Love

By ANGELIQUE VACCARO

 

The Bible says in 1 John 4:19 “We love because he first loved us.” 

Love starts with God. God loving us. Then we need to love ourselves so that in turn we can love others. “Love your neighbor as yourself.” (Mark 12:31) 

If from the start we don’t love who we are, how can we provide love for someone else? We can’t give away what we don’t have, and can we truly love ourselves without knowing how much God loves us? We must love ourselves otherwise we will project our insecurities onto our spouse. We will believe that they can fix us and fill what’s empty in us. Thus, we will be forever unsatisfied and cause our marriage to weaken because of our unrealistic expectations.

Love is something priceless in which we don’t realize its worth. We want love to be a natural thing, but because of the fall and our separation from God, we can’t do it.

The dictionary tells us that love is “an intense feeling of deep affection.” It is not just a feeling. Feelings are unstable; they change. They come and go like the wind, so we can’t let our feelings dictate our life even though we need feelings in marriage. We have to understand that love is deeper than that. Love comes from God, for God is love. “Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.” (1 John 4:7-8) 

How incredible is that? We must learn how to love the way God loves us. And we must trust that He will help us love our spouse the way we should.

God is love, and we know we need love to build and maintain our marriage. We must allow God to be the center of it all. Without Him, marriage will certainly fail. We love not with simply our own will and power but really because of Him loving through us. So we need to have God in our hearts to love others and, more specifically, the spouse that He gives us.

“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.” (1 Corinthians 4-7)

We require all these love qualities to have a strong and successful marriage. Without love, marriage is impossible because everything in marriage flows from love. Love is a gift, a treasure, and because God loves us in our imperfection, we must love our spouse who is imperfect too. We need to love unconditionally everyday exactly like how God loves us! 

Love is a choice of the heart, from the heart! Our heart produces love. If our heart is not in the right place in our marriage, we will close ourselves to love and to our spouse. We will become unloving and unlovable. Loving will then become harder or even impossible. It is our responsibility to love. We make the choice to love our spouse no matter what, and for that we need God’s grace. We must renew our love for our spouse every day! 

We are imperfect people, so we love imperfectly. Because of the original sin, we separated ourselves from the perfect love of God. But God loves us so much that He sent us His son Jesus, to be our savior and make a new covenant with us. The source of love we desperately need will never come from our spouse; our spouse is not God. 

The reason why people are disappointed in their marriage is that they have a pre-set idea on how it should be. They think that their spouse will give them the love they need. Unfortunately, our spouse will never be able to fulfill the desire we have to be loved the way we need to be loved. “The only source that can fuel a lifetime of love is the person who perfectly, permanently and powerfully loves us: God.”  – Jimmy Evans, Marriage Today – 

We should stop placing unrealistic expectations on our spouse, because they will always fail. Perfect love only comes from a perfect source: God! Women have the tendency to think that a man exists to make them happy, like in the movies! He is supposed to be this perfect, charming prince who comes to save them and make them happy for the rest of their lives! However once conflict arises, they are very disappointed. They feel betrayed and think they made a mistake. Marriage is not how they pictured it. 

It is exactly the same for men! They believe a woman is this perfect housewife who serves them and responds to their needs every day with a willing heart and a smile on her face. No! We are responsible for our own happiness! We often go into marriage with a lot of immaturity, naivety and unrealistic expectations. We make up this ideal in our mind and believe that what we expect is what’s going to be. But the reality of life is way different than what we envisioned, and we have to wake up and grow up fast. This is real marriage!

Don’t be defeated reading these words; there is hope! God gives us grace to help us love the best we can to have a healthy, fulfilling and happy marriage. Read along as we will discover together what to do and what not to do, to have the marriage God desires us to have.