Keeping your marriage alive is very essential. The most famous biblical definition of love can be found in 1 Corinthians 13:4-7:
“Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right. Love bears all things; believes all things; hopes all things; endures all things.”
The Bible preaches that we should love one another and incidentally has a wonderful prescription for staying in love.
Falling in love is easy. Staying in love is much harder. What does it take to have a long-term relationship that continues to be successful? Marriage has traditionally been the indicator that we love someone enough to commit our entire life to them; to bear all things, believe all things, hope all things and endure all things within that relationship for the love of our ‘better’ half.
Although marriages change, the keys to sustaining a healthy, lasting marriage are companionship, communication and commitment.
‘There is no more lovely, friendly and charming relationship, communion, or company than a good marriage.”- Martin Luther (1483-1546) German priest & scholar
Bill Doherty states: “The only thing that rivals for sheer challenge in today’s world is marriage, which holds our fondest hopes and our worst fears about permanence of relationships in life.”
Tips For Staying Married
- Marry someone with similar core values as you. Don’t go into your marriage thinking you will transform your lover into who you think they should be. Chains do not hold a marriage together. It is threads, hundreds of tiny threads, which sew people together through the years.
A soul mate marriage does not at all mean that you have found someone you match up with on all the cards – on all the issues, on everything. That would be the most deadly dull thing to even imagine. Instead, it means you’ve found someone and they don’t ever want to blow out that little light inside you. And you feel the same way about them. -Diane Sollee
In marriage, as in all things, the perfect can be the enemy of the good. It is sometimes essential for a husband and a wife to quarrel – they get to know each other better but they should know how to forgive one another in order to stay in the marriage.
Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction. When a guy is happily married, no matter what happens at work, no matter what happens [during] the rest of the day, there’s a shelter when you get home. There’s a knowledge knowing that you can hug somebody without them throwing you downstairs and saying, ‘Get your hands off me.’
- Marry your friend. Friendship is more important that lust or physical attraction, because that friendship is what keeps the marriage together. Heart-thumping passion will change throughout your relationship, but friendships most often deepen over the years.
Marriage, ultimately, is the practice of becoming passionate friends, between husband and wife. Friendship seems to exist by nature, for man is naturally disposed to pairing. It is very important for a lady to choose for marriage a man whom she would choose as a friend if he were a woman because it has been noticed that most unhappy marriages are born out of lack of friendship and not love. It is very important to remember this bible verse that states that: “For wherever you go, I will go: And wherever you lodge, I will lodge, your people will be my people, And, your God, my God.”–Ruth 1:16
Be on the lookout for strains in each other, and with compassion and understanding, lend a helping hand and a mature heart. Helping each other manage emotional strain can yield creative alternatives and build a new foundation for heart-based communication and hope.
- Mutual respect and affirmations on a regular basis are important to keep your friendship alive and growing. Let’s face it, if your partner only has negative things to say to you and about you, life gets pretty grim. On the other hand, if you can only think of negative qualities and actions of your spouse, how is that coming across? And how is that reciprocated? Two negatives in a long-term relationship do not add up to a positive.
Marriage is our last, best chance to grow up; what we direct our attention to creates our experience; sets our outlook, perspective, our mood, and behavior. Do we focus on how our partner loves us, or how he/she fails to love us? On how our marriage fulfills, or fails us? Is the story we present to ourselves and others that our marriage is half empty, or half full? There is a proverb. “As you have made your bed, so you must lie in it”: why don’t you work towards making your bed comfortable for you and your spouse.
Having someone wonder where you are when you don’t come home at night is a very old human need but it means caring about your friend and having each other at heart.
- Genuine affection for each other becomes more important as you age and doesn’t replace sexual activity, but becomes more important. Sexual affection is more important in the early years of your life, even though many older adults continue to enjoy a healthy sexual relationship, too. However physical affection and kindness continue to be more important to keep your marriage going than intercourse.
In marriage, each partner is to be an encourager rather than a critic, a forgiver rather than a collector of hurts, an enabler rather than a reformer and real giving is when we give to our spouses what’s important to them, whether we understand it, like it, agree with it, or not. One of the great illusions of our time is that love is self-sustaining. It is not. Love must be fed and nurtured, constantly renewed. That demands ingenuity and consideration, but first and foremost, it demands time.
- Continue to build intimacy. This means that in addition to being friends, (or because you are friends) you and your partner share emotionally. You tell each other your most intimate feelings; your worst fears and worries, your hopes and dreams, and all the minutia of daily living. Building intimacy still involves passion and keeping the romance alive as you know more about each other’s body than anyone else: you know the smell of their sweat, the curve of their hip and the feel of that hollow at the front of their throat and more.
People think they have to find their soul mate to have a good marriage. You’re not going to “find” your soul mate but create a soul mate years after loving, bearing and raising children and meeting challenges together – then you’ll have “created” your soul mate.
- Choice. Marriage is choice: choice of partner; choice of self; choice of growth, even choice of passion & adventure. Marriage is the continuing choice to stay together even when your spouse has just pissed you off for the last time, or gotten on your last nerve for the umpteenth time. Aside from the commitment to the institution of marriage, the fact that each day in many ways you choose to keep working on the relationship, you choose to think the best of your spouse, you choose to be loving instead of hateful and you choose to grow in your relationship instead of throwing in the towel. The many times daily that you choose to honor your relationship and keep working on your marriage helps keep it intact.
One of the nicest things you can say to your partner is, “If I had it to do over again, I’d choose you again.” It is very important for someone to choose his or her love; then love whatever choice that person has chosen.
Use for quote:
“People think they have to find their soul mate to have a good marriage. You’re not going to “find” your soul mate but create a soul mate years after loving, bearing and raising children and meeting challenges together – then you’ll have “created” your soul mate.”
Also Read: Basic Attitude That Give Way To Satisfaction In Marriage
