'What Did You Expect?' The Main Problem With Most Marriages, Says Paul Tripp, Is Lack of Submission--to God

by Paul David Tripp

Crossway Books, April 2010

288 pp., $3.19

Twelve years ago, my husband and I dutifully pursued premarital counseling, which meant having dinner with a well-meaning professor and his wife. They walked us through their marriage's highlights and lowlights, covering faithfulness, forgiveness, and the roles of husband and wife. But what I remember most about the talk was thinking my fianc and I already had figured marriage out. We were seminary students who loved God and communicated well. These qualities, along with our mutual love, surely meant we could avoid the sinkholes that doomed other relationships.

We are, by God's grace, still happily married, but I am often confronted with the extent of our foolishness in those early days. Like every married couple, we have faced unfulfilled expectations, disappointments, and unmet needs. At minimum, we could have better anticipated these with Paul Tripp's What Did You Expect? Redeeming the Realities of Marriage (Crossway).

Tripp adeptly burrows beneath discussions of gender roles, communication mishaps, and felt needs--the driving forces of most Christian marriage manuals--to get at the root of all marital problems: who or what we worship. This is the first Christian marriage book I've read that does not use the words submission or headship. Nor does it refer to the most classic passage on marriage, Ephesians 5. Tripp is not rejecting these biblical constructs, but he is asking us to consider a more fundamental question that shapes not just our marriages but our entire lives: Whose kingdom?