Now notice this proposition: That the marital union requires leaving and cleaving. “For this cause, because God created male and female, a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife.” What that is saying is that when a couple determines that they wish to be married, according to the principle that God ordained for the well-being of human society, when they decide that that’s the way they want to go, they’ve got to understand two things. Number One: It means that they will voluntarily walk away from the benefits and privileges of the single life. Number Tw they will unite themselves and commit themselves unreservedly to the primacy of the new relationship. If these things are not done, once the pressures come, once the difficulties come in marriages, the immediate reaction is to bail out or redefine, or restructure, or do it another way.

What does it mean to leave the old life? It means to learn something that is one of the most difficult lessons for a human being to learn. Do you know what it’s called? It’s called, unselfishness! Selfishness is the death knell of any relationship, particularly marriage!

Now there are very definitely some advantages to being single. I remember being single. I thoroughly enjoyed being single. I had a whale of a time being single. Nobody held a gun to my head. Jill's father did not come to me and say, “I’m a car dealer; I’ll give you a car, if you’ll take my daughter off my hands.” He did not say that!

I came across Jill and I had the funniest feeling inside me that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her; and I didn’t want anybody else to get the chance to do it. I was going to get ahead of them, and I was going to win this woman to me. Nobody forced me, nobody twisted my arm, nobody held a gun to my head. It was purely voluntary, and so committed was I to this new idea, that I was prepared to abandon the wonderful feelings of being totally free to do what I wanted as a single person, and I was going to commit myself to this new union! And I’ve been spending the rest of my life learning what I go into…without regrets!

You know what the problem is? The problem is very often some people want their cake, and they want to eat it. They want the benefits of the marital union, and they want the free selfishness of the single life; or they want to have a re-negotiable contract, rather like a professional athlete who signs a contract knowing full well that if he can’t get a different contract, while he’s still in the course of the one he’s got, he'll refuse to train and he will blackmail the team. No, they’re to leave and cleave.

I had a remarkable experience of this with a couple I was ministering to in Premarital Counseling years and years ago. It was obvious they’d had a fight on the way to see me, so I began to talk to them about this. The gal was crying, and he wasn’t even talking to me, and the atmosphere was not conducive to marital counseling.