Lifelong Marriage Quotes

You'll never experience the joy and tenderness of a lifelong love unless you fight for it.

[L]asting love is something a person has to decide to experience. Lifelong monogamous devotion is just not natural—not for women even, and emphatically not for men. It requires what, for lack of a better term, we can call an act of will. . . . This isn't to say that a young man can't hope to be seized by love. . . . But whether the sheer fury of a man's feelings accurately gauges their likely endurance is another question. The ardor will surely fade, sooner or later, and the marriage will then live or die on respect, practical compatibility, simple affection, and (these days, especially) determination. With the help of these things, something worthy of the label 'love' can last until death. But it will be a different kind of love from the kind that began the marriage. Will it be a richer love, a deeper love, a more spiritual love? Opinions vary. But it's certainly a more impressive love.

I knew that most people would consider us too young to talk about lifelong commitments or marriage, but I couldn’t imagine taking her to bed without that promise. Even if it meant never being with her, I didn’t want to have one desperate, hurried, hidden night. I wanted to put a ring on her finger. I wanted a future—or nothing. I knew, in her heart, that she would want that, too

A good marriage isn't something you find; it's something you make.

There must be some other possibility than death or lifelong penance ... some meeting, some intersection of lines; and some cowardly, hopeful geometer in my brain tells me it is the angle at which two lines prop each other up, the leaning-together from the vertical which produces the false arch. For lack of a keystone, the false arch may be as much as one can expect in this life. Only the very lucky discover the keystone.

It is the fate of great achievements, born from a way of life that sets truth before security, to be gobbled up by you and excreted in the form of shit. For centuries great, brave, lonely men have been telling you what to do. Time and again you have corrupted, diminished and demolished their teachings; time and again you have been captivated by their weakest points, taken not the great truth, but some trifling error as your guiding principal. This, little man, is what you have done with Christianity, with the doctrine of sovereign people, with socialism, with everything you touch. Why, you ask, do you do this? I don't believe you really want an answer. When you hear the truth you'll cry bloody murder, or commit it. … You had your choice between soaring to superhuman heights with Nietzsche and sinking into subhuman depths with Hitler. You shouted Heil! Heil! and chose the subhuman. You had the choice between Lenin's truly democratic constitution and Stalin's dictatorship. You chose Stalin's dictatorship. You had your choice between Freud's elucidation of the sexual core of your psychic disorders and his theory of cultural adaptation. You dropped the theory of sexuality and chose his theory of cultural adaptation, which left you hanging in mid-air. You had your choice between Jesus and his majestic simplicity and Paul with his celibacy for priests and life-long compulsory marriage for yourself. You chose the celibacy and compulsory marriage and forgot the simplicity of Jesus' mother, who bore her child for love and love alone. You had your choice between Marx's insight into the productivity of your living labor power, which alone creates the value of commodities and the idea of the state. You forgot the living energy of your labor and chose the idea of the state. In the French Revolution, you had your choice between the cruel Robespierre and the great Danton. You chose cruelty and sent greatness and goodness to the guillotine. In Germany you had your choice between Goring and Himmler on the one hand and Liebknecht, Landau, and Muhsam on the other. You made Himmler your police chief and murdered your great friends. You had your choice between Julius Streicher and Walter Rathenau. You murdered Rathenau. You had your choice between Lodge and Wilson. You murdered Wilson. You had your choice between the cruel Inquisition and Galileo's truth. You tortured and humiliated the great Galileo, from whose inventions you are still benefiting, and now, in the twentieth century, you have brought the methods of the Inquisition to a new flowering. … Every one of your acts of smallness and meanness throws light on the boundless wretchedness of the human animal. 'Why so tragic?' you ask. 'Do you feel responsible for all evil?' With remarks like that you condemn yourself. If, little man among millions, you were to shoulder the barest fraction of your responsibility, the world would be a very different place. Your great friends wouldn't perish, struck down by your smallness.

We always wonder, when we see two people together, particularly when they're actually married, how these two people could have arrived at such a decision, such an act, so we tell ourselves that it's a matter of human nature, that it's very often a case of two people going together, getting together, only in order to kill themselves in time, sooner or later to kill themselves, after mutually tormenting each other for years for for decades, only to end up killing themselves anyway, people who get together even though they probably clearly perceive their future of shared torment, who join together, get married, in the teeth of all reason, who against all reason commit the natural crime of bringing children into the world who then proceed to be the unhappiest imaginable people, we have evidence of this situation wherever we look... People who get together and marry even though they can foresee their future together only as a lifelong shared martyrdom, suddenly all these people qua human beings, human beings qua ordinary people... enter into a union, into a marriage, into their annihilation, step by step down they go into the most horrible situation imaginable, annihilation by marriage, meaning annihilation mental, emotional, and physical, as we can see all around us, the whole world is full of instances confirming this... why, I may well ask myself, this senseless sealing of the bargain, we wonder about it because we have an instance of it before us, how did this instance come to be?

This is the tattoo of life decisions." "Tattoo of life decisions?" "Yes. Tattoo. Marriage is the forever and permanent branding of one person to another. Sure, you can get it removed - but it's expensive, it's a process, and you're never the same after. You're scarred. It's always a part of you, visible or not. You get a tattoo with the intention of a life-long commitment. You have to defend its existence and take ownership of it in front of others for the rest of your life regardless of how it sags or droops or changes shape and color - because it will! It will change and fade, and not in an aesthetically pleasing way.

happy marriage is the union of two good forgivers.” ~ Ruth Bell Graham.

Long-term marital intimacy requires accepting this truth: to stop giving yourself to your spouse is to spiritually divorce them.

When A Man Is Trying To Win The Heart Of A Woman,He Studies Her.He Learns Her Likes,Dislikes,Habits And Hobbies.But After He Wins Her Heart And Marries Her,He Often Stops Learning About Her.If The Amount He Studied Her Before Marriage Was Equal To A High School Degree,He Should Continue To Learn About Her Until He Gains A College Degree,A Master's Degree And Ultimately A Doctorate Degree.It Is A Lifelong Journey That Draws His Heart Ever Closer To Hers.

