About two million couples get married in the U.S. each year. Of that number, something like 225,000 of them began their relationship online. Imagine a couple that is about to get married. They didn’t meet in a bar, which is where many people go to find a match, nor in church, which is a better choice for meeting someone with whom to spend your life. No, they met online, using an AI-powered dating service that requires members to answer a sophisticated 200-question survey.

This thirty-something couple paid $100-a-month to join the site, filled out the comprehensive questionnaire, and registered their profile. Instead of using an internet cheat sheet to impress potential dating-partners, the two of them answered the questions honestly and to the best of their ability. They really wanted to find the right person.

They begin corresponding and, after a few weeks, decided to meet. But even before their first face-to-face, the CEO of the dating service texted them to set up a Zoom meeting. The couple wondered why he wanted to talk with them. What could motivate the CEO of the world’s fastest-growing dating site to set up a meeting with them?

At that Zoom meeting, the CEO told them, “Of the six million questionnaires submitted worldwide over the past three years, yours are the first to score a 100% compatibility rating across all 29 personality dimensions. Nothing like this has ever happened before! It is virtually impossible. If ever there was a match made in AI heaven, it’s yours. Invite me to the wedding! Oh, and I’d like to hire you as our spokespeople for 2026.”

These people we are imagining are the most compatible couple since Adam and Eve. They are perfectly suited for each other. He jokes that he should change his last name to “Right” so that he can be Mr. Right and she can be Mrs. Right on the marriage license.

So, if something like that really happened, would it guarantee a happy and successful marriage? The answer – even an AI will tell you – is no. Finding Mr. or Ms. Right does not guarantee a successful marriage, but when each member of the couple becomes the person God intends them to be, it does.

“I wish someone had told me that earlier.”

Ann Tyler wrote a novel titled, A Patchwork Planet, in which the main character is a thirty-two-year-old divorced man. Because of his job, he spends a great deal of time with elderly people, some of whom have been married for fifty years or more. As he watches them, he comes to a profound conclusion. “I was beginning to suspect that it made no difference whether they’d married the right person. Finally, you’re just with who you’re with. You’ve signed on with her, put in a half a century with her, grown to know her as well as you know yourself or even better, and she’s become the right person. Or the only person, might be more to the point.”

Then he says poignantly, “I wish someone had told me that earlier.”

That is what I am telling readers in this article. Marrying “the right person” does not guarantee a good marriage, but becoming the right person (in this case, the right people) does. And no one knows how to help people to become the right person better than Jesus. When both members of a married couple become his apprentices, rely on his help, and seek his blessing, they will have a marriage that not even the best dating service can provide.

When a couple marries, they give themselves to each other with vows, the joining of right hands, and the giving and receiving of rings. But the foundation for a great marriage does not rest on the couple’s act of giving themselves to each other for life, but on the giving of themselves to God for eternity. That is what makes the difference.

All great marriages are three-dimensional. The first and most visible dimension is the one that exists between the couple. It is rich in itself, layered, complex, and beautiful; but there is more. The second dimension, which is just as real but not quite as prominent as the first, exists in the relationship between their marriage and others: children, family members, friends, and the church.

But it is the third dimension that stretches a marriage up to heaven: a shared relationship with God. Without this, marriage remains two-dimensional, which is to say, it remains flat. But with it, a marriage can become a work of art, sculpted in cooperation with the Divine Artist himself: a stunning, three-dimensional representation in which the beauty of Christ’s love for his church shines.