Marriage, under the best circumstances, is a crisis—one of the major crises of life—and it is a dangerous thing not to be aware of this. Whether it turns out to be a healthy, challenging, and constructive crisis or a disastrous nightmare depends largely upon how willing the partners are to be changed, how malleable they are. Yet ironically, it is some of the most hardened and crusty and unlikely people in the world who plunge themselves into the arms of marriage and thereby submit in almost total naivete to the two most transforming powers known to the human heart: the love of another person and the gracious love of God. So be prepared for change! Be prepared for the most sweeping and revolutionary reforms of a lifetime.

Mike Mason, The Mystery of Marriage: As Iron Sharpens Iron (Sisters, OR: Multnomah Press, 1985), 60-61.