Marriage, with or without children, can only be what it is meant to be, a lifelong romance, on one condition—that the husband's attitude is one of lifelong courtship.

Life isn't about falling in love as much as it is about learning to get over hatred..

Done well, marital sexuality can be a supremely healing experience.

This is the journey marriage calls us to, to seek to understand and empathize, for each of us to strive to become a redemptive partner rather than a legal opponent.

Why hadn't that been part of his stupid lifelong redemption program: Do what my wife asks immediately so she doesn't feel like a nag.

Arranged marriages are just an effort for you to know that your wife is with you. All religions resist divorce for the simple reason that if divorce is allowed, then the basic purpose marriage was invented for is destroyed. The basic purpose was to give you a companion, a lifelong

There’s a word for the first blush of youthful love free of desire. For longing to be with someone so much you would rather throw yourself to the tides than be without them. For the stale but steady relationship between faithful members of an arranged marriage. For how to feel about someone you thought was everything but ended up never feeling the same way about you. For the poison left over when you love someone and it ends so badly you cannot release the feelings. For the love between a mother and her children, a father and his children, a grandmother and her progeny, the love between two dear friends, the love that is the first building block of a lifelong affair. There’s even a word for a love so devastating nothing before or after is ever seen the same.

Before we begin dating, we have to develop a vision for what makes marriage worth having. Why do we even want to be married in the first place?...Marriage is worth having because you get God in your lifelong commitment to one another. Marriage is about knowing God, worshiping God, depending on God, displaying God, and being made like God....What makes marriage worth having is that you, your spouse, and those around you see more of God and his love in Jesus.

So what does this mean? I am dedicated to the preservation of my marriage’s unity. Not just for my happiness and my children’s security, but because of my calling in Christ. I will guard my marriage, feed it, work through issues, confront when necessary if something is threatening our unity, forgive with eagerness to preserve our unity, be gentle so that no bitterness attacks our unity, live with patience so that I don’t replay past episodes, and certainly remain vigilant to never let my heart be stolen by anyone else.

The first is the result of a decision to act—to do something. This type of mistake is made with incomplete information, as it’s impossible to have all the facts beforehand. This is to be encouraged. Fortune favors the bold. The second is the result of a decision of sloth—to not do something—wherein we refuse to change a bad situation out of fear despite having all the facts. This is how learning experiences become terminal punishments, bad relationships become bad marriages, and poor job choices become lifelong prison sentences.

A defeatist attitude kills almost as many marriages as do affairs.

Marriage was the thing, or rather, a wedding was, with its formal neatness of virtue rewarded, the thrill of its pageantry and banqueting, and dizzy promise of lifelong union.

Wedding Anniversity: A yearly event held in a life-long institution where the goal is not to graduate but to avoid being expelled.

Good manners should be placed right after love in the best recipe for an enduring happy marriage. A couple can avoid divorce by continuing lifelong the etiquette of their engagement.

Our wives don’t have to “deserve” it. A Christian husband doesn’t love his wife only when she is lovable. He loves her whenever Christ deserves to be reverenced, which, of course, is always.

One of the most widely held beliefs in our culture today is that romantic love is all important in order to have a full life but that it almost never lasts. A second, related belief is that marriage should be based on romantic love. Taken together, these convictions lead to the conclusion that marriage and romance are essentially incompatible, that it is cruel to commit people to lifelong connection after the inevitable fading of romantic joy. The Biblical understanding of love does not preclude deep emotion. As we will see, a marriage devoid of passion and emotional desire for one another doesn’t fulfill the Biblical vision. But neither does the Bible pit romantic love against the essence of love, which is sacrificial commitment to the good of the other. If we think of love primarily as emotional desire and not as active, committed service, we end up pitting duty and desire against each other in a way that is unrealistic and destructive.

Readers wanted to fall in love with an author’s library, knowing that there would be more to come. Reader and author could be a lifelong love affair and, like a marriage, it needed tending to.

I prayed that all might be well between me and Hartley, that somehow that lifelong faithful remembering, what I now thought of as my mystical marriage, might not be lost or wasted, but somehow come to good!

Being "married for a mission" can revitalize a lot of marriages in which the partners think they suffer from a lack of compatibility; my suspicion is that many of these couples actually suffer from a lack of purpose.

she had married Vince because he seemed solid, religious and faithful, unlike her father. She believed, as he did, in the sacredness and lifelong commitment of marriage. She told herself that she would have to adjust.

There’s a reason most cultures have some version of marriage, some kind of lifelong commitment. People need the security of knowing their partner will stick with them regardless of what kind of uptight ogre they turn into in old age.

Although Gora had tried his best to dissuade Anandamoyi from attending Binoy's marriage ceremony he was not in his heart of hearts very much pained when, taking no account of his anger or distress, she refused to listen to him, in fact he really felt delighted. Feeling so certain that however great the gulf between Binoy and himself might become, Binoy could be never deprived of that part of his mother's immeasurable love which was showered upon him like nectar, Gora's heart was satisfied and at peace. From every other standpoint he might be separated ever so far from Binoy, but by this one bond of imperishable love of a mother these two lifelong friends would be united by the closest and deepest ties for life.

A sense of having been decoyed by some world-old conspiracy into this bondage of body and soul filled her with despair. If marriage was the slow life-long acquittal of a debt contracted in ignorance, then marriage was a crime against human nature.

Who ever talks about a lifelong, intimate friendship expressing itself in the broadest possible range of conversation? If people are really alive and alert it ought to go on and on, prolonging life because there is always something more to be said.

Their lives were ruined, he thought; ruined by the fundamental error of their matrimonial union: that of having based a permanent contract on a temporary feeling which had no necessary connection with affinities that alone render a life-long comradeship tolerable.

