Love is a Choice (More Marriage Advice)

After reading Summer’s and Khaled’s posts of marriage advice, I’m struck by a concurrent theme: love is a choice.

It is also best experienced as a verb rather than a noun, in fact, as a present continuous verb. It is action word, an action that sets other actions in motion.

Love is NOT a feeling, and this is what trips most people up. Not to discount the all-encompassing elation of that ‘in love’ feeling, when it is so palpable you can smell, taste, and breathe ‘being in love’; it is an amazing time when you realize: “On my, THIS is it! He makes me feel so alive! Colors are more bright when we are together!”. The ‘in love’ feeling is part of the building blocks of your initial attraction, but, it doesn’t last forever. Actually, this is a good thing, as this time in life leaves us unable to do much else then revel in the glory of the feeling. If everyone stayed in this season of love, the world would come to a halt and not much else would get done.

Most of us get married while the ‘in love’ feeling is still our primary emotional response to one another. We make our vows to be together forever at the peak of the limerence curve, when we really can’t imagine that things will be anything less than what they are that day. Then after six months, when we have had our first argument, felt slighted, smelled one another’s morning breath or gotten pregnant, the ‘feeling’ begins to fade. We mourn its loss, we wonder what is wrong, dangerous, fearful thoughts like: ‘is it over? Is this all there is?” lurk in our minds in the night.

The next step is a scary one…sex isn’t the wild, crazy exploratory time it was in the beginning. Maybe unspoken expectations of marital relations leave one or the other disappointed. The jokes and criticisms of others in unhappy marriages come back to haunt you. Maybe the husband gets a jolt when he actually looks twice at another woman, thinking that after marriage he wouldn’t be doing that as much. Maybe the wife has a strong emotional response to a compliment given in innocence, and it surprises her.

This is a good time to talk about it and build communication skills when the topic is less than pleasant. Don’t go into all the details, but do talk about it, mourn the loss of that special time and vow to look for ways to re-ignite. Re-affirm the choice to love. Ask the other what you can do to make them ‘feel’ loved, what behaviours or words make you ‘feel’ less than loved. Just watching the other make an effort towards you can in and of itself stir positive feelings again.

New feelings then begin to emerge. Trust. Safety. Contentment. These are the corner pillars of the foundation you built on when committing to one another for life. They will hold the strong house you build together.

Spiritual Foundations

I completely forgot an important part of the foundation of marriage to people of faith (oh, how I love being in a country where people still talk about faith!!! I would get laughed off the internet if my readership were secular Americans). When faith in God is at the center of a marriage, as the writer of Proverbs states: “A three strand cord is not quickly broken”. When God and His priorities are woven into your relationship like the cords of a rope are woven, a marriage is greatly strengthened and can withstand both the pressures and pulls of outside influence.

W hen blogger Hani Masoud was getting married, his response to one of my comments was something about how Evangelical Christians in America get divorced at the same rate as the rest of the population. I had heard the same statistics from a Gallup poll, but when my husband and I went through old address books and counted divorces among friends of ours (both in divorce-crazy California and the conservative MidWest), it was more like 5% of everyone we knew, not 50%. It’s not like we have the most holy friends in the world, either. Huge discrepancy. HUGE. Yet completely un-reported, since secular media can’t bear the thought of reporting anything positive about people of the mono-theistic faiths.
That prompted a little research, and an interesting discovery. That same Gallup poll showed that when couples pray together every day, the divorce rate drops to 1:1,056. We realized we pray together three times a day: at supper, praying with the kids, and at night before we sleep. The last words we say or hear before we sleep are our mutual worship of the Almighty, prayers for people in need, our families and one another. When I hear my husband ask God’s specific blessings for my life, I am both strengthened in his love for me, mine for him, and strengthened in faith in God.

Be encouraged!