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The ZimZum of Love: A New Way of Understanding Marriage
Rob Bell
Sunday Times bestselling author Rob Bell is joined in this book by his wife of twenty years, Kristen, to present a new way to make marriage work.Marriage is complex because people are complicated. You think you know each other so well that you’re almost one person. But then there are moments when it’s shockingly obvious that you’re two, with two opinions and two ways of doing things. And these moments can be relationship flashpoints – whether it’s over money, politics, childrearing or what you’re going to watch on TV tonight. So how do you stop yourself flaring up when you and your spouse disagree and start seeing marriage as a chance for you to learn more about the person you want to know best of all?Early on in their marriage Rob and Kristen experienced the struggles, disagreements and fights that come to all couples. They still do. But they quickly learned that if they were to fulfil their desire of a great marriage, they had to be proactive, focused and intentional about their relationship – and learn how to fight in the most productive way possible!In this inspiring and humorous insight into their approach to marriage, the popular husband and wife team explore communication, dealing with relatives, sex, petty fights, money, work and boundaries, as well as love, forgiveness, fidelity, faith and hope – because something happens when two people give themselves fully to each other, something profound and mystical, something with endless depth and dimension, something spiritual – and that’s the ZimZum of Love.There’s the ideal of marriage, and then there’s the reality of marriage: this book is about bringing those two closer together.With extensive discussion questions in the endnotes, this easy-to-read book is invaluable for anyone searching for a happy, fulfilling relationship.
Copyright (#ulink_6d514de0-9723-5529-80a8-6084bca7d606)
William Collins
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London
SE1 9GF
WilliamCollinsBooks.com (http://WilliamCollinsBooks.com)
First published in Great Britain in 2014 by William Collins
This paperback edition published in Great Britain in 2016 by William Collins
Copyright © WORB, Inc., 2014
Designed by Terry McGrath
Illustrations by John Stevens Photograph here (#litres_trial_promo) by Carolyn Baas
Rob and Kristen Bell assert the moral right to be identified as the authors of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins
Source ISBN: 9780007582082
Ebook Edition © November 2014 ISBN: 9780007557936
Version: 2016-01-13
CONTENTS
COVER (#u78a3facb-6c50-5931-a91d-a548a4ee3ac5)
TITLE PAGE (#ub7617b63-3b92-5584-8d8c-cfd9e281e674)
COPYRIGHT (#ubb6a3782-9540-5a02-836a-b619a449cf7d)
PREFACE (#udf438771-4f2f-5292-9851-ce4ef6cfa718)
CHAPTER 1: WHAT’S A ZIMZUM? (#u1574b655-accb-57c8-90f2-c16ddddf4994)
CHAPTER 2: RESPONSIVE (#u80e91991-e0b5-5579-a4e7-2e71589f9803)
CHAPTER 3: DYNAMIC (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 4: EXCLUSIVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER 5: SACRED (#litres_trial_promo)
EPILOGUE (#litres_trial_promo)
QUESTIONS (#litres_trial_promo)
ENDNOTES, COMMENTARY, AND A WORD FROM BOB DYLAN (#litres_trial_promo)
THANKS (#litres_trial_promo)
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER (#litres_trial_promo)
PREFACE (#ulink_f7abc061-aa10-5f0b-aa14-8cbfd44c9d2b)
A while ago we came across an idea about the origins of the universe that made us think of marriage. We weren’t aware that anyone had connected this idea with being married, and it got us thinking. The more we talked about it, the more this idea evolved into a new way of understanding marriage. We found ourselves thinking we should write a book about this.
So for a year and a half now, we wake up in the morning and make breakfast for our kids and take them to school, and then we sit side by side at a desk, doing our best to give language to this new way of understanding marriage.
There are, of course, lots of books on marriage. Practical books, inspiring books, books that can give you all sorts of advice and steps and techniques for facing and dealing with the challenges of marriage, from communicating better to handling money to sex to the division of household tasks.
This book, however, is about the deeper mysteries of marriage. How is it that the same relationship can be capable of producing so much joy and so much pain? How is it that the slightest thoughts and actions can so significantly change the space between two people? How is it that the space between two people can be so unique that it exists nowhere else in the universe? How is it that flawed, fragile, flesh-and-blood human beings can relate to each other in such a way that they show each other the divine?
Something powerful and profound happens in marriage—something involving energy, love, and the deepest forces of the universe. We believe that you can grow in your awareness of these realities, learning how to better see what’s going on in the space between you, how it works, and how the love can flow all the more freely between you.
To that end, we’ve included discussion questions at the end of this book as well as endnotes with commentary to help you explore these deeper mysteries together.
It’s our hope that this new way helps you better understand and enjoy this mysterious, extraordinary, difficult, beautiful, frustrating, complicated gift called marriage.
CHAPTER 1 (#ulink_598354ef-97b6-5f60-9b84-9470e68ecc5d)
WHAT’S A ZIMZUM? (#ulink_598354ef-97b6-5f60-9b84-9470e68ecc5d)
We want to give you a new way of understanding marriage.
It’s called the zimzum of love, and we explain it with stick figure drawings.
At first, it’s just you.
Your life is mostly about you. Your friends and your work and your schedule and your interests and your goals and your thoughts and all the rest of what makes your life your life.