FINALLY, and I think most importantly, marriage is a vocation. It is a task to which you are called. If it is a task, it means you work at it. It is not something which happens. You hear the call, you answer, you accept the task, you enter into it willingly and eagerly, you commit yourself to its disciplines and responsibilities and limitations and privileges and joys. You concentrate on it, giving yourself to it day after day in a lifelong Yes. Having said Yes to the man who asked you to marry him, you go on saying Yes to marriage.

It takes reading hundreds of books to get a degree and start a journey to build our career, and we do not complain. How many books have you read so far to improve your relationship and rescue your marriage? Start today, it's not too late; it's part of being life-long learner.

God’s true love pretty much nullifies dating as we know it. . . . It seems that dating as we have come to know it doesn’t really prepare us for marriage; instead it can be a training ground for divorce. We cannot practice life-long commitment in a series of short-term relationships.

Whatever one makes of these seven passages in Scripture, it seems clear that they must not be used in the service of condemning homosexuality as we know it today. [...] There is, however, much in Scripture about compassion for one's fellow human beings, a call for empathy and justice for the marginalized, and a standard of honesty, mutuality, and love in all relationships. In the end, God believes in love. Therefore, I would argue that Scripture gives us great and lasting guidance for the conduct of our relationships, whether they be with strangers, friends, or lifelong partners.

You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words:. . . . Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling . . . of that something which you were born desiring . .

On your wedding day you will participate with your spouse in one of the most solemn pledges ever given to humankind—the vow of marriage. This vow, or covenant, is a lifelong commitment, a promise not just between two people but between a man and a woman and their God. It involves three promises: To stay married throughout your lives To love and care for each other To maintain sexual fidelity

What if I ran all my actions through this grid: “If my son-in-law treated my daughter the way I’m treating my wife, how would I feel?” Men, that’s the way what you’re doing looks like to God. Women, just switch the genders. Imagine hearing your (perhaps future) daughter-in-law talking to her friends about your son with the same tone and words you use to describe your husband: How does that feel?

Sentences like the following are found in many mystical and reactionary writings though not as clearly formulated as by Hutten: ''Kulturbolschewismus is nothing new. It is based on a striving which humanity has had since its earliest days: the longing for happiness. It is the eternal nostalgia for paradise on earth . . . The religion of faith is replaced by the religion of pleasure.'' We, on the other hand, ask: Why not happiness on earth? Why should not pleasure be the content of life? If one were to put this question to a general vote, no reactionary ideology could stand up. The reactionary also recognizes, though in a mystical manner, the connection between mysticism and compulsive marriage and family: ''Because of this responsibility (for the possible consequences of pleasure), society has created the institution of marriage which, as a lifelong union, provides the protective frame for the sexual relationship.'' Right after this, we find the whole register of "cultural values" which, in the framework of reactionary ideology, fit together like the parts of a machine: ''Marriage as a tie, the family as a duty, the fatherland as value of its own, morality as authority, religion as obligation from eternity.'' It would be impossible better to describe the rigidity of human plasma!

This is the journey marriage calls us to, to seek to understand and empathize, for each of us to strive to become a redemptive partner rather than a legal opponent. If we truly want to love God’s sons and daughters, we have to seek to understand God’s sons and daughters. Men and women, have you ever asked God why your spouses are the way they are? In the midst of your frustration, have you ever sought God’s perspective for what has “bent” them in their current direction?

One of my greatest concerns for the young women of the Church is that they will sell themselves short in dating and marriage by forgetting who they really are--daughters of a loving Heavenly Father. . . . Unfortunately, a young woman who lowers her standards far enough can always find temporary acceptance from immature and unworthy young men. . . . At their best, daughters of God are loving, caring, understanding, and sympathetic. This does not mean they are also gullible, unrealistic, or easily manipulated. If a young man does not measure up to the standards a young woman has set, he may promise her that he will change if she will marry him first. Wise daughters of God will insist that young men who seek their hand in marriage change before the wedding, not after. (I am referring here to the kind of change that will be part of the lifelong growth of every disciple.) He may argue that she doesn't really believe in repentance and forgiveness. But one of the hallmarks of repentance is forsaking sin. Especially when the sin involves addictive behaviors or a pattern of transgression, wise daughters of God insist on seeing a sustained effort to forsake sin over a long period of time as true evidence of repentance. They do not marry someone because they believe they can change him. Young women, please do not settle for someone unworthy of your gospel standards. On the other hand, young women should not refuse to settle down. There is no right age for young men or young women to marry, but there is a right attitude for them to have about marriage: "Thy will be done" . . . . The time to marry is when we are prepared to meet a suitable mate, not after we have done all the enjoyable things in life we hoped to do while we were single. . . . When I hear some young men and young women set plans in stone which do not include marriage until after age twenty-five or thirty or until a graduate degree has been obtained, I recall Jacob's warning, "Seek not to counsel the Lord, but to take counsel from his hand" (Jacob 4:10). . . . How we conduct ourselves in dating relationships is a good indication of how we will conduct ourselves in a marriage relationship. . . . Individuals considering marriage would be wise to conduct their own prayerful due diligence--long before they set their hearts on marriage. There is nothing wrong with making a T-square diagram and on either side of the vertical line listing the relative strengths and weaknesses of a potential mate. I sometimes wonder whether doing more homework when it comes to this critical decision would spare some Church members needless heartache. I fear too many fall in love with each other or even with the idea of marriage before doing the background research necessary to make a good decision. It is sad when a person who wants to be married never has the opportunity to marry. But it is much, much sadder to be married to the wrong person. If you do not believe me, talk with someone who has made that mistake. Think carefully about the person you are considering marrying, because marriage should last for time and for all eternity.

