Mysteriously Ever After: Unplugging U2’s “A Man and a Woman”

Part 9 in the U2 Unplugged Series

The Greek language may have four words that express different types of love, but Hollywood portrays love as having one meaning: romance. Any “feel good” romantic comedy – such as You’ve Got Mail, Sabrina, Only You, or Notting Hill – focuses on the saga of two unlikely people falling in love with each other. But, these films always end the moment the couple finally gets together, marries, and lives happily ever after.

In contrast, a lively, dynamic marriage is never explored in film; perhaps the underlying assumption is that now that the couple is together, the excitement is over. In fact, marriage tends to be depicted on screen only when the relationship is failing or when it serves as a back story to something more important.

The problem comes when we start to believe what we watch in the movies and hear in Top 40 love songs – that “falling in love” is what fulfills us. Then, when we don’t feel the magic or experience the romance in our everyday life, we can become disillusioned and give up on our marriage, thinking there’s something wrong with it or the person we are committed to.
Within this romance–crazed culture, U2’s “A Man and a Woman” [Lyrics] [iTunes] offers a much different take. Instead of writing Yet Another Love Song for his wife Ali, Bono writes a far deeper, more probing, and ultimately redemptive tune. The result is a musical peek into what true married love is all about.

The Engine of Marriage

“I Want to Know What Love Is” was the piercing question that the rock band Foreigner asked in their hit tune of the same name back in the mid-1980s. Their song seems to serve as an unspoken theme for a postmodern society confused about love and the expectations we should have. If the Foreigner song poses the question, U2 answers it with an exclamation point on their How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb album. For, in “A Man and a Woman”, U2 tells what true love is. The song echoes the words of C.S. Lewis contrasting romance and love:

“Being in love” is a good thing, but it is not the best thing…Love as distinct from “being in love” is not merely a feeling. It is a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit; reinforced by (in Christian marriages) the grace which both partners ask, and receive, from God. They can have this love for one another even at those moments when they do not like each other; as you love yourself even when you do not like yourself. They can retain this love even when each would easily, if they allowed themselves, be “in love” with someone else…It is only on this love that the engine of marriage is run; being in love was the explosion that started it.

The type of love that Bono sings and Lewis writes about has a special quality to it I call “texture”. Much like a cloth is assembled by interweaving a multitude of individual strings, textured love is bound together by a collection of strands: romance, friendship, common interests, mutual goals, physical intimacy, children, and shared ministries. In a marriage between believers, all of these strands are held together with the grace of Jesus Christ.

U2’s “A Man and a Woman” expresses the textured qualities of a true marriage. As Bono starts out the song, he sings to his wife:

Little sister don’t you worry about a thing today
Take the heat from the sun
Little sister
I know that everything is not ok

But you’re like honey on my tongue

When we are in love, we long to pamper and care for our spouse. We want to keep the other tucked away in our home, away from the cares and concerns of the outside world. Playing with the lyrics slightly, we long to have our spouse “take the heat from the Son”, finding strength and trust in God’s Son, Jesus Christ. Yet, we don’t live in a world that we can completely protect our spouse: pain, worry, and heartache will penetrate the safe haven we attempt to create and can leave our marriage looking “not ok.” Perhaps the difficulty stems from circumstances you are facing together as a couple. Or maybe it is because one of you has let the other down. Yet, through good times and bad, God can renew your love, allowing you to say to your spouse “you’re like honey on my tongue,” always a sweet blessing from the Lord.
As Bono continues in the first verse, he further defines the nature of this love:

True love never can be rent
But only true love can keep beauty innocent

Textured love can never be had cheap: it never “can be rent”. What’s more, when we shower our marriage with the grace and forgiveness of Christ, God keeps the beauty of our marriage spotless, no matter what mud pits that we’ve sloshed through. The stains of the past are washed away. Beauty is declared “innocent” – both in the eyes of God and, relying on God’s grace, in the eyes of our marriage as well.

True love is far more than a mutual 50/50 partnership. Instead, as Genesis 2:24 says, you become “one flesh.” According to C.S. Lewis, the idea of “one flesh” isn’t sappy, sentimental poetry, but is actual fact “just as one is stating a fact when one says that . . . a violin and a bow are one musical instrument.”
In the chorus of the song, Bono further contrasts the difference between “true love” and “romance”:

I could never take a chance

Of losing love to find romance

Marriages held together by feelings and romance are vulnerable. For when that single strand is broken, then nothing is left to hold the relationship in tact. However, in a marriage with textured love, you are far less susceptible to temptation, because of the strength of the many strands that bind the relationship together. We come to value our love so much, we’d never want to risk what we have to find a strand of romance elsewhere.

Breaking Points

In “A Man and a Woman”, Bono also explores the inevitable valleys that couples go through during their marriage and the responses we can have to them. Bono puts it like this:

Little sister
I’ve been sleeping in the street again
Like a stray dog
Little sister
I’ve been trying to feel complete again
But you’re gone and so is God

One of the natural reactions that we have when we go through tough times in a marriage is the belief that we made the wrong choice. Postmodern society has the idea that if you can just find the right person, you can count on being in love forever. In Only You, for example, the main character Faith becomes obsessed with finding a man named Damon Bradley, a name she got off of a Ouija board when she was twelve. Damon is her destiny, she believes, and she is convinced she won’t be truly happy with anyone else. Once again, C.S. Lewis sets the record straight:

If the old fairy-tale ending, “They lived happily ever after” is taken to mean “They felt for the next fifty years exactly as they felt the day before they were married,” then it says what probably never was nor ever could be true.

