How to Keep Your Love Growing
A woman wrote to Dear Abby: “Do all marriages eventually go stale? Ours has. My husband and I don’t seem to have much to talk about any more. We used to talk about our kids but now they’re grown and gone. Now I have no major complaints about my husband but the old excitement just isn’t there anymore. We watch a lot of television. We read a lot. And we have fun with some friends. But when we’re alone together it’s pretty dull. We even sleep in separate bedrooms now. Is there some way to recapture the old magic?” Reader’s Digest reports that the number one question people ask marriage counselors is “Why don’t we love each other the way we used to?” The truth is every marriage is always either growing together or growing apart. Because it’s a relationship, a living, breathing thing, it never stands still. Relationships never stand still. There are five things which keep a marriage and your love growing.
First, keep on paying attention. Attention means love. It’s the most loving thing you do when you give somebody your attention. When you’re paying attention to somebody you’re saying to them, “I value you. You matter to me. You’re worth listening to.” When you give somebody your attention, you’re actually giving them your life because your time is your life and you’re never going to get that time back. So the most valuable thing you can give somebody is your attention. When you give them that you are actually giving them a part of yourself.
The truth is that’s how you fell in love. You began to pay attention to somebody and they began to pay attention to you. If that hadn’t happened, you would have never fallen in love. And that became the beginning of a relationship. Marriage takes a lot of attention. Do you remember how much attention you used to give to your husband or your wife before you got married? You bought flowers, you wrote notes, you made phone calls. You talked for hours. You spent a lot of time together. In many, many ways during dating and engagement you said, You have my undivided attention. In fact, you thought about them all the time when you weren’t with them.
What happened? You don’t think about your husband/wife all the time now. Your attention shifted. You got complacent. You began to take things for granted. And over time we tend to pay less and less attention to our spouse and more attention to things like bills, babies, budgets, career, hobbies and sports. All of a sudden your husband/wife is no longer the focus of attention of your life. When that happens, the marriage begins to deteriorate. Write this down: I show I care by staying aware. If your marriage is going to keep on growing you’ve got to figure out a way to keep on paying attention to each other. If you don’t do that, your marriage is going to start to crumble. You’ve got to keep on paying attention.
Second, keep on making adjustments. Over the years you’re going to face lots of opportunities to make adjustments. Things are going to change. The kids are going to grow up. You’re going to find yourself moving from time to time. Jobs will changes. Even illnesses force us to make adjustments. Because circumstances keep changing you have to keep adjusting. Moe than anything, we have to adjust to one another. Nobody’s perfect. Somebody wrote to Dear Abby and said, “Dear Abby, I’m 40 years old. I’d like to meet a mature man my age with no bad habits.” Signed Rose. Abby wrote back, “Dear Rose, So would I.” The truth is we all need to learn to grow to adjust to each other but that’s especially true in marriage. The key to making those adjustments is unselfishness. In fact, learning to be unselfish is one of the greatest lessons of life and marriage. If you want to be selfish, don’t get married because to have a successful relationship you have to learn to be unselfish. 1 John 3:18 “Our love should not be just words and talk. It must be true love which shows itself in action.” What does this involve? What does adjusting to your husband or your wife involve? It involves a couple of things.
First, it means thinking about what he or she needs the most. It’s putting your spouse’s needs ahead of your own. Philippians 2:4 “Look out for one another’s interest and not just your own.” I don’t know why it is that the longer we’re married, the less we think about each other’s needs. That’s sort of a crazy thing. The Bible says that we’re supposed to be concerned about other’s needs and serve them. That’s especially true in the home.
Second, adjusting means what the Bible calls submitting to each other which means giving up my rights and the things that I really want in order to meet another person’s needs. Ephesians 5:21 says “Honor Christ by submitting to each other.” Ephesians 5 goes on to say, “Husbands be willing to sacrifice like Jesus sacrificed His life for the church.” Be willing to adjust to meet the other person’s need. That’s what it’s really all about. There’s a lot of things we have to adjust to through life but the most difficult is the little things. We need to adjust to the little things. Maybe it means arriving a little bit later or leaving a little bit earlier. Maybe it means going to bed a little bit later or a little bit earlier. Maybe it means watching what the other person wants to watch on TV or going to the movie they want to go to or the restaurant they want to go to. Maybe it means listening when they need you to listen to them and not when you want to listen. It’s in those little daily decisions to adjust, to meet each other’s needs, that real genuine love is expressed. The test of real love isn’t what you say about how you love each other, it’s how you love one another. So treat your mate as Jesus would.
Third, keep on showing affection. Romans 12 “Love each other with genuine affection and take delight in honoring each other.” Love is not a feeling. It creates feelings, enormous feelings. But love is not a feeling. Love is a choice. It’s a commitment that says, “I’m going to put your best interest ahead of my own.” Anything other than that is not love. It may be lust, attraction or infatuation. But it’s not love unless you’re saying, I want to put your needs ahead of mine. That’s what real love is. And love is a choice. If love were a feeling, God couldn’t command it because you can’t force a feeling. Yet in the Bible over and over God commands you to love. He commands you to love others. You can’t force a feeling. But you can choose to love. You choose who you’re going to love and you choose when you going to love. So make a choice and say, I’m going to choose to love this person that I used to feel affection toward but I don’t anymore” and then the feelings will follow.
