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INTRODUCTION God, the best maker of all marriages, Combine your hearts in one. — William Shakespeare, Henry V
A Book for Married People . . . Think of this book as a tree supplied by three deep roots. The fi rst is my thirty-six-year marriage to my wife, Kathy.1 She helped me write this book, and she herself wrote chapter 6, Embracing the Other. In chapter 1, I caution readers about the way contemporary culture defi nes “soul mate “as a perfectly compatible match.” Nevertheless, when we fi rst began to spend time with each other, we each realized that the other was a rare fit for our hearts. I fi rst met Kathy through her sister, Susan, who was a student with me at Bucknell University. Susan often spoke to Kathy about me and to me about Kathy. As a young girl, Kathy had been led toward the Christian faith by C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia.2 She urged Susan to recommend them to me. I read and was moved by the books and by other Lewis volumes that I subsequently studied. In 1972, we both enrolled at the same school, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary on Boston’s North Shore, and there we quickly came to see that we
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