A Treatise on Marriage: Part V: Living with a Loser

In spite of your best preparations, certainly in spite of your best intentions, even after prayerful consideration, you  will possibly get married only to find that you've married a loser. I don't mean you marry someone who gave all impressions of being a morally upright individual only to see them jump off into drunkenness, dissipation, lasciviousness and all manner of moral turpitude, all without a wink of regret. That is certainly to be pitied, but what I really mean is that after the leap, you find the person you married isn't what you want in a spouse and is, in fact, much less.

You assumed that maturity would come, but it doesn't. You assumed that they would overcome that specter of selfishness that hangs around us all in our early years, but they instead are the ones that are overcome. You may have even assumed that there should be an evenness between the two of you, with you and your spouse being pretty much neck-and-neck in the race toward perfection. You would have roughly the same amount of diminishing flaws, these fading more and more with the passage of time. Instead, you sprint ahead whilst they seem to lag at the block. You run; they sashay. You are a rocket of moral ascension; they, a spitwad.

You look at this dilemma with mounting frustration. You are committed to sticking with this marital cripple (remembering Part IV, Item 2), yet you perhaps entertain thoughts, wondering just what you have gotten yourself into. Perhaps you have even wondered if that fellow that has written "A Treatise on Marriage" knows what he's talking about. This is the Internet, after all. Fools publish every day, without restraint. Maybe in your darkest moments, you have thought you deserve better and might just be able to find something better, were the bonds severed in a morally acceptable way that didn't lead to prison time. Hopefully, after these dark moments, you didn't Google "poisons deadly undetectable".

Being married to a loser is a fairly common affair. See yourself as being a member of a noble brotherhood/sisterhood. See yourself as suffering for the sake of your own spiritual growth along with the countless others who have had those same dark thoughts and exited into the bright light of sensibility. Yes, there are losers everywhere, and many of them are married to someone like you. So exactly what is it that can bring you from darkness into light? Well, there is no panacea, but remember these few facts and it will hopefully attenuate your suffering to a tolerable level.

1.  They can't help that they are losers. - It's bound up in their natures. Their parents raised them as losers, teaching them all the tricks and secrets of being so thoroughly irritating and wrath-provoking. Such seemingly innate behavior is virtually impossible to untrain. The untraining process involves infinite patience on your part, the long-suffering spouse married to the loser. You will need to provide loving acceptance while the process works, often for years and years without seeing much in the way of discernable progress. Strive to be content in the process, knowing that somewhere between here and eternity, they will hopefully break free.
2. They cannot see how much better you are, therefore any contrasts or comparisons are lost. - In their own eyes, they are just fine, certainly no worse than you are. In fact, they may strangely think they are a better spouse for you than you are for them. How perverse! This being true, your living example of spousal perfection will be mostly ineffective in bringing about any change. This doesn't mean you should abandon your quest for perfection. After all, why should you lower your standards. 
3. There is a chance that you might experience Divine Intervention and they will regain moral consciousness. - We shouldn't be hopeless. The Almighty has, after all, done some pretty impressive things, and usually with a whole lot less to work with. Let you prayers be ceaseless, your hope continually buoyed by the idea that today--yes, Lord: today--just might be the day the light of realization shines in their dark soul and brings them to where they can love you as you deserved to be loved. 
4. But for God's grace, you could be the loser in this relationship. - What if the unthinkable were true? What if you were the loser and they were the one suffering? The only thing that kept this from happening is that God shed his grace on you, making you the perfect spouse, creating in you a superior conscience, and bringing you to the point where your moral authority would create the gulf you now lament. It's hard to see who the blessed one is here: the loser remaining in ignorance or the victim of said irreparable ignorance. 

There is so much more that could be said about your dilemma, but it is not my desire to pour too much of the salt of revelation into your open wounds. And with nothing left to add at this point, I leave you with one last command:

Print this off and give it to your spouse. It was written for them.

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Yes. It's true. The things we are thinking about them, they are thinking about us. We're both right. We're both losers, incapable of being the perfect spouse and unlikely to change, apart from that Divine Inoculation. Until that happens, I'll ask you this: if you love this person, or if you have ever loved them, don't give up that quest for perfection. Don't be content as the loser. Work with all your might to be the perfect spouse for them. Also, in thinking about your spouse as the loser, know that no amount of cajoling, ridiculing, fault-finding, snide commentary, or camouflaged/uncamoflaged loathing will bring about the change from loser to perfect spouse. The only thing that will bring about any chance of change is your own example of striving to be the perfect spouse. They will work to become the perfect spouse when they see you being the perfect spouse. Don't give up. Hang in there. You have only one failure to deal with. God has it tougher; everyone he deals with is a failure.