Falling in love is perhaps nature’s greatest high. Just seeing your beloved can make your heart race, your legs weak and your face flushed. Movies try to convince us we’ll feel this way forever.
“And they lived happily ever after”, the story usually ends. But have you noticed that we’re never shown how “happily ever after” looks like?
Truth is, intense romance – often what people call “love” – has an expiration date for everyone. That type of romance will never last a lifetime. No long-term relationship can maintain the initial chemistry that brought two people together and last forever. It simply doesn’t. And that’s okay. It would be hard to lead a normal life if we constantly felt overwhelmed with those magical, “falling-in-love” feelings!
Falling in love is just a phase that fizzles out. And as such, you can’t marry someone just because you’re in love with them, inasmuch as you can’t divorce someone just because you’re no longer in love with them. A proper understanding of this alone can save so many marriages from devastation and ultimately, divorce. People will be a lot happier, just with that understanding.
The change in the intensity of your feelings is a natural process in marriage. It is normal to be head-over-heels for someone when you are falling for them. You have rose-coloured glasses on, and they can almost do no wrong in your eyes. But the longer you are with them, the more you start to see their flaws as the intensity of feelings lessens.
It doesn’t mean the love is gone. And by the way, what’s love got to do with it anyway? What’s love got to do with your feelings?
To sustain a marriage, feelings must evolve from romantic love to authentic love. This is partly because you can’t literally be all over your spouse and still get stuff done. And partly, because the “romantic love hormones” that propel the intense “falling-in-love feelings” can only last for so long in marriage.
It's normal and natural for romantic relationships to start out fiery and passionate, then slowly transition into warmth and stability. This is due to many factors, ranging from how attraction and bonding hormones in our bodies change over time, to the instinctive nesting habits that have kept us flourishing as a species.
What makes you stay together when you take off your love-is-blind glasses and real life stressors come into play? It’s when you consciously choose to be with each other even when some of the romance and passion disappears.
Marriage is about our individual convictions to commit and devote ourselves to the vows we made to one another. Doing our part individually to enhance a healthy relationship is really what ensures that a marriage goes the distance. Furthermore, an ability to genuinely communicate beliefs, goals and thoughts maximises your chances of success in marriage.
Healthy marriages are formed on the strong foundation of common purpose, shared values and similar maturity levels. When you’ve successfully established your compatibility in these three key areas – mission and life goals; personal values as well as your character and maturity levels – you can get married with at least a very large portion of things to worry about removed off the table. With this as a foundation, the covenant of your marriage has a very firm foundation to build on.
But never forget it, marriage does not begin with love, nor is it sustained by love. Marriage begins with covenant. It is sustained by wisdom, understanding and knowledge. Love, and we mean, true love, only enters the scene years later.
Again, marriage is sustained by knowledge – information; understanding – comprehension and wisdom – application of knowledge, not love. And that makes romantic love a very weak foundation for marriage. When you become deliberate students of one another, you give true love an opportunity to be born and to grow.
Great marriages don’t happen by luck or by accident – nor are they built on romantic love or fleeting happiness. Applied knowledge helps you build around structure, discipline, shared values, common goals and unwavering commitment.
So don’t throw in the towel. Put in the work. Be one another’s students. Being students of one another is the foundation of marriage. And living with knowledge and understanding together is the only basis for you to treat one another with honour and consideration.
Leading with your spouse in mind means you make a deliberate effort to observe and learn of your spouse. This will make loving and submitting to one another a comfortable experience.
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