Marriage is not for You

Everything from Disney movies to romantic comedies has taught us that marriage will bring ultimate happiness and fulfillment to our lives. Anyone who is married can testify to the fact that this is untrue. One reason marriage will not bring us ultimate happiness is because we marry a human-being, not a fairytale prince/princess. Real people are really messed up, we all are. We have fears and bad habits that our significant other will have to "embrace".

Marriage wasn't created by God to make us happy, but to point to what God's love for humanity looks like. A healthy and joy filled marriage is a picture that God created to point to what His love for us looks like. It's a love that never ends. It's a love that is patient, kind and not self-serving. It's a love that perseveres through hardship.

Marriage can certainly bring happiness to our lives but if we think that happiness is the point our marriages will suffer and probably end up in divorce. True love doesn't say: "what can he/she do for me?" True love is focused on serving the other person. True love will always include self-sacrifice. In a relationship where there is no self-sacrifice at all there is no real love. We will love few people on Earth as much as our own children and every parent knows that a lot of self-sacrifice is involved in parenting. Real love is not self-serving.

When you have two people in a marriage who are both focused on serving their spouse, not on getting what they want out of the relationship, you will see a marriage that flourishes. When I'm fully committed to serving my husband and meeting his needs and he is fully committed to serving me and meeting my needs we both end up happy. On the other hand, if we both choose to focus on making ourselves happy in the marriage we will end up competing with each other and have a lot of conflict. God loves humanity so much that he came down himself to die for all our sins. When I choose to model what Jesus did, to die to my own selfishness and choose an others-focused life I flourish.

You'd think that if I make my own happiness my main focus in life that would make me happy, but it doesn't. We were not created to live isolated lives but to live in community with others. When you have a community full of people focused on their own happiness, it makes sense that you will not see a lot of love in that community. When I learn to live an others-focused life and surround myself with a whole community full of people who are also focused on serving rather than getting, I end up surrounded by real love.