This week I’ve dedicated towards talking with single people aiming for marriage.
I wanted to end the week with this column I wrote a while back on how our culture sees love in the wrong way. I thought it was a good way to cap off the week, since it relates to both singles and marrieds.
Sheila’s Marriage Musings: Why Love Shouldn’t Be By Accident
I travel well. I enjoy plane rides, I don’t mind airports, and I’m a big fan of cruise ships. But I don’t pack particularly well.
It’s not that I forget the essentials; it’s that I get stressed out trying to remember them all, let alone trying to accomplish the massive to-do list that I make for myself before I can depart.
But I think this acknowledgement of my pitfalls is actually one more brick in the road towards familial bliss. Certainly it’s not bliss living with me as I frantically reply to emails that have been sitting in my inbox for weeks, or decide that it is imperative that we clean out the fridge right now, even though that rotting stuff in there hasn’t bothered me up until now. Knowing I’m going to be a bear, though, gives my family time to plan for it. They know I’m a wreck, so for the most part, they can laugh it off, realize it’s nothing personal, and eventually we’ll get on the road and all will be well. When we prepare for the rocky road ahead, we end up faring much better.
If we stopped seeing love as an accident, and realized that love may be more of a journey, maybe we’d prepare for it more.
Over the next eleven days, our culture will celebrate love. And yet, for a society that praises love, yearns for love, and chases love, it seems so odd to me that we fail to prepare for love.
On Valentine’s Day, the popular image is Cupid’s arrow, which the plump cherub aims at unsuspecting people, causing them to love completely out of their own control. Or what about the way we speak of love? “As soon as our eyes met I knew I was falling in love.” Love is like falling. There’s nothing you can do it about it; you’re just walking along merrily one day when suddenly something pushes you over a cliff, and there you go, hurtling towards coupledom. It’s Love by Accident. We’re thankful that we’ve found someone, so we count our blessings and prepare to keep falling.
But what happens when the ground hits?
If we stopped seeing love as an accident, and realized that love may be more of a journey, maybe we’d prepare for it more.
Yet when it comes to love, preparation is one of the furthest things from our minds. We’re told to do what feels good, to find the one who completes you, and then to jump in with both feet. What we’re not necessarily trained for is how to keep a relationship going.
Think about the wedding day. We spend, on average in Canada, about $25,000 to tie the knot, and yet very few couples take any kind of marriage preparation course. It’s assumed that love will tide them through. If we spent less on the wedding and invested more in counseling, personality testing, marriage books, or even just interviewing couples who had been happily married for decades, we’d be better off. Maybe the wedding would be a little less extravagant, but imagine the fiftieth anniversary party!
Cupid’s arrow fades, but love doesn’t have to.
When we know that certain stages in marriage are more stressful than others—like when babies are born, the kids start school, or the kids leave home—maybe we’d understand these things are common to all, and work through them, rather than assuming there’s something wrong with our spouse. And if we understood that love is a decision, and not always a feeling, maybe we’d work more at cultivating it. After all, when we decide to forgive, to be kind, to listen, or to hold our tongue, even when we don’t always feel our efforts are reciprocated, we keep the relationship going. When we decide to appreciate, rather than to condemn or nag, we build something far more precious than a career, a hobby, or a bank account. We build love.
Sometimes, in a marriage, we won’t always feel love. I wish every new couple starting out could understand that. But we can still prepare for love. Let’s not love and live by accident; let’s love on purpose. That’s a much richer love than the one our culture so eagerly glorifies.
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Sheila Wray Gregoire has been married for 29 years and happily married for 24! She loves traveling around North America with her hubby in their RV, giving her signature "Girl Talk" about sex and marriage. And she's written 7 books. About sex and marriage. See a theme here? Plus she knits. Even in line at the grocery store.
I’ve been wanting to leave this comment all week, since the theme has been singles wanting to be married. Today’s post seems to be the best one for what I want to say.
In the church we tend to send some very wrong messages to teens and singles about finding a mate and about marriage itself. I grew up hearing that if I did things right, (lived for God, dated in the Faith, saved sex for marriage, etc.) that God would send me someone, and that my marriage would be blessed. Well, I was pretty “good” and followed all the rules I mentioned. I finally met someone and we got married. We have only been married a few years, but we have struggled SO MUCH in our marriage. And in my new church I keep hearing things preached to the young people that I heard growing up, but probably painted a little more rosy by this pastor. “You’ll have a wonderful marriage if you live for God and do things right.” Ugh! Which young lady is going to be devastated in 10 years because she did everything right and things still aren’t good!
