Our Own Lives?

I have a friend who is spending the summer in the Middle East working on some sociology project. She mentioned on her blog a conversation she had with some of her friends there regarding the marrying of men based on their level of cleanliness (in context, the conversation made loads more sense than it sounds here).

While I don't have any immediate insight with regard to the "messy/tidy" man question, I am interested in this sentence from the conversation:

"Would she (a wife who excels at keeping her husband "tidy") have time for anything else if she is always cleaning after her husband? Maybe a messy-looking guy is preferable because his wife would have more time to herself and have her own life, but compromise with a less-than clean-looking husband."

It is a strange expectation, in my sometimes-not-humble-enough opinion, that once a man and a woman become "one flesh", that either of them would maintain anything that would warrant being called his or her "own life." A man and a woman enter into the marriage covenant precisely because they have discovered that it is not good to be alone, and that it is very good to be together; why would they, then, want to go on being alone?

This seems to me a symptom of an already and implicitly accepted centering of the individual, where everything is ushered through the filter of the survival and happiness of "I". Sure there are communities, but they are understood primarily as the individual-voluntary gathering of individuals who have implicitly agreed that "I can come and go as it suits me, and I will remain here in as much as it is good for me and my interests or it holds my attention span." This life is much like a rave: sure I'm at the "club" (a quick nod to the idea of community), but I am dancing my own dance in my own space; near other people, but certainly not with them." And in case you can't tell, that sentence is meant to be critical.

Imagine a community whose members, rather than primarily seeking to hold onto their own lives, actually seek to give up their own lives in service to the others. Imagine a marriage that works this way! Imagine individual people who seek to enter into marriage in order that they might give up their "own lives" in service to their spouse! Here's an interesting test: if the preceding sentences sound repulsive, we should ask "why?" "Do I consider myself 'first' or 'last'"?

This is surely all a great mystery, as Paul was quick to declare. But it is a good mystery, for it is to push us forward to a better Marriage, the consummate Marriage of The Husband and His Bride: the One lays His life down for the other, the other returns all praise and thanksgiving to the One.

Jeremy