Recently, I asked the husband of a young couple seeking to improve their marriage, “Do you ever have a warm thought, even a fleeting one, about your wife when you’re not with her?” He replied (as I suspected he would), “Yes, of course I do”. Then I asked him if he had ever reported those thoughts to his wife when he got home that night. He stared blankly at me for a moment before finally telling me that he hadn’t, quickly adding that it had never occurred to him. I assured him that he had given a very common, almost universal, response, but that he could use that new-found awareness to make a difference in his marriage. And, so could his wife, who admitted that she didn’t communicate those things either.
Think about that for a moment. Spouses often have loving thoughts of each other when they are apart during the day, but they rarely let their partners know about it. I call those instances “missed opportunities,” thoughts which could otherwise emotionally lubricate the relationship. When you begin sharing these thoughts, you are simply making known something you already think. But it tells your spouse that when he or she is out of sight, they’re not out of mind. To be sure, that is a powerful bonding moment because it speaks to the importance your spouse has in your thinking. You might be surprised to learn just how many people do not think their spouses even have time to think about them when they’re away at work.
As small as such a change is, it has a disproportionately positive impact on your marriage. You see, it’s the small things that most often make the difference cumulatively in continuously invigorating the intimacy between two people.
Think back on the days of your courtship when you were trying to win the heart of your girlfriend or boyfriend. You were likely doing many small, but thoughtful things for him or her, behaviors which have simply disappeared over time after you got married. Like opening doors for each other, walking beside, not in front of, one another, complimenting (or even noticing) your wife’s hair or how nice your husband looks in his new shirt, making certain you introduce your spouse who is standing beside you to someone you know but your spouse doesn’t, or openly admiring some strength your spouse has that he or she is exhibiting at the moment. It means a thousand different ways of letting your spouse continuously know of your love. You may think it’s a natural part of the business of living together, resolving conflict, and keeping up a household to forget these smaller details. Perhaps it is, but you do so at the peril of your marriage.
It’s easy to underestimate the importance those things had in nurturing the relationship during the courting period. When I ask couples why they stopped some of those behaviors, they usually say that such actions no longer seemed to be noticed or, at least to generate much comment. With the lack of reinforcement, behaviors naturally die. It’s also how love eventually dies.
When couples come to me for pre-marriage counseling, they never tell me that the reason they’re getting married is so that they can more easily neglect each other. Instead, they have dreams of experiencing each other’s love for a lifetime. When I see married couples whose relationship is in trouble, I often find them wondering what happened.
In the dark comedy film, The War of the Roses, starring Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner, there is a poignant scene near the end in which, during a violent verbal battle, one spouse suddenly stopped the barrage and, with a saddened face which had only moments earlier had been contorted with rage, turned to the other and said, “How did we get here?”
Many couples who are hurting ask themselves this same question. They don’t realize that, from early on in the relationship, it was the small reminders of conjoint love that quietly dropped out of their repertoire of marital interactions which prepared the way for the intransigence they find now. They cannot understand how the distance of neglect and conflict slowly built up over time. All they know is that they don’t feel important to one another anymore. That’s why the feel perpetually hurt and in an unremitting state of (sometimes buried) rage.
Obviously, God did not call us to this kind of marriage. But he understood that a failure to appreciate the unique characteristics of your spouse was at the heart of marital disillusionment. He also made it clear that loving, mutually serving relationships required the constant work of humility and, at times, sacrificial giving.
The dramatic consequences of failure to value what makes your spouse tick can be found, for example, in the account of David’s marriage to Michal. In 2 Samuel 6: 12-23, we read that a profound breach in their relationship opened up for two reasons: 1) Michal allowed her jealousy and rigid sense of royal decorum get in the way of her appreciating David’s religious zeal (as shown in his welcome of the Ark of the Covenant to the city of Jerusalem), and 2) David failed to understand or appreciate Michal’s history in a royal court with her father (Saul) whose premature death she was still grieving. The destructive interaction that therefore ensued, in which both were hitting well below the belt with sarcasm and retribution, effectively ended their relationship (vs. 23).
Their mutual failure to value what each brought to the table of their marriage no doubt began long before this dramatic end to their union. Marital dissolution does not occur overnight. Even when it appears to be a petulant reprisal against some perceived injustice by the other person, it’s almost always the conclusion to a long erosion of the sense that they matter to each other.
Perhaps, that’s why Jesus, when he said that the husband and wife shall leave their mother and father and become one flesh, was not merely talking about sex, but about spiritual, emotional, and physical unity. Emotional without physical unity is a misleading deprivation. Physical without emotional unity is merely gratification. And either one without spiritual unity is numbing secularization. All three must be present to provide a unity that passes biblical muster.
This is not as easy as it may sound. It takes a lot of consciously committed work. Yet, it’s work made much more likely when you attend to the small things that daily lubricate the desire to serve one another. Pay close attention to these and you will prevent many of the more painful interactions later.