A second response we can have when difficulty and hurt enters our marriage is to turn inward and isolate ourselves from our spouse. We want to avoid intimacy to prevent the hurt from happening again. Bono warns of this:

But you can’t be numb for love
The only pain is to feel nothing at all
How can I hurt when I’m holding you?

When we have been betrayed or wronged by our spouse, we can (quite naturally) be tempted to lock up our heart as an attempt to prevent ourselves from being vulnerable to pain in the future. However, that’s a self-defeating proposition. As Bono says, the “only pain” is to be indifferent, numb, to “feel nothing at all”.

Living in this fallen world, nearly every couple who experiences true, lasting love in their marriage will almost certainly go through a period of serious trial at some point in their marriage, in which their romantic ideals die and the emotions all fade away. C.S. Lewis even considered this trial as being inevitable:

For I believe [love] must always be lost in some way: every merely natural love has to be crucified before it can achieve resurrection and the happy old couples have come through a difficult death and re-birth. But far more have missed the re-birth.

Jesus himself said that unless a thing dies, it cannot fully live. Perhaps then when our romantic ideals die, our marriage is able to be re-born with textured love. Bono alludes to the “re-birth” of true love in the song:

You can run from love
And if it’s really love it will find you
Catch you by the heel

When your marriage is re-born, textured love won’t let you go. It will “catch you by the heel” and “find you”. In fact, as we are tested, the strands of textured love are only wrapped tighter. “Great relationships take form when they are strained to the breaking point but do not break,” writes Philip Yancey
.
When you are in a marriage that has gone through the re-birthing process, you may not experience those same butterfly feelings in your stomach that you had when you originally feel in love. But, as the song testifies to, there’s something deeper, more satisfying, and no less exciting. In fact, God endlessly renews excitement and passion of marital love – if we will stick with it. Bono sings about the endless state of wonder we can have for the one we love:

Brown eyed girl across the street
On rue Saint Divine
I thought this is the one for me
But she was already mine
You were already mine…

When we see our spouse on “rue Saint Divine”, we can gaze upon our spouse and say to ourselves, “Wow, that’s the one I’m married to!”

Mysteries

In Ephesians 6:32, the Apostle Paul speaks of the “profound mystery” of the marriage of Christ with his church. However, as Bono sings, another mystery also exists inside of a human marital relationship as well. The chorus of “A Man and a Woman” speaks of this:

I could never take a chance
Of losing love to find romance
In the mysterious distance
Between a man and a woman

True love has a sense of mystery to it, no matter how many years we are with are with our spouse. Speaking of this reality, Bono admits, “I have somebody in my life, after a long time, I still feel I don’t know.” He gets even more specific in the final part of “A Man and a Woman”:

For love and faith and sex and fear
And all the things that keep us here
In the mysterious distance
Between a man and a woman

God created men and women in such a way that we often see the world differently. A women will look at “love, faith, sex, and fear” from a different angle than her husband will. In turn, he will want to talk or deal with these issues in a manner quite unlike his wife. This mysterious difference in perspective on many concerns of life is either marriage’s greatest opportunity or its greatest curse: either we seek to bridge the mystery and serve our spouse or we shut the door clinging onto our own desires. When we choose to die to our own wants and needs, we not only live out Christ’s call to surrender ourselves, but we also increasingly become “one flesh” with our spouse in the process. What’s more, as we take the initiative to serve our spouse our me-first attitude changes. We actually begin to desire to serve the other, or in the words of Bono, we say, “You make me want to lose myself”.

The mystery between a couple may never be fully realized in this earthly life. But as you walk through life together as “one flesh”, you will continue to grow closer and closer, gradually dissolving that “mysterious distance between a man and a woman.”

Where Do You Live?

Hollywood is obsessed with romance, though I don’t necessarily fault filmmakers. After all, romantic tension – will they get together or not? – is what gives every romantic film its pulse. But, a line from Sabrina, one of those romantic comedies, helps get at the need to distinguish between the romance offered in the cinema and genuine love offered in the home. In the film, Sabrina is talking with the workaholic Linus about the need to differentiate between his work and his life. She says, “I know you work in the real world and you’re very good at it. But that’s work. Where do you live Linus?” While Sabrina is talking about work-home balance, her question speaks to us when we try to distinguish between romance and love. Romance may be exciting and fulfilling for a time early on in a relationship, but where do you live?

As you think about that question, listen to U2’s “A Man and a Woman”. It shows us exactly the type of love that enables married couples to live mysteriously ever after.

Action Steps

In “A Man and a Woman”, U2 explores the nature of real marital love and how that differs from romance. If you are married, consider the following steps to grow your marriage into this type of love:

Do some personal housecleaning. Get alone and think through your personal expectations of your marriage and your spouse. Examine what changes you need to do lose yourself interest and become “one flesh”.

Make a date with your spouse and have a heart-to-heart conversation about the state and expectations of your relationship. Be honest and real.

Commit to reading through together a marriage book with your spouse, perhaps going over a chapter a week. I recommend starting with Gary Chapman’s The Five Love Languages.

Pray regularly as a couple. There’s perhaps no activity more important for a couple than to go to God together in prayer.

Tensions between each other have a way of melting away when you humbly come before Jesus Christ.

Diving Deeper

Matthew 19:4-5, Proverbs 5:15-20, Genesis 2:24, Ephesians 5:22-33
The Five Love Languages, Gary Chapman