Tattoo of life decisions?” “Yes. Tattoo. Marriage is the forever and permanent branding of one person to another. Sure, you can get it removed—but it’s expensive, it’s a process, and you’re never the same after. You’re scarred. It’s always a part of you, visible or not. You get a tattoo with the intention of a life-long commitment. You have to defend its existence and take ownership of it in front of others for the rest of your life regardless of how it sags or droops or changes shape and color—because it will! It will change and fade, and not in an aesthetically pleasing way.” The

I think that the contemporary model of Christian marriage is a good one for heterosexual people: one man and one woman should marry for life and, if they choose, bear and care for children. This model is not found in Genesis, however. Moreover, it took Western society many centuries to come to it,91 and even so, half of the heterosexual people in American society do not follow it. On the other hand, many Christian gay and lesbian people have committed themselves to one lifelong partner. Many care for children, and some that I know have adopted children with special needs. They seem to have gotten the point of the contemporary Christian model of marriage and are living it out.

She had humor and common sense and she soon knew what she must do. She must have done with her dream world, laugh at the ridiculous Mary who had lived in it and get to know the Mary whom she did not want to know, find out what she was like and what her prospects were. It sounded an easy program but she found it a grueling one. The phantasy world, she discovered, had tentacles like an octopus and cannot be escaped without mortal combat, and when at last her strong will had won the battle it seemed as though she were living in a vacuum, so little had the real world to offer the shy, frustrated, unattractive girl who was the Mary she must live with until she died. But free of the tentacles she was able now to sum up the situation with accuracy. She would not marry and being a gentlewoman no other career was open to her. She was not gifted in any way and she would never be strong and probably never free from pain. She was not a favorite with either of her parents, both of whom were vaguely ashamed of having produced so unattractive a child, and yet she was the one who would have to stay at home with them. The prospect was one of lifelong boredom and seemed to her as bleak as the cold winds that swept across the fens, even at times as terrible as the great Cathedral in whose shadow she must live and die. For at that time she did not love the Cathedral and in her phantasy life the city had merely been the hub from which her radiant dreams stretched out to the wide wheel of the world. What should she do? Her question was not a cry of despair but a genuine and honest with to know. She never knew what put it into her head that she, unloved, should love. Religion for her parents, and therefore for their children, was not much more than a formality and it had not occurred to her to pray about her problem, and yet from somewhere the idea came as though in answer to her question, and sitting in Blanche's Bower with the cat she dispassionately considered it. Could mere loving be a life's work? Could it be a career like marriage or nursing the sick or going on the stage? Could it be adventure?

Throughout the history of the church, Christians have tended to elevate the importance of one over the other. For the first 1,500 years of the church, singleness was considered the preferred state and the best way to serve Christ. Singles sat at the front of the church. Marrieds were sent to the back.4 Things changed after the Reformation in 1517, when single people were sent to the back and marrieds moved to the front — at least among Protestants.5 Scripture, however, refers to both statuses as weighty, meaningful vocations. We’ll spend more time on each later in the chapter, but here is a brief overview. Marrieds. This refers to a man and woman who form a one-flesh union through a covenantal vow — to God, to one another, and to the larger community — to permanently, freely, faithfully, and fruitfully love one another. Adam and Eve provide the clearest biblical model for this. As a one-flesh couple, they were called by God to take initiative to “be fruitful . . . fill the earth and subdue it” (Genesis 1:28). Singles. Scripture teaches that human beings are created for intimacy and connection with God, themselves, and one another. Marriage is one framework in which we work this out; singleness is another. While singleness may be voluntarily chosen or involuntarily imposed, temporary or long-term, a sudden event or a gradual unfolding, Christian singleness can be understood within two distinct callings: • Vowed celibates. These are individuals who make lifelong vows to remain single and maintain lifelong sexual abstinence as a means of living out their commitment to Christ. They do this freely in response to a God-given gift of grace (Matthew 19:12). Today, we are perhaps most familiar with vowed celibates as nuns and priests in the Roman Catholic or Orthodox Church. These celibates vow to forgo earthly marriage in order to participate more fully in the heavenly reality that is eternal union with Christ.6 • Dedicated celibates. These are singles who have not necessarily made a lifelong vow to remain single, but who choose to remain sexually abstinent for as long as they are single. Their commitment to celibacy is an expression of their commitment to Christ. Many desire to marry or are open to the possibility. They may have not yet met the right person or are postponing marriage to pursue a career or additional education. They may be single because of divorce or the death of a spouse. The apostle Paul acknowledges such dedicated celibates in his first letter to the church at Corinth (1 Corinthians 7). Understanding singleness and marriage as callings or vocations must inform our self-understanding and the outworking of our leadership. Our whole life as a leader is to bear witness to God’s love for the world. But we do so in different ways as marrieds or singles. Married couples bear witness to the depth of Christ’s love. Their vows focus and limit them to loving one person exclusively, permanently, and intimately. Singles — vowed or dedicated — bear witness to the breadth of Christ’s love. Because they are not limited by a vow to one person, they have more freedom and time to express the love of Christ to a broad range of people. Both marrieds and singles point to and reveal Christ’s love, but in different ways. Both need to learn from one another about these different aspects of Christ’s love. This may be a radically new concept for you, but stay with me. God intends this rich theological vision to inform our leadership in ways few of us may have considered. Before exploring the connections between leadership and marriage or singleness, it’s important to understand the way marriage and singleness are commonly understood in standard practice among leaders today.

Applaud to those who withstand the shards of compromise. May laurel leaves sit on your head, and life-long pride be yours for the taking.

