Some quotes from this very helpful book:
“If you want to be free to serve Jesus, there’s no question — stay single. Marriage takes a lot of time. But if you want to become like Jesus, I can’t imagine any better thing to do than to get married. Being married forces you to face some character issues you’d never have to face otherwise.” -p. 21
“Any situation that calls me to confront my selfishness has enormous spiritual value, and I slowly began to understand that the real purpose of marriage may not be happiness as much as it is holiness. Not that God has anything against happiness, or that happiness and holiness are by nature mutually exclusive, but looking at marriage through the lens of holiness began to put it into an entirely new perspective for me.” -pp. 22-23
“…some of us ask too much of marriage. We want to get the largest portion of our life’s fulfillment from our relationship with our spouse. That’s asking too much. Yes, without a doubt there should be moments of happiness, meaning, and a general sense of fulfillment. But my wife can’t be God, and I was created with a spirit that craves God. Anything less than God, and I’ll feel an ache.” -pp. 25-26
“One of the cruelest and most self-condemning remarks I’ve ever heard is the one that men often use when they leave their wives for another woman: ‘The truth is, I’ve never loved you.’ This is meant to be an attack on the wife–saying in effect, ‘The truth is, I’ve never found you lovable.’ But put in a Christian context, it’s a confession of the man’s utter failure to be a Christian.” -pp. 40-41