What did you do when you fell in love? What you did to fall in love, you must continue to do to stay in love. And if you don’t, you won’t. Actions will always follow feelings, not the other way around. So if you don’t do those things that you used to do that’s why you’ve lost that loving feeling. You know what the greatest enemy of romance is? It is not adultery or anger or bitterness. It’ busyness. You’re just too busy for each other. You don’t have time together anymore. Your schedule is full and your spouse has been sidelined. You’re two ships passing in the night, rushing around, and you don’t have time for each other. Nobody is going to make time for your marriage except you. The University of Nebraska did a study of what makes a fantastic marriage. They discovered that the common denominator in every great marriage was real simple: spending time together. No matter how dedicated you are, you have to spend time together if you want to have a strong, healthy, deep marriage.
Fourth, keep on giving affirmation. Every single person needs affirmation. You need to be affirmed, you need to be adored. One reason that you fell in love with your mate is they affirmed you. Who’s going to fall in love with somebody who doesn’t affirm you? You fall in love with people who express the fact that they love you. Your mate desperately needs affirmation from you. One of your God given roles as a husband/as a wife is to be your husband/wife’s greatest fan. Why is that so important? Because we live in a world where there are a lot of critics. There are a lot of detractors out there. It’s easy to find somebody who will criticize you and put you down. So one of the most important things that you do is you lift up your husband, your wife by affirmation. How often are we suppose to do this? The Bible says in Hebrews 3:13 “Encourage each other every day while it is today.” So it’s a daily habit, something we do everyday.
What do you affirm? Four things: First, affirm their value. You know the word “appreciate” like with a house, means to raise in value. You can raise someone else in value as you appreciate them. As you appreciate them you raise their value and you raise the value of your marriage. Proverbs 12:25 “A word of encouragement does wonders.” A word of encouragement would do wonders for your marriage this next week, for any relationship that you’re in. You appreciate their value. Second, affirm each other’s strengths. You build each other up. The power of praise of seeing someone’s strength and praising that strength is amazing because as you affirm those strengths, you help someone to grow. It is your job to bring out the best in your husband/in your wife. So you make this decision: I’m going to be a dream builder and not a dream buster. I’m going to be someone who decides to not nag but to brag on my spouse. I’m going to give strokes instead of giving pokes. Third, affirm each other’s faith and ministry. That’s very important. Affirm what you’re doing for God’s sake in the world today. Romans 1:12 says “I want us to help each other with the faith that we have. Your faith will help me and my faith will help you.” Now the most important thing you’ve got to do in order to keep your marriage growing is to keep on following Jesus. He is the glue. He is what holds you together when everything is going to ear you apart, when you feel like giving up. Jesus Christ is the glue. Keep on following Jesus. Fourth, affirm them in prayer. Pray for each other but most importantly, pray with each other. James 5:16 “Make this your common practice. Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you can live together whole and healed.” Would you like to live together whole and healed? It tells you. First you admit it when you’re wrong and second you pray for each other and pray with each other.
Fifth, keep on following God’s word. Keep in God’s word. Proverbs 3:6 says “Listen for God’s voice. In everything you do, everywhere you go, He’s the one who will keep you on track.” Marriage magazine published a national study and discovered that one out of three marriages ends in divorce. But when when couples are married in a Christian service, attend church regularly, and pray together or read the Bible together – the divorce rate plummets to one out of every 1,105 marriages. Think about that. That’s the difference that Jesus Christ makes in a marriage. When you’re growing toward God and your husband or wife’s growing toward God, He naturally brings you together.
Your marriage may have been going through a stress season. Maybe it’s been in hibernation and maybe it’s been going through a drought and it’s been dying for lack of water and attention. Maybe it doesn’t look too pretty but it can come back to life. If you’ll do what God tells you to do, if you’ll do it God’s way, your marriage can start growing again.
Which of these areas do you need to work on? Do you need to pay better attention to your husband or your wife? Do you ignore them when they talk to you and not really listen to them? Do you even know what their needs are right now? How about adjustments? Are you willing to make adjustments or have you been stubborn and unbending and expect them to adapt to your schedule? Do you show as much affection as you used to? Or have you let this area of your relationship become stale, stagnant? Do you give daily affirmations and encouragement to your husband or your wife? Are you an encourager or a discourager? Do you give more strokes or pokes? Do you nag or do you brag? Do you affirm their value, their strength, their ministry? Is Jesus Christ the center of your life and your marriage? These are the things that keep a marriage going and growing.
Pray this: “Dear God, I want our marriage to keep growing. Help me to pay better attention to my wife/my husband. Help me to keep on making adjustments, showing affection, giving affirmation. Most of all I want to keep on following You, Jesus. I ask You to give us a love that lasts a lifetime. In Your name I pray. Amen.”