Being married to your purpose gives you the legal right to birth it. Having goals is not enough. You must achieve them in order to have real success. Most people are content with just having goals, but it takes commitment (being married to your goals) in order to give birth to them. Most people don’t want to marry their goals; they simply want to date them. Dating requires no commitment and if things become difficult, you can call it quits and lose nothing. However, when you are married to something, you are committed to fulfilling its purpose, regardless of the cost. When people marry, they vow during marriage to stick through things “for better or for worse” meaning conditions don’t determine your commitment. Success takes faithfulness and dedication. With marriage, there is real intimacy, one common purpose, life-long commitment, quality and constant time together. The marriage to your vision requires the same thing to be successful. You must be willing to ignore distractions and do whatever is necessary to supply all that is needed to have a fulfilling marriage to your vision. While there is pain in giving birth, the joy of the newborn baby (vision) makes it worthwhile. While people say they want to give birth to their goals, many are afraid and unwilling to make a commitment to them. The birthing not only takes time, it also takes nurturing and caring after the birth or it will die. Just as people want the benefits of marriage (companionship and sex) without commitment, they also want the success of goal setting without the commitment. The same amount of passion you have for loving and being committed to your family, you should have for your vision and goals. Take this very moment to list your goals and write beside each one of them whether you are married to them versus dating them.

Western people have been sold a lie. Marriage was designed in ancient times not for companionship, but for social, economic and political expediency; it would still work just fine if we remembered that. But somewhere along the line people started wanting to pretend that the hormonal rush we experience from being strongly drawn to someone is the same thing as love, which it isn’t; we even started calling it “falling in love” (which, again, it isn’t). As if that weren’t bad enough, some two centuries ago we decided for some absurd reason that this temporary neurochemical derangement was in and of itself reason enough to make a lifelong commitment to someone, without any concern for economics or personal compatibility. In fact, within the past century we completely departed from rationality by deciding that this quasi-inebriated condition was the only valid reason for marriage or (some believe) even having sex, and went so far as to create social institutions (such as anti-prostitution laws) to enshrine the fallacy as Divine Truth.

Dr. Jan Yager, a sociologist, friendship expert and author of When Friendship Hurts, states, “For some, admitting to a broken friendship has become like admitting to a failed marriage. Over the last two decades, a myth of lifelong friendship has emerged, even as the ideal of a lifelong marriage has, sadly, become an unrealistic reality for many people.

One choice changes the construction of a life. You’ll never experience the joy and tenderness of a lifelong love unless you fight for it.

Today we have gay people whose relationships, until just recently, have been branded by society as extraordinarily shameful, as uniquely perverse—worse than incest. The cultural heritage of this view had the effect of driving them all underground, where sex is practiced surreptitiously, secretively, for fear of social ostracism, not to mention physical harm. And now, tired of the highway rest stops, tired of the back rooms in gay bars, many in that community have a longing to attempt what can only be regarded as modern marvel regardless of gender: two people willing to attempt lifelong fidelity to each other, come what may. This doesn't seem to me to be a "slippery slope." It seems to me that it might actually be instead, a redemptive trajectory.

God the Father invented the family. He’s the one who determines its meaning, purpose, and role. He’s the one who instituted marriage as a lifelong covenant between husband and wife. He’s the one who enables couples to be fruitful and multiply. He’s the Patēr (Father) from whom every patria (family) in heaven and earth is named. Marriage and family were created by Him and exist for Him.

Your tests don’t have to define you. Your compatibility doesn’t have to be a ceiling over which your relationship can never rise. Your past hurts don’t have to constitute the first steps in a journey toward divorce court. We worship, serve, and are empowered by a supernatural God who can lift us above our scientific limitations and create something special out of something very ordinary. These tests don’t account for the power of a magnificent obsession.

Consider the following perspective: if the amount you studied your spouse before marriage were equal to a high school diploma, then you should continue to learn about your mate until you gain a “college degree,” a “master’s degree,” and ultimately a “doctorate degree.” Think of it as a lifelong journey that draws your heart ever closer to your mate.

Don’t pass over this thought, because it’s crucial: Isaiah 40:29 assumes that God will call us to various tasks for which we lack enough power on our own.

When I was graduating, my thesis advisor, Larry Summers, suggested that I apply for international fellowships. I rejected the idea on the grounds that a foreign country was not a likely place to turn a date into a husband. Instead, I moved to Washington, D.C., which was full of eligible men. It worked. My first year out of college, I met a man who was not just eligible, but also wonderful, so I married him. I was twenty-four and convinced that marriage was the first—and necessary—step to a happy and productive life. It didn’t work out that way. I was just not mature enough to have made this lifelong decision, and the relationship quickly unraveled. By the age of twenty-five, I had managed to get married … and also divorced. At the time, this felt like a massive personal and public failure. For many years, I felt that no matter what I accomplished professionally, it paled in comparison to the scarlet letter D stitched on my chest. (Almost ten years later, I learned that the “good ones” were not all taken, and I wisely and very happily married Dave Goldberg.)

In living out my conversion as a daily and lifelong process, I treasure most the example of my grandmother Totten, who dwelled in one marriage, one home, one church congregation for over sixty years. Her faith was alive for anyone to see; her life demonstrates that conversion is no more spectacular than learning to love the people we live with and work among. It does not mean seeking out the most exotic spiritual experience, or the ideal religion, the holiest teachers who will give us the greatest return on our investment. Conversion is seeing ourselves, and the ordinary people in our families, our classrooms, and on the job, in a new light. Can it be that these very people—even the difficult, unbearable ones—are the ones God has given us, so that together we might find salvation?

if we are nagging or complaining about it all the time then change won’t happen. This will only make a husband feel like he can’t win so he will think, Why even try?

In the final analysis, the technology of precision machinery—and the urbanization of human society that that technology made possible—has rendered the so-called traditional family, with its assumption of lifelong permanence, essentially obsolete. The arranged marriage has become a thing of the past. The economic benefits of having children have been replaced by significant economic costs. The economic and social interdependence between men and women has weakened considerably. And not only virginity in adolescence but also the traditional prohibitions against premarital and extramarital sex have lost most or all of their former social stigma.

In our modern day and age, words like faithfulness, lifelong commitment, and covenant are not very popular. Instead, we prefer words such as soul mate, true love, and happiness. But the truth is, these feelings-based words do not produce the type of enduring marriages that we long for.

