In love relationships and marriage, the major challenge most people have is how to understand their partner or spouse. The husband finds it hard to understand his wife, and the wife thinks her husband is too difficult to be understood.
Lovers who don’t understand each other would always have recurrent issues such as misunderstanding, dissension, and lots more.
If you don’t know who you love it would be difficult relating to the one you love. Therefore, it is important to understand people so you can relate well with them.
Do you know who you are in love with? Knowing them isn’t rocket science if you:
1. Walk in love
Many of us have misunderstood love for the PDAs or the feeling of excitement which has given us a blindfold to know who we love. But when the ecstatic feeling is over, we claim to have fallen in love with the wrong person.
The truth, however, is that we do not know them in the first place, we are only excited about being in a relationship with them. If you don’t love a person, you’d never come to the point where you would seek to know them.
In relationships, knowing a person should come first before loving them, but many claims to be in love without knowing who they love. Although, love is a command and to relate is a choice. But friendship should be built before you fall in love with a person, not the reverse, especially in a love relationship.
The major thing, however, that is required to know your spouse or partner is love. Love that is patient, kind, believes all things, bears all things, and it matches the characters of love that’s described in first Corinthians thirteen makes this possible.
There’s a level of intimacy that you’d experience when you know your partner, but walking in love makes that possible. Those who seek to know each other without the involvement of sex understood each other better than those who introduced sex at the wrong time. Sex outside marriage ruins intimacy, but sex in marriage deepens it.
Love makes it possible for you to know each other when you tolerate, and respect each other. With love, you’d be patient to study him or her, but without it, it’s the complete opposite.
2. Believe
It would be difficult to know your spouse or partner if you do not believe or trust them. It becomes impossible when you or they live suspiciously.
Today, most couples find it difficult to dwell with each other in knowledge because they have believed the philosophy that, “Men cannot be trusted,” or “All women are the same.” This ideology has now made some couples to live together as strangers while seeking avenues to make themselves the culprit.
But as believers, you should walk in God’s kind of love towards your spouse, and never walk according to the rudiments of this world.
Do you believe your spouse or you doubt what they say or do? If you do, then you’re most likely not walking in love.
3. Love the right person
I have never seen anyone who knew so much about his or her partner or spouse when they are in love with the wrong person.
A wrong person is a pain in the neck and there is no way it would be easy to know them.
A man won’t have problems understanding his wife when he marries the right woman. You know why? They would live plain lives without pretense – nothing to hide. A wife too won’t understand her husband when she marries the wrong man.
What makes people a mismatch in marriage is due to their wrong motive to desire a relationship with you; incompatibility of destiny, and their wrong mindset about marriage.
When you love the wrong person, they would pretend to be the right one, and pretense has an expiry date. It is better not to love the wrong person than to discover that you have fallen in love with the wrong person.
Being in love with the wrong person is like living with a chameleon. They would show you different colors about their real self until you become frustrated in the relationship.
Why is this so?
Those who are not in Christ Jesus will live double lives – hypocrisy – and those who prefer to hide their true self. And when they enter into marriage with this nature or mindset, they become a problem to whoever they’re married to.
Dearly beloved, are you living an honest life, or you have different personalities for different occasions? Doing this would make it difficult for your spouse to understand you. And truth be told, you don’t need to read an encyclopedia to understand a woman when you marry the right one and you’re the right man; the same applies to a man.
A right spouse or partner has a good motive to be in a relationship with you. More so, there’s the compatibility of divine purpose, understanding and God brought you two together for a purpose. A right person is ready to be naked and unashamed because they are not in the relationship to deceive you, or pretend to be what they’re not.
But when you’re in with the wrong person, you won’t know them easily until you find out their real intent, and most times, it’s usually with a painful discovery.
Now, do you know the God you claimed to love?
Going to church does not make you know God if you don’t have a relationship with Him. And it isn’t enough to have a relationship with Him, you need encounters to consolidate your knowledge about Him.
You can read the Bible from Genesis to Revelation and you’d never understand God experientially. Attending a church for more than a decade doesn’t translate to knowing God. It is Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit that makes knowing God possible.
Added to those, you need encounters to deepen your knowledge of God. Encounters could come through studying His word, dreams, visions, or real-life situations where what He did for you could have only been done by Him – without the influence of man even if a man would be used.
When I refer to encounters, I do not talk about angelic visitations that most young preachers teach, but an encounter with Him you had which transformed your life in no little way.
Do you know the God that you believe in, or your knowledge about Him is limited to what others said about Him?
Through personal encounters, Abraham knew Him as Jehovah Jireh, and Moses noticed His presence through the burning bush. Joshua didn’t build his experience with what he saw Moses did, he encountered God at river Jordan.
The protocