Stephen Covey is credited with introducing the metaphor of an emotional bank account in his book, The 7 Habits of Highly Successful People. He explained that positive actions are deposits in a relationship which build trust, while negative behaviour drains a relationship. Everything you do in your relationship is either a deposit or a withdrawal. Every smile, every word of encouragement, every act of kindness, every sacrificial deed, is a deposit into your relationship. Every unkind word, every selfish act, every display of indifference, every thoughtless deed, is a withdrawal from your relationship. No relationship can survive endless withdrawals. When the withdrawals outweigh the deposits, emotional bankruptcy results. No relationship becomes bankrupt in a day. It is the conglomeration of acts of omission and commission that eventually push a relationship over the precipice that leads to disintegration.
One crucial question we must all ask ourselves is, ‘Am I a giver, a taker or 50-50 lover?’ Your answer to that question will strongly influence your ability to have and maintain a successful marriage. Each one of us has our own unconscious, private concept of what love is and what love does. This concept is an unseen script that orchestrates how we engage in relationships. It determines how we conduct ourselves in marriage and what our expectations are of the other person. Based on our concept of love, each of us is a giver, taker or 50-50 lover.
Takers
Takers expect marriage to be a relationship of convenience. Their chief expectation, though unspoken, is ‘My way or no way!’ Every relationship has one basic bottom-line for them, ‘What’s in it for me?’ Takers enter a relationship for what they can gain out of it. Any benefit to the other party is purely coincidental. They spell love s-e-l-f. Sometimes selfishness is thinly disguised as need. Needy people are exhausting to be around because they have a parasitic approach to relationships. They are always miserable because their personal happiness depends on what others do or do not do for them. They are critical, manipulative and demanding.
Takers are attracted to givers because they see them as a ticket to satisfaction in life. In reality, no human being can ever totally satisfy another person; we are not equipped to do that. Only a dynamic, vibrant relationship with God can meet our deepest needs and satisfy our heartfelt longings. No one would willingly admit to being a taker but if you consistently fail at relationships and you always attribute the failure of your relationships to the other person’s inadequacies, the cause of the problem might actually be revealed by a cursory glance in the mirror.
50-50 Lovers
50-50 love is potentially the most deceptive concept of love because it seems like a perfectly respectable place to be; at the centre of the spectrum. 50-50 lovers are people who subconsciously expect marriage to be a contractual relationship. They will do their part as long as you do yours. This all sounds like a ‘fair’ proposition but unfortunately life is not always fair. What happens to 50-50 love when a husband loses his job and cannot pay his share of the bills? Or a wife loses her health and cannot meet her husband’s sexual needs? 50-50 love goes out of the window when faced with the trials of life and is quickly replaced by resentment.
50-50 love is storybook love but it cannot survive the vagaries of real life. Marriage is not a contract and the reality is that sometimes your spouse might not be in a position to uphold their part of the bargain. When this happens, 50-50 lovers become victims of their own expectations. As long as your fulfilment depends on someone else meeting your needs or doing certain ‘expected’ things on cue, you will never be happy. Make no mistake; your needs are legitimate and important, but strenuously seeking to get your needs met through your spouse leads to frustration rather than satisfaction.
Givers
Givers see marriage from a covenant perspective. They give for the joy of delighting someone else, not because of what they expect to receive in return. Givers understand that God is a giver and that love is spelt g-i-v-e in His dictionary. Giving is a life-skill without which no Christian can survive. It is the language of love. Choose to invest in your relationship. In marriage, give without waiting for returns. Marriage is a covenant, not a contract. People who approach marriage with a 50-50 contract mentality which says ‘You give this and I will give that…you do this and I will do that’, always miss out on the best that marriage has to offer. Marriage was not designed to function on terms and conditions; it was designed to be a covenant where you give your all for the benefit of the other, without holding anything in reserve.
If you are prepared to give your all to your spouse, you have the seeds of what it takes to succeed in marriage. The beauty of love is that you need not worry about its future. Marriage is a marathon but you only have to concern yourself with the very next step of the journey. All you need to do is to give your best today. Trust God to help you invest in love today and tomorrow will take care of itself. Forty years of happy marriage are made up of individual days of sacrificial giving and loving. The joyful memories which you will look back on forty years from now can be created today.
P.S. Share this article with someone who needs it on Facebook and Twitter.