It is not at all surprising that Jesus compares His relationship with the Church to that of a bride and groom. Of that relationship with us, Paul says, “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?” (Romans 8:35). After suggesting several possibilities, Paul answers his own question with an emphatic, “Nothing!” If each partner sees that commitment to be a lifelong one of walking together, in honor preferring one another, marriage becomes beautifully representative of our relationship with Him.

There are very few heiresses among the women jockeying for eligible gentlemen on the marriage mart. And the cost of failure is high: lifelong dependence on disappointed parents and indifferent brothers, perhaps even the necessity of becoming a lady's companion or, worse, a governess. No one would have thought any less of Lady Ingram for marrying the richest man she could find, certainly not when he happened to be both striking in appearance and sterling of character. Her success was a fairy tale, something to aspire to. "And if that fairy tale was to gradually lose its potency, well, such is life. What was not supposed to happen was her brutal honesty. The unspoken rule has always been that if a woman marries for money, she keeps that to herself and maintains an appearance of interest in her husband. Because that is what his money paid for. She is never supposed to not only confirm that she has never loved him but also denigrate him in the same breath for his said-to-be half-Jewish blood." "I didn't know Society ladies cared that those of Jewish roots should not be taunted for that fact," said Treadles. "What? No, they didn't care about that. They cared that Lady Ingram didn't just tear the fairy tale in two but spat on it. They cared that this sent a shiver through all the men of Society. If a paragon such as Lord Ingram couldn't find a wife who genuinely loved him, what chance did the other gentlemen have?

Few women desire the kind of “equality” that Engels, Foster, and Zinn offer. Marxists may present monogamy as a capitalist trick for enslaving women, but the fact is that most women desire lifelong, monogamous marriages—which redound to their benefit, compared to any other arrangement in which men can use women and then discard them. Few women in the United States wanted to trade places with women in the Soviet Union or would want to live the life of an Indian woman. American women today have more freedom than women have ever enjoyed anywhere in the globe at any time in world history. And even in early America, women’s rights here were greater than in England, and certainly than in most places in the world.79 Women in colonial America enjoyed the benefits of chivalry and security and respect in the family. Some women were tavern-keepers, merchants, dress-makers, midwives, teachers, writers, and landed proprietors, as the 1924 study Colonial Women of Affairs: A Study of Women in Business and the Professions in America before 1776 tells us.

Summing Up While the Old Testament envisions occasional short-term avoidance of sex for the purposes of holiness, it does not envision celibacy as a lifelong calling. The ancient world generally tended to view the question of whether to marry or remain single as a pragmatic matter. Marriage was considered primarily in terms of the responsibilities and duties required to sustain a household. Cynics and Stoics differed on the relative importance of marriage for the fulfilled life. Jesus, in his commendation of those who have “made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 19: 12), recognized that God calls some, but not all, to a single life. Paul addresses this question extensively in 1 Corinthians 7 in a carefully balanced way, recognizing some circumstances under which married people might avoid sex for brief periods of time, but discouraging married people from avoiding sex altogether. Paul invites single people to remain unmarried, but clearly recognizes that not all people are gifted with lifelong celibacy. The modern awareness of the persistence of sexual orientation thus raises an important question: Are all gay and lesbian Christians whose sexual orientation is not subject to change necessarily called to a celibate life? If so, then this stands in some tension with the affirmation—of both Jesus and Paul—that lifelong celibacy is a gift for some but not for all.

Summing Up The context and overall language of Scripture suggests that the one-flesh bond spoken of in Genesis 2: 24 is essentially a lifelong kinship bond. The prophetic tradition in the Old Testament deepens the Bible’s understanding of this bond by speaking of God’s faithfulness to Israel as a marriage bond, emphasizing grace and lifelong faithfulness. This emphasis on kinship and bonding is reflected in each New Testament text that refers back to Genesis 2: 24. The biblical usage suggests that this emphasis on bonding (“ one flesh”) constitutes the essence of marriage, even where the procreative meaning of marriage cannot be fulfilled. This focus on the bonding implicit in becoming one flesh is the basis for the Bible’s categorical rejection of all forms of sexual promiscuity. People are not to say with their bodies what they cannot or will not say with the whole of their lives. It is clear that Scripture assumes that this one-flesh bond only takes place between a man and a woman. Yet there is nothing inherent in the biblical usage that would necessarily exclude committed gay or lesbian unions from consideration as one-flesh unions, when the essential characteristics of one-flesh unions as kinship bonds are held clearly in view. Therefore, what is normal in the biblical witness may not necessarily be normative in different cultural settings that are not envisioned by the biblical writers.

If region and state couldn’t serve as a basis for honor, surely strong family values could. Even when they couldn’t manage to live up to their moral code—which favored lifelong, heterosexual, monogamous, pro-life marriage—they took pride in the code itself. It was not easy to live by such a code. One woman of the right had a gay brother who had been married, had a child, and abandoned both “just because of sex,” and the episode had caused an upheaval in the family. In order to avoid the pain of divorce her own parents had caused her, one woman entered a covenant marriage. (Intended to strengthen the institution, covenant marriage was passed into law in Louisiana in 1997, and later in Arkansas and Arizona. It calls on the couple to sign an affidavit that they have undergone pre-marital counseling, and otherwise heightens the requirements for entry and exit from marriage.) She soon discovered her husband was gay, and while the couple later cooperated in raising their two children, she was glad she had tried to keep the marriage together “the way it should be.” The fourteen-year-old daughter of another mother became pregnant and kept the baby. “I’m working full-time and she’s got to finish school. Frankly it’s been very hard.” And it would have been easier for her young daughter, she feels, if she had had an abortion. But there was honor in keeping the baby and “doing the right thing”—an honor they felt to be invisible to liberals.

You give me pleasure unspeakable, unimaginable. And I wasn't avoiding you,' he spoke into the softness of her hair. 'At least, not voluntarily. I was giving you the chance to end the physical relationship, to end the honeymoon if you wanted to.' He pulled back to look at her tear-wet face. 'You don't want to, do you?' he realised huskily. 'Never!' She buried her face against his chest.

