“I work all day at my job!”
“I work all day at this house, with the children!”
It becomes a competition of who does more, who does less, and who can see the contribution you’re putting out there. We become so blinded by what we’re giving out that we miss what our partner is supplying. We become so focused on where we’re taken advantage of that we totally miss our own selfish attitude.
Who’s the most selfish person in the relationship?
It’s the one who’s breathing. It’s him, it’s her, it’s you, it’s me. We’re all selfish. That’s the easy part of marriage. The hard part is moving past selfishness and working towards servanthood. Serve your spouse; don’t spend your time wondering how they can serve you.
Before you become angry, fed up, or burned out with your partner, consider how you might better improve yourself. What can you do to cultivate the relationship? What plank exists in your own eye while you’re distracted with the sawdust they left on the floor?
From personal experience, you get back what you put in. Your reward is dependent on how you run the race. Your harvest is based on what you’re planting and feeding into the soil. Just like your banking account, the deposits have to exceed the withdrawals, otherwise you’re bankrupt. Invest to see a future profit.
3. Learn what love is. A majority of marriages that end in divorce are because of a lack of love. They start with what they think is love, but it’s not. A lot of the time what we assume is love is really addiction. Hang with me, now.
We are addicted to feeling good. We need to feel appreciated, taken care of, desired, found attractive. We thrive on compliments, we feel best when we are needed. It gives us a sense of purpose to take care of someone, and it gives us a sense of peace to have someone take care of us. And while yes, I believe God created marriage with a partnership in mind, we confuse love with performance. We convolute love with just emotion. So when we are hurt, our love takes a hit. We base our ability to love someone on how they love us back. We base our continued love for someone on how it feels at the moment. We take back love when ours isn’t reciprocated.
If you find yourself doing any of the above in your own relationship, don’t beat yourself up too bad. You’re in good company. It’s called being human and we all would like the perfect marriage. We eat food based on what tastes good. And we stay committed to someone based on the continued performance of our spouse. We’re basically grading our marriage, and we are using a pass or fail sliding scale.
I love ice cream because it’s delicious. Especially chocolate chip! I love my husband, but he isn’t always pleasing to my palate. Sometimes he’s downright bitter.
If we desire a happier marriage, we have to enlist a bit of Christ-like behavior. We have to try and love more like Jesus does. We have to understand and discover that real, unbreakable love isn’t based on what we can get out of it. Real, unconditional love is the kind that dies for you even when you hate it. It’s the kind that forgives you even when you are the weapon of that death. It’s the kind of love that loves the unlovable, that loves even when it gets nothing in return.
I’m not asking you to be crucified like a martyr for your marriage, but I do think you’ll grasp a taste of the divine when you can try and sample what He placed before us as an example of love. We are the bride of Christ, and the love He’s laying down, can’t nobody model, but it comes back to that thing I mentioned in the first paragraph. Work in progress. We’re all working towards that perfection we can achieve through Him. Does that mean a perfect marriage? No. But it does mean a happier, healthier one if we can try a little harder to understand that real love He modeled.
When you walk in that kind of love for your spouse, you love them even when they say something thoughtless. You forgive them when they fail you. You love them when you’re not feeling like it, and you love them even when they have nothing to give in return. That is love.
We love Christ because He first loved us (1 John 4:19), and true, long-standing love is achieved through giving of yourself without expectation of what you’ll get in return.
We can’t place too much expectation on our marriage or having the perfect marriage. The only perfect marriage is between Jesus and the Church. To love your spouse is to mean that even when they don’t meet that high expectation, we still love. We love like Christ, because He first loved us. I found that by modeling that kind of love towards my husband, he in turn loved me the same.
My husband and I only expect perfection in Jesus, and our true joy and contentment cannot be found in one another or some idea of a perfect marriage. They can only be found in Him. We have found happiness in remembering that on a day-to-day basis. We model His love to one another, but we also understand that kind of love can only truly be found in Him.
