One thing I’m seeing through all of this is that the more I approach Del with love, the more I find my own heart opening back up to him. The more I make the effort to show him love, the more we seem to be connecting again too. I think that’s what choosing love in marriage is starting to mean to me. It isn’t pretending everything is perfect or ignoring the things that still need work. It’s deciding what kind of marriage I actually want and recognizing that sometimes I have to make the first move toward creating it.
Now, does that mean everything is suddenly perfect between us? HECK NO. We still have things to work through, and I know it’s going to take time for us to fully heal from some of the things we’ve gone through together. There’s even a part of me that wonders sometimes if what I’m seeing right now is temporary. Maybe we’ll fall back into old habits again. Maybe there will be another hard season that tests us. After all, we’ve been married long enough for me to know that life definitely isn’t going to stop throwing challenges our way just because we’re getting along better right now.
But I’ve also found myself asking a couple of pretty simple questions lately. Would I really want to spend my life being miserable with Del sitting beside me? No. Do I truly want to live a life where he isn’t in it at all? Also no. And when I really sit with those two answers, they tell me quite a bit about what I actually want. I don’t want to simply stay married for the sake of saying we’re still married. I want us to actually enjoy each other again. I want the connection. I want the friendship. I want to be able to look at this man I’ve spent so many years with and remember WHY I chose him in the first place.
If you’ve been reading Sharing Life’s Moments for a while, you already know I’ve never tried to convince anyone that Del and I have some picture-perfect marriage. I’ve shared plenty of our ups and downs over the years. When I wrote about some of the hard truths I’ve learned about married life, one of the biggest truths was that there have been times when I’ve considered leaving. There have been times when we haven’t particularly liked each other very much. But after 18 years of marriage together, I’ve learned that marriage isn’t built on always FEELING in love with your spouse. Feelings change depending on what you’re going through, how tired you are, what somebody said three days ago that you’re STILL annoyed about, and about a million other things. Love has to go deeper than that.
Choosing Love in Marriage When You Don’t Feel Like It
I think one of the things I’m realizing now is that sometimes we wait for our spouse to make us FEEL loving toward them before we’re willing to start showing them love again. I know I’ve done it. I can get caught up in thinking, Well, if he would do this differently, then I would respond differently. Or, Why should I keep trying when I don’t feel like he’s trying as hard as I am? Then before you know it, you’re both waiting on the other person to make the first move and wondering why nothing between you is changing.
Funny enough, Del taught me a version of this lesson YEARS ago with something as silly as cold weather. I wrote about it in How to Avoid Showing Your Spouse Temperature-Controlled Love after he told me that apparently my love for him stopped at about 45 degrees because I wasn’t willing to crawl out of my warm bed to walk him to the door. At the time it was something we laughed about, but it also made me think about how easy it is to show love when it’s convenient for us. It’s a little different when showing love requires us to get uncomfortable.
I’m starting to realize that applies to a whole lot more than getting out of a warm bed.
It’s easy for me to be loving toward Del when I’m feeling loved by him. It’s easy when we’re laughing, getting along, and everything between us feels good. It’s MUCH harder when I’m carrying hurt feelings, when I’m frustrated with him, or when I feel like I’m the one putting in more effort. Yet lately, I’ve been trying to approach him with love anyway, and somewhere along the way something I wasn’t really expecting started happening. I started FEELING more loving toward him again.
That doesn’t mean I’m ignoring the things that need to be addressed. I want to make that VERY clear because I don’t believe loving your spouse means becoming a doormat. I don’t believe one person should carry an entire marriage forever, and I definitely don’t believe anyone should tolerate abuse or continual disrespect because they’re supposed to “love harder.” That’s not what I’m talking about.
I’m talking about the normal hard seasons of marriage where two imperfect people have hurt each other, gotten wrapped up in life, stopped communicating the way they should, allowed resentment to build, or simply gotten so comfortable together that they stopped doing the things that helped them fall in love in the first place.
Marriage Isn’t Always Going to Be 50/50
Marriage isn’t always 50/50. I’ve never understood why we try to make it sound like it is. There are going to be times when one person is carrying more of the load. There may be a season when I’m doing more of the work on our relationship because Del simply doesn’t have it in him at that moment. There may come another season when I’m the one barely holding things together and he’s the one carrying us. That’s LIFE. The problem comes when one person is expected to carry everything forever.