I remind you that marriage is a precious gift. It’s a lifelong dedication to love, and a daily challenge to love one another more fully and more freely through the many years you have left. May you consider what you have now, and seek to carry it forward each and every day.

What is marriage anymore, anyway? How is the institution structured? What assumptions do we bring to it? Is it an irreducible economic unit, in which production and labor remain distributed along traditional lines (the model of husband as protector and breadwinner and wife as 'angel in the house,' domestic goddess, and nurturer)? Or is it a spiritual, intellectual, artistic, and social partnership - a lifelong collaboration, a project, a constant becoming? Is it what patriarchal society said it is, or what Hollywood pretended it was? What does it mean to be a modern woman? Where does a woman's 'modern-ness' reside? In what she looks like, how she acts, what she does, wears, or says? Or is it somewhere else entirely outside of her, in a larger system that allows her to be a whole, free person? that represents her as such? that allows her to represent herself? that recognizes her individuality and subjectivity? Is it about things like voting and birth control, the issues that Katharine Hepburn's mother devoted her life to fighting for? Is it about wearing pants, not aiming to please, sleeping around, and not getting married, like Katharine Hepburn did? Is it about smoking Virginia Slims? Is it not perhaps all and none of these things but the fact that we keep having to make a case for our personhood? Is it not the story that needs to be reframed? the heroine who needs to be allowed to create herself, from scratch?

What is marriage anymore, anyway? How is the institution structured? What assumptions do we bring to it? Is it an irreducible economic unit, in which production and labor remain distributed along traditional lines (the model of husband as protector and breadwinner and wife as “angel in the house,” domestic goddess, and nurturer)? Or is it a spiritual, intellectual, artistic, and social partnership—a lifelong collaboration, a project, a constant becoming?

Don’t stress that your friendships are changing as marriages and children bring challenges to them. New wonderful friends will appear in the next eight years that will bring you lifelong friends and so much happiness. JONATHAN AND ANGELA SCOTT, WILDLIFE AND TRAVEL PHOTOGRAPHERS – THE BIG CAT PEOPLE 1.

Seeing your partner’s perspectives and experience as equal in importance to your own. This means recognizing narcissism for what it is (it’s not just you, we all have it). Relating to others as genuine people, rather than need satisfiers or projections of your own psyche, is a lifelong effort, never complete.

Christian marriage vows are the inception of a lifelong practice of death, of giving over not only all you have, but all you are.

We live in an age of high performance, in which everyone is supposed to be constantly maximizing their potential, living their "best life." Social media has made everything from marriage proposals to this morning's breakfast into exquisitely choreographed, unsubtly competitive rituals. The ethos of work—"the long arm of the job," as one scholar put it—pervades our leisure, to the extent that we even have any.

Here’s the “refrigerator list” of lessons for successful married life: 1. Marry someone a lot like you. Similarity in core values and background is the key to a happy marriage. And forget about changing someone after marriage. 2. Friendship is as important as romantic love. Heart-thumping passion has to undergo a metamorphosis in lifelong relationships. Marry someone for whom you feel deep friendship as well as love. 3. Don’t keep score. Don’t take the attitude that marriage must always be a fifty-fifty proposition; you can’t get out exactly what you put in. The key to success is having both partners try to give more than they get out of the relationship. 4. Talk to each other. Marriage to the strong, silent type can be deadly to a relationship. Long-term married partners are talkers (at least to one another, and about things that count). 5. Don’t just commit to your partner—commit to marriage itself. Make a commitment to the idea of marriage and take it seriously. There are enormous benefits to seeing the marriage as bigger than the immediate needs of each partner.

Nearly everyone tries to date the hot guy or the cute girl. But physical attractiveness has very little actual value when it comes to having a successful, lifelong marriage relationship.

ADD seemed to explain many of my behavior patterns, thought processes, childish emotional reactions, my workaholism and other addictive tendencies, the sudden eruptions of bad temper and complete irrationality, the conflicts in my marriage and my Jekyll and Hyde ways of relating to my children. And, too, my humor, which can break from any odd angle and leave people laughing or leave them cold, my joke bouncing back at me, as the Hungarians say, like “peas thrown at a wall.” It also explained my propensity to bump into doorways, hit my head on shelves, drop objects and brush close to people before I notice they are there. No longer mysterious was my ineptness following directions or even remembering them, or my paralytic rage when confronted by a sheet of instructions telling me how to use even the simplest of appliances. Beyond everything, recognition revealed the reason for my lifelong sense of somehow never approaching my potential in terms of self-expression and self-definition—

A Soulmate Is a Fellow Traveler “People think they have to find their soulmate to have a good marriage… Anyone you meet already has soulmates… Their mother, their father, their lifelong friends. You get married, and after twenty years of loving, bearing and raising children, and meeting challenges, then you’ll have ‘created’ soulmate status.

The Case for Christ,

I need him only because I happen to adore him, because his company brings me gladness and comfort, and because, as a friend's grandfather once put it, “Sometimes life is too hard to be alone, and sometimes life is too good to be alone.” The same goes for Felipe: He needs me only for my companionship as well. Seems like a lot, but it isn't much at all; it is only love. And a love-based marriage does not guarantee the lifelong binding contract of a clan-based marriage or an asset-based marriage; it cannot. By unnerving definition, anything that the heart has chosen for its own mysterious reasons it can always unchoose later--again, for its own mysterious reasons. And a shared private heaven can quickly descend into a failed private hell.

Jesus points out that God’s purpose for marriage is to be found in the creation account in Genesis 1–2. God created marriage to be between one man and one woman under a lifelong covenant, but it was because of people’s “hardness of heart” that Moses allowed for a certificate of divorce (Mark 10:4–5).

The woman who was built from the man is now joined to him and they become “one flesh” (Genesis 2:24). This “one flesh” imagery is the basis for marriage being the union of one man and woman in a lifelong covenantal relationship (Matthew 19:4–6). The words “leave” (ʿāzab) and “hold fast” (dābaq) depict the fact that marriage is a covenantal relationship (see Deuteronomy 28:20; Hosea 4:10).

