Groom's speech

Last month I attended the wedding of Rene and Sarah.  Rene gave the most wonderful groom's speech I have ever heard.  This is what he said:

Over the last year or so, Sarah and I have been learning about marriage and obviously, marriage is quite a daunting milestone to engage in, I don't think anyone would debate that. And, of course, the general public perception of marriage is one of being shackled in a sense, and, funnily enough, the irony of this is that, the more we have learned of marriage, the more we've come to realise that this is actually true, it is evident even in the vows that we gave [earlier]. Now our immediate reaction as selfish humans is that this is reprehensible and goes against our very nature, and would not be something we would want to ever pursue but when you look at it closely, you realise that this is actually the very beauty of marriage. We, as selfish humans tend to run away from our problems -- when things get too hard we mostly want to retreat since the pain is too great. But in a marriage, that option has now been closed off -- you are shackled to the other person and the only option left is to work through the problems, as painful as that might be, and the only way to do this is through the truth which requires us to make ourselves completely vulnerable. And when we do this, the scales of who we might think we are, or even want to be, start falling off, since it reveals who we actually are, and the two people engaged in that marriage start to fuse together through this vulnerability. And the result of this is this beautiful synergy where two people's existence become intertwined together, fused through honesty, truth and vulnerability. And I believe, that is where God's intention of marriage comes in when he claims that the "two shall become one".
Now, I understand that this view of marriage might seem very unattractive to many, but I urge you to analyse human happiness. Human happiness thrives through sacrifice, since that is what human relationships are based on, all of them, and you can see that quite easily because any relationship anyone engages in requires a give and take dynamic, the fundamentals of which is sacrifice. This is also how we can see that marriage is a reflection of the relationship between Christ and the church (not any worldly, physical church, but the collective body of true believers), since that is a relationship that is SOLELY based on sacrifice.
So Sarah, I think that we have already partially seen some of this in our relationship, where our compasses have started to point towards the same direction. And I pray that they will continue to do so as we fight through thick and thin and become a worthy reflection of the most important relationship of all, the relationship between Christ and his church.