Instead why can’t we tell young people that they need to do these things: serve God, date in the Faith, save themselves for marriage. And that they’ll never regret doing that, and there are consequences if they don’t. And that if their marriage isn’t spectacular, God will be there to carry them. But they will have a very good chance at a great marriage.
Sorry, a soapbox of mine, but I really felt like it was relevant this week. Maybe it will help someone.
I love this, Ashley! I think if we just taught people to follow Jesus, everything else would fall into place. Because if we have Jesus, then hopefully we will have discernment and we will marry well. And then, if there are troubles, then He will be with us and carry us. But yes, this idea that “if you do all the right things, life will be rosy” makes it seem like we do all the right things SO THAT life will be rosy, rather than so that we will love God.
I see that with sex, too. We promise people: If you wait until marriage, sex will be awesome! That’s not actually true. Yes, sex will be marginally better, statistically, if you wait. But many people still have big learning curves ahead of them, and for many sex is never perfect. So let’s not promise all these things hoping we can bribe people into doing the right thing. Let’s just point people to God!
My husband and I had a conversation about this a while back. He’s not an ogre, and hasn’t enjoyed our problems any more than I have. Even the ones he’s responsible for. I told him the wording I think we should tell teens instead of the message they are hearing now. And my husband told me he thinks the “everything will be wonderful” line is a much better sell. Well, sure it is! But if I buy something and it isn’t what it was supposed to be, I’m likely to return the item for a refund. (I’m not suggesting we do that with our spouce!) I guess I’m saying there’s a bigger issue with anger, disappointment, maybe resentment toward God if you believed the “wonderful” line and it didn’t pan out.
It wasn’t love at first sight for me with my husband. I wasn’t automatically smitten with him after our first date. He was nice. He was respectful. It wasn’t until after about a month of dating that I thought that maybe he could be the one. On one of our dates to a Pittsburgh Pirates MLB game vs Cleveland Indians at Three Rivers Stadium(before it was demolished), I wore my Indians shirt. He of course had his Pirates gear on. Funny, considering I was from Pennsylvania and he’s from Ohio. LOL He told me that’s when he knew I was “the one”. I still wasn’t entirely convinced at that point.
But here we are…almost 18 years in. With a middle-schooler son we’re raising. I’d agree…love gets better over time. There’ll be ups and downs but if you stick it out, it’ll be worth it.
I love your story!
It boils down to expectations. Of course, we shouldn’t teach our kids absolutes like marriage and sex are going to be amazing just because they’ve followed all the Christian rules. There are no absolute equations, even when we faithfully follow all God’s directions.
I saw Chrisitan marriages in poor shape all around me growing up. I didn’t expect marriage to be rosey 100% of the time. But, what I personally didn’t anticipate was that when problems did strike, we wouldn’t be equipped to find resolution on our own. And then our Christian advisors weren’t that helpful. We were told to just follow the bible and pray. It’ll all work out. Well, it did work out, but we had to find outside help because we had trouble with conflict resolution.
Singles need to be taught practical tools where biblical principles are played out in real life (i.e. life application) and given realistic expectations. Be cautiously optimistic. 🙂
For a possible topic…how do you teach your children something is not okay to say or do without undermining your spouse? For example, my husband feels it is ok to call somebody “fat” or “stupid” if he deems them fat or stupid. I disagree. I don’t think I’m going to change my husband on this matter. However, my kids are beginning to follow his lead. He typically laughs at it if they use such words. He gets very upset if I tell the boys using specific words or certain actions are not ok and that I am undermining him as a parent because he uses that language or does that action. The few times my boys have called their dad stupid, he gets very angry and tells me it is my poor discipline or mothering skills that have resulted in our kids saying this (never mind he modeled the behavior). My purpose is not to berate my husband, we both have our strengths and weaknesses. But how do I teach my kids a behavior or word isn’t okay without undermining my spouse ? How do you move forward as a team (in raising kids) when one parent isn’t willing to compromise?
It’s especially hard to tell your kids not to call people names when the new President of the USA does/did the exact same thing .
My husband isn’t very politically-correct (like your husband). It’s gotten him in trouble in life. I make sure to model the opposite behavior for my son and I’ve had discussions with our son to say that it’s never ok to call anybody names or make fun of them because they aren’t as smart as you or aren’t as good as you at something. Because, in my experience, if you act a certain way at home, then that’s how you’re gonna act in real life.
Thankfully, my son chooses to model my behavior at school. There’s a big anti-bullying push in our local schools. Supposedly, the new FLOTUS Melanie Trump’s platform will be anti-bullying. How ironic?
Yes! I’ve been married for over 10 years now. Most days I wouldn’t say that I’m “in love” with my hubby (though that feeling does occasionally pop up) but I definitely love him more now than I did when we were first married. I love the journey analogy!