Your center of gravity extends roughly as far as you.
But then you meet someone—or you’ve known someone for a while—and that person has their own life, with their own center of gravity, and your heart begins to shift toward them.
You find yourself thinking about them, drawn to them. When you’re not with them, you miss them, you ache for them, your phone rings and when you see that it’s them you feel a surge of electricity through your body.
You talk for hours. You start arranging your life so that you can spend as much time as possible with them as your lives become increasingly intertwined.
As you become familiar with what moves and drives and inspires them, their well-being begins to matter to you more than your own. You find yourself making sacrifices for them,
while they’re doing the same for you.
It’s here that you become aware of a subterranean shift, a tectonic slide in your heart, one that alters the course of your life:
Your center of gravity expands.
You are in new territory.
Before, it was just you.
Now, it’s you—and this other person.
Before, there was one.
Now, there are two.
As you intentionally create space for this person in your life and they create space in their life for you, this movement creates space between you—space that has an energetic flow to it.
This flow in the space between you is like an energy field or an electrical current. It’s the draw, the pull, the magnetic attraction that leads you to give yourself to this person in a way you don’t give yourself to anyone else on the planet.
It’s a vibrant, pulsing, humming flow that stirs your heart and causes your soul to soar. You talk about falling in love because of the feeling of weightlessness it evokes; you speak of finding your other half because of those moments when your boundaries feel porous, like you don’t know where you end and they begin. You speak of being swept away, like you’re caught up in something bigger than the both of you, like you’re flying, the intoxicating attraction you feel toward another human being taking you both somewhere new and thrilling.
And then there’s us, standing in our kitchen arguing about something one of us said about the microwave.
K: It was me. I made a comment—
R: —that made no sense.
K: And then he wouldn’t drop it.
R: I couldn’t figure out what she was talking about.
K: And so he got butt-headed about it.
R: Just explain what you meant.
K: Just drop it. Let it go. Relax.
R: So you’re saying you didn’t mean it?
K: I’m saying it’s not worth discussing.
R: Then why did you say it?
We’re going round and round having the dumbest discussion in which neither of us is actually listening to the other and it’s getting more and more ridiculous because we’re making less and less sense—and then our older son, who’s been sitting there the entire time witnessing this train wreck of a conversation, finally says,
K: With his head in his hands,
Will you two stop it? You’re driving me crazy!
(We’re laughing as we write this.)
There are moments in marriage when you realize that you’re brushing up against our deepest experiences of what it means to be human, when you become aware that some of the most profound truths of the universe are lying next to you in bed, moments that illuminate our most innate and mysterious longings for grace and connection and vitality.
And then there are other moments, when lofty talk about two becoming one and I found my other half seems delusional, when you wonder, Who is this crazy person and why in the world did I ever want to be married to them?
Marriage.
You find someone—or they find you (that’s part of the mystery, isn’t it?)—and out of seven billion people on the planet, you decide to say yes to just one of them, till death do you part.
There is something about marriage—something about the potential, the promise, and the possibilities of creating a life together—something so powerful and compelling and alluring that despite all the pain marriage has caused over the years, people are still looking for that one person—and still getting married.
Still standing on beaches staring into each other’s eyes for engagement photos, still registering for matching bath towels, still trying to figure out whether or not the groomsmen should wear the cummerbunds, because, after all, they’re included in the rental.
K:The dating site (#litres_trial_promo)match.com (http://www.match.com)gets around seventeen million unique visitors a month. (#litres_trial_promo) Seventeen million people a month holding out hope that that person is out there.
There’s all sorts of speculation about exactly how many marriages don’t last—the general consensus being quite a few—but statistics are beside the point because we’ve all seen marriages unravel around us—neighbors, co-workers, parents of our kids’ friends—people taking off wedding rings, selling houses, working out joint custody arrangements.
Divorce is like a death, only the other person is still alive.
Some say that the enduring draw of marriage is rooted in cultural conditioning. And they have a point. Our daughter was watching a movie recently about a princess who was waiting for her prince to rescue her so that they could live happily ever.
And she’s four (our daughter, not the princess).
Others say that our ongoing propensity to keep getting hitched is simply biology in its more advanced and organized forms, that we’re hardwired to find someone to make more someones with and so marriage is simply a social construct we’ve created to propagate our species.
R: Two words about that: throw pillows.
K: Throw pillows?
R: Dudes learning to properly arrange throw pillows on the couch because that’s how she likes it.
K: What do you mean by that?
R: There’s a direct connection between primal mating impulses rooted in biological survival instincts and the intentional organizing of decorative cushions.
K: In other words, our species has an astonishing ability to adapt.
And then there’s the Jagger Theory (as in, Mick), which states in a very straightforward manner that monogamy isn’t our natural inclination so why do we keep torturing ourselves with this outdated and antiquated custom that shackles two people to the constricting notion that they must remain exclusively and faithfully committed to each other with no other experiences of a similar sort until one of them is left standing over the grave of the other?
That question leads to another question, one many people have about marriage: Has any institution/idea/arrangement caused so many people so much agony? Is there a greater ache than giving your heart—not to mention your life—to someone, only to have it collapse and fall apart on you?
