Hounded by the Foxes
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[1 Comment]When Dara and Kevin were in premarital counseling, their pastor asked them to list five habits or personality traits about the other person that they found annoying. Dara stared at her blank piece of paper and said, "Honestly, nothing about Kevin annoys me."
By their 10-year anniversary her grievance list had grown, primarily because of the stress of managing two kids, a demanding job, a monstrous mortgage, and an incontinent cat. These made even the little problems between her and Kevin major annoyances, and left her little energy for sex.
Every couple wishes the romance and starry-eyed love could last forever. But at some point every husband and wife must cross the invisible line between fantasy love and real life, where the majority of marriage is lived out.
Even King Solomon and the Shulammite crossed that line as problems threatened to erode their intimacy: "Catch for us the foxes, the little foxes that ruin the vineyards, our vineyards that are in bloom" (Song of Songs 2:15). She told him, "We've got problems. Can't you see those little foxes? They're going to ruin everything for us. Do something about this."
Most Old Testament scholars agree that the vineyards in this verse represent Solomon and the Shulammite's love. Everything seems perfect, except that she spies some little foxes in their vineyard, and warns Solomon of their presence. While seemingly harmless, foxes dug holes and passages that loosened the soil around the vines, preventing them from developing a stable root system. In this instance, that root system is their intimacy.
Proverbial symbols of destroyers, the little foxes in this passage symbolize the small problems that gnaw at the root of their love.
We must catch those foxes that gnaw at the root of our love, because if we don't, they'll destroy our desire for sexual intimacy.
A recent cover of Newsweek showed a husband and wife in bed, dressed in full-length pajamas. He stares blankly at a computer on his lap while she shovels spoonfuls of Häagen-Dazs into her mouth, a zoned-out look on her face. A blaring headline reads, "No Sex, Please, We're Married." The subtitle asks, "Are Stress, Kids, and Work Killing Romance?"
The answer? Yes! Stress is eating us alive. And the two most common foxes, or intimacy killers, for married couples? Work and kids.
Intimacy stealer #1: overwork
Work, work, work. According to former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, Americans worked 350 hours more this year than last year, and this upward trend continues. And the result is neglected marriages.
John works 75 hours a week under the guise of providing for his family. Amy's request for him to spend more time at home unleashes strong emotion in them both. He's angry: "Doesn't she understand the pressure I'm under?" She's despondent: "Doesn't he see he's becoming a stranger to me?"
Originally published in: Marriage Partnership, 2004, Fall
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Despite hard work and children, the Amish enjoy generally happy marriages and see divorce as unthinkable. What's the primary difference between their happy marriages and ours? Birth control. We have it; they don't.
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