When I was a child, I absolutely adored fairytales. Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and Snow White were my heroines, in that order. I loved their stories of courage, their triumphs over injustice and most importantly, the fact that they were eventually swept off their feet and carried away by some handsome prince. The part I never liked about these stories was the inevitable ending – ‘So they lived happily ever after…The End’. I always felt it was most unfair to end the story at that point because I could sense instinctively that that was actually just the beginning. So it is with marriage. The real drama begins when the Prince and Princess get married and begin to live together. When the suit and the gown have been put away, then the business of making love last forever begins. Then the realisation dawns…‘happily ever afters’ are hard work! They don’t just happen. Someone has to make them happen.
Undoubtedly, you know a couple whose ‘happily ever after’ has become ‘once upon a time’. The dream has metamorphosed into a nightmare. It might be you; it might have been your parents or perhaps your sibling, a close friend or a colleague at work. Heartbreak and shattered dreams surround us every day. All sorts of people find themselves in the valley of lost love and my heart goes out to them. My concern is much less for those who view love as a perishable commodity and therefore do not see the need to put forth an effort to preserve it. The following quote is credited to the much married movie star Zsa Zsa Gabor. ‘People don’t understand that love comes and love goes. And when love goes, it is better to separate and remain friends than to stay together and become enemies’. Little wonder she had been married nine times at the last count! Your perspective of love will inevitably colour your experience of love. However, my heart bleeds for those who genuinely expected love to last forever, who said ‘I do’ and really meant it, who desired to keep their love alive but didn’t know how.
Contrary to the experiences that many have had, the Bible declares that ‘Love never fails [never fades out or becomes obsolete or comes to an end]’ (1 Corinthians 13:8) and ‘Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it’ (Song of Solomon 8:7). So why is there a discrepancy between God’s plan and our experience? Because everything God says we can have is conditional upon us doing what He says we need to do to have it. We can have the forever kind of love only if we do what we need to do to have it. The challenge is that many of us don’t know what we need to do to experience the kind of love that God wants us to have.
The truth is that love in a relationship is cause and effect; it comes and goes only when we don’t know what to do to make it stay. It takes more than choosing the right partner to secure a happy marriage. You must also be prepared to make the right choices in your marriage if you want it to work. There is a price to pay to make love stay. Happy marriages are never accidental. I have never met a happily married couple who said ‘We never expected our marriage to work out! This all happened by chance…’ Every happily married couple I know can tell you about the price they paid and the choices they had to make. You can have a great marriage…if you are prepared to pay the price.
The price of a great marriage is growth. Jesus put it bluntly in Matthew 19:11-12 [MSG] when He said, ‘Not everyone is mature enough to live a married life. It requires a certain aptitude and grace. Marriage isn’t for everyone…But if you’re capable of growing into the largeness of marriage, do it.’ Navigating our way successfully through married life takes skill. It requires us growing out of the single mindset and into the marriage mindset. Our ability to grow in the attitude and aptitude required to make marriage work will determine how successful we will be at it. Sometimes, growth can be painful because it requires us to take full responsibility for our actions rather than being able to blame someone else. It challenges us to be selfless when we would rather not be. It calls us to summon our highest levels of creativity and bring them to bear on our marriage when we would prefer to coast along and accept whatever comes our way. In what areas of your life have you been resisting growth? What one thing could you change today that will transform the atmosphere of your marriage? When we choose growth, we experience a new level of freedom to determine the outcomes of our marriage and we rise to the occasion with all our strengths and abilities. If you have chosen to say ‘I do’, you owe yourself no less than that.