The woman who was built from the man is now joined to him and they become “one flesh” (Genesis 2:24). This “one flesh” imagery is the basis for marriage being the union of one man and woman in a lifelong covenantal relationship (Matthew 19:4–6). The words “leave” (ʿāzab) and “hold fast” (dābaq) depict the fact that marriage is a covenantal relationship (see Deuteronomy 28:20; Hosea 4:10). Marriage is not a social construct but is something that God ordained as a creation ordinance and institution.

First, she must unequivocally say “no” to the housewife image. This does not mean, of course, that she must divorce her husband, abandon her children, give up her home. She does not have to choose between marriage and career; that was the mistaken choice of the feminine mystique. In actual fact, it is not as difficult as the feminine mystique implies, to combine marriage and motherhood and even the kind of lifelong personal purpose that once was called “career.” It merely takes a new life plan—in terms of one’s whole life as a woman. The first step in that plan is to see housework for what it is—not a career, but something that must be done as quickly and efficiently as possible. Once a woman stops trying to make cooking, cleaning, washing, ironing, “something more,” she can say “no, I don’t want a stove with rounded corners, I don’t want four different kinds of soap.” She can say “no” to those mass daydreams of the women’s magazines and television, “no” to the depth researchers and manipulators who are trying to run her life. Then, she can use the vacuum cleaner and the dishwasher and all the automatic appliances, and even the instant mashed potatoes for what they are truly worth—to save time that can be used in more creative ways.

You honor your parents when you put your spouse first. You comfort them because they know you’re safe and secure, and that their grandchildren are well cared for. You honor your children when you put your spouse first. You teach them that they are, in fact, NOT the center of the universe and that the best way to live is to be aware of other people’s needs. You teach them what marriage is supposed to look like. You provide a safe and unbreakable home. You provide a lifelong foundation for them on which they can anchor and build their futures. You honor yourself when you put your spouse first. Because you are living for something greater than yourself and are less likely to die alone, sad, angry, and with herpes on your mouth.

Love before marriage is the spark that ignites the journey, while love after marriage is the flame that sustains the enduring warmth of a lifelong partnership.

From the last three decades of psychological research, we know that our minds are formed in relationships. This means not simply that our minds are concerned with relationships (which they are), but that relationships shape the ways we process and experience reality. Psychology has made huge strides in mapping the connections between early attachment, emotional development, and adult intimate relationships. Throughout life, our emotions signal what’s important, and what’s important—at any age—is satisfying relationships. In a real sense, then, marriage picks up where childhood left off. As a close relationship that engages body, heart, and mind, marriage offers a powerful lifelong vehicle for knowing another, being known, and developing our deep emotional life. Overall, research finds that the most important factors in whether our relationships are satisfying all have to do with emotions: how we tune into our emotions, experience them, manage them, communicate about them, calm them enough to respond to others, and align them with our behavior and goals. Throughout this book, I will sum up the key capacities of healthy emotional relating as curiosity, compassion, and control. When we’re curious, we are open to trying to understand our own and the other’s truth. When we’re compassionate, we feel empathy for our own and the other’s struggles. When we exert self-control, we contain and communicate our emotional responses to others in ways that are accurate, sensitive, and likely to get heard. The triad of curiosity, compassion, and (self-)control takes us toward a sense of personal agency, and away from holding our partner responsible for our own feelings. It helps us build the inner capacities we need to reckon well with the rough patch. Finding a way to be happy in marriage depends on our ability to exercise emotional skill, flexibility, and resilience. But

On a day-to-day basis, we try to distance ourselves from the unseen realm (see Eph. 6:12) because spiritual warfare offends our postmodern sensibilities. We find it easier to believe that our spouses are hopelessly dim-witted rather than attribute our frustration to the thief who wants to steal, kill, and destroy (see John 10:10). It’s imprudent to assume there’s a demon inspiring every moment of marital friction, but it’s also foolhardy to ignore the larger spiritual reality.

Self-awareness means that we see our sin patterns, are grieved by them, and work to overcome them. It means we acknowledge our limitations and their cost to our spouses. To be self-aware is also to admit that we can’t get past our sin and brokenness by sheer determination or intellectual prowess; we need Jesus. If you don’t know what those areas of sin and brokenness are or how they influence your relationship, go ahead and ask your spouse—but not until you’re ready to hear the answer.

Most of us are raised to believe we will either find love in our first family (our family of origin) or, if not there, in the second family we are expected to form through committed romantic couplings, particularly those that lead to marriage and/or lifelong bondings. Many of us learn as children that friendship should never be seen as just as important as family ties. However, friendship is the place in which a great majority of us have our first glimpse of redemptive love and caring community.

Married life, offered in service to God, is such a good and rewarding life. Let’s give ourselves fully to it; let’s keep building our “marital house” until we die, pursuing each other, forgiving each other, loving each other, and growing together through the years. If we do this, we will, like Anne, be richly blessed with a lifelong love.

Keep in mind: if your marriage and family feel like a joke or as if they’re bordering on chaos, it’s not anything that God hasn’t seen or isn’t capable of redeeming. So much of Christian teaching today is about us developing “our” gifts, improving “our” talents, reaching “our” potential, yet so much of Jesus’s teaching and modeling is about surrendering to the work of the Holy Spirit. Let’s allow marriage to teach us to trust this Holy Spirit. He’s proven Himself.

What if we viewed a bride walking down an aisle toward a tuxedoed groom standing anxiously at an altar as the first step on a lifelong march toward justice and the common good? What if we understood that white dress and tux as work clothes, and the wedding rings as essential equipment for building a strong social foundation? What if a pledge of permanence meant more for economic security than just the fulfillment of sexual ecstasy?

A defeatist attitude kills almost as many marriages as affairs do.

Marriage isn't about rights as much as it is about revelation.