Escape rooms might be a fun date night or stressful event depending on who we go with. And how well we can work together will determine if we get out or not, which is why many companies use it as a team building experience. But there are lessons here for marriage as well.
The pressure of an escape room quickly exposes our differences. While some rush to figure everything out at once, others are more methodical. Some are creative and can think outside of the box, while others excel in seeing logical sequences. Whatever it looks like, these different approaches are not right or wrong, simply different. But the key to winning is learning to work together. Everyone enters the game with the same mission of getting out. And so we must learn to make our differences work together to accomplish our shared objective. And the same is true when it comes to marriage.
Even when we have a lot of common ground, it doesn’t take long in marriage for our differences to also be exposed. One might be more social while the other more reserved. Or perhaps one is more direct while the other is more empathetic. Again, whatever it looks like, our differences can cause friction when we don’t learn to make them work for us.
While it’s easy to remember in an escape room that we have the same mission, this is a reality we must remember in marriage as well. This allows us to fight together rather than against each other.
God created the body with different parts to be unified and work together. We don’t “win” by trying to convert our wife to our way of doing things. We win by honoring our differences and figuring out how to make them work for us in accomplishing the work God has given us to do.
In the end, just like in an escape room, you win in marriage by working with your differences – remembering your unified mission and using your different gifts to move your marriage towards God’s best.
