a biblical marriage.

The 2:00 p.m. couple, both members in good standing at a local Seventh-day Adventist Church (where one of them was the head elder), was miserable. He had never physically assaulted his wife, nor had he been sexually involved with other women. He took seriously his interpretation of the curse of Genesis 3:16 (echoed, he thought, in Eph. 5:22–24), where God condemns Eve (and, all of her daughters) to be "ruled over" by her husband. He ruled with a firm, though (in his mind) fair hand.

His wife had almost no autonomy or control in her life, and was expected to comply with her husband’s directives. He insisted that he was in faithful compliance with Paul’s commission to husbands to love their wives as Christ did the Church (Eph. 5:25). His directives to his wife were always in what he saw as her best interest and designed to keep her clean, radiant, and blameless (5:26–27). If they sometimes disagreed about where her best interests lay, well, as he saw it, Scripture was pretty clear about whose view must prevail.

Fifteen years into their marriage—after giving birth to three children and regularly performing all of her wifely duties—the head elder’s wife decided to stop having sexual relations with her husband. As I say, they were miserable.

The 3:00 p.m. couple attended a Christian church of a different denomination, where one was also an elder. They had been together for about fifteen years, as well. They were miserable, too, but for a different reason—one of them had breast cancer and was probably going to die soon. They had spent a decade and a half sharing real intimacy and companionship with each other, providing for each other what they saw as the biblical imperative of a "suitable helper" (Gen. 2:18 NIV).

They made their decisions together and resolved conflict by searching for common ground, values, and goals. They had each made sacrifices for—and accepted them from—the other. They had raised two children together, and had looked forward to watching them grow up together. They had been sexually faithful to each other throughout their relationship, and continued to fulfill each other in that way, as well. They were in therapy to get support and to help them deal with anger and grief over the likely too-early death of one and the loss of their shared future. Both of them, of course, were women.

The Sabbath School Bible Study Guide begins lesson 3 with a declarative sentence reflecting a certainty about God’s plan for marriage that is breathtaking: "Marriage was divinely instituted by God as a permanent, monogamous union of a man and a woman" (29, Teacher’s Version). I suppose by that standard that my 3:00 p.m. couple would not qualify as having what the Study Guide later calls a "Genesis marriage."

No marriage is perfect, of course, certainly neither of the two described above. But during the six months that I saw these two couples back-to-back—and many other times in the years since—I have reflected on which marriage came closer to fulfilling Genesis principles. Although I lack the certainty displayed by the Study Guide, for me the answer has always been fairly clear. The core principle of a Genesis marriage would seem to be found in 2:18 (NIV), which has God saying, "It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him."

Aside from gender, is there any doubt that my 3:00 p.m. couple more closely approximated this biblical good of not living alone? Can there be much doubt that my 2:00 p.m. couple was too desperately living alone?

Some people have difficulty putting gender aside when it comes to marriage. After all, Genesis 2:24 does observe that a man will leave his parents and unite with his wife, and Genesis 1:28 does include the commission to reproduce. It is always tempting to make interpretations that ratify our own experience. Yet obviously we do not regard all lifelong bachelors as in violation of Genesis 2, nor do we regard all childless couples as violating Genesis 1.

What describes most couples need not prescribe for every couple. Does a fair and prayerful reading of Genesis really mandate gender as the heart of true marriage? I am not so sure. Opposition to the possibility of gay marriage has often been framed as a "defense of marriage" (see, for example, material on the Web sites of the White House and Christianity Today). I am a big fan of marriage, and a vigorous practitioner of it for more than eighteen years. The sight of a loving, committed couple has never once felt like a threat to my own marriage, and indeed has only ever been an inspiration and encouragement, regardless of the couple’s specific identities. There is not so much genuine love in our shadowed world that we can afford to waste much of it.

I suspect there is more than one kind of marriage that can approximate biblical ideals. Indeed, I hope so, since few if any of the marriages described in the Bible much resemble the kind of marriage practiced by twenty-first century Westerners. Marriage as described throughout the Old Testament—and practiced throughout the world’s many historical and cultural variations—often looks very little like the heterosexual, single-partner relationships that provide the basis for modern, autonomous nuclear families. It would take a form of arrogance that even I am not capable of to imagine that only the form of marriage that I participate in has escaped the curse of sin and is capable of approaching God’s ideal.

The Study Guide reminds us of the injunction in Hebrews 13:4 (NIV) that "marriage should be honored by all." Sadly, married people, all too human, rarely honor their marriage commitments in their deepest sense all of the time. But when I see a couple sharing companionship, helping each other through life’s burdens, treating each other with love, compassion, and respect, and keeping their mutual promises, I see marriage restored.

Let us continue to call each other to honor our marriage commitments, on the one hand, and to provide for each other the support and encouragement needed to do so, on the other.

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