I actually learned some of this during the early years of our marriage too. I wrote about it when I shared some of the books that helped me when I was a discouraged wife. Our first year of marriage was HARD. I remember wondering if I’d made another mistake and being scared to death that I was headed toward another failed marriage. I started reading everything I could get my hands on because I desperately wanted things to change. What I eventually started noticing was that when I changed some of the ways I approached our marriage, Del responded differently.
Apparently I’m a little hardheaded because here I am all these years later learning another version of the same lesson.
Except I think I understand it differently now.
Back then, I think a lot of my focus was on How do I fix my marriage? Now I’m realizing there are parts of marriage I simply cannot fix by myself. I can’t control Del. I can’t control how quickly he works through something. I can’t control what he says or how he responds to every situation. What I CAN control is the kind of wife I choose to be and the way I approach the man I say I love.
Sometimes God Is Working Where We Can’t See It
And this is also where God comes into it for me.
I truly believe God can be working on another person even when we don’t see it. That’s hard because we want evidence. We want to pray about something tonight and wake up tomorrow morning to a completely changed spouse. Wouldn’t THAT be nice? Instead, sometimes we’re praying for months or even years and wondering if anything we’re doing is making a difference.
That’s probably one reason War Room has connected with so many wives. I’ve talked about the movie before when I shared movies I think married couples should watch, and there is a reason that particular movie has stayed with me. A LOT of wives have lived some version of that story. Maybe not the exact circumstances, but they’ve known what it’s like to pray for a marriage when they weren’t sure what was happening on the other side of those prayers. They’ve known what it’s like to want God to change their husband only to find out God had some things He wanted to work on in THEIR heart too.
I know I’ve certainly been guilty of praying something along the lines of, God, would you PLEASE make this man see what he’s doing?!
Meanwhile, God may very well be saying, Crystal, since I’ve got you here, let’s talk about you for a minute too.
That’s not nearly as much fun.
But maybe that’s part of what is happening now. Maybe some of the change I’m asking God to make in our marriage has to start with what He’s doing inside of me. That doesn’t mean Del doesn’t have things he needs to work on because he certainly does, and so do I. It just means I don’t have to wait for every single thing about him to change before I start working on the things I CAN change.
I’m Seeing Something Change Between Us
The more I approach him with love, the more my heart seems to soften toward him. The more my heart softens, the easier it becomes to see the GOOD again instead of constantly looking at everything that’s wrong. We’re talking more. We’re connecting more. I’m enjoying him more. And after everything we’ve been through, I’m grateful for that.
Do I still wonder sometimes if it will last? Yep. I’m human. But I’m also starting to realize that worrying about whether something good will eventually end is a pretty quick way to miss the good while it’s happening.
I don’t know what the next chapter of our marriage looks like. None of us really do. I just know that I don’t want to live miserably beside a man I actually WANT in my life because we’re both too stubborn, too hurt, or too scared to start loving each other differently.
Love really is a journey, and for it to truly blossom, I think we have to be willing to walk through ALL of life’s challenges together. There may even be seasons when it feels like you’re the only one working on the relationship. That doesn’t mean you should carry it alone forever, but I do believe God can be working on the other person’s heart during those seasons even when you can’t see it happening.
Maybe that’s one of the biggest things this season with Del is teaching me. I can’t control tomorrow. I can’t guarantee that we’ll never hurt each other again, never get disconnected again, or never have another season where marriage feels HARD. After 18 years, I know better than to make promises like that.
What I can do is decide how I want to love him today, and I think that’s really what choosing love in marriage comes down to for me. It isn’t one giant decision you make on your wedding day and you’re magically finished. Sometimes you have to choose that person again when life isn’t romantic, when feelings have gotten complicated, and when there is still healing that needs to happen.
And right now, the more love I give this man, the more I’m discovering that MY heart is finding its way back to him too.
Talk to us in the comments:
Have you ever noticed that changing the way YOU approached your spouse ended up changing something in your own heart too? What did that season teach you about love and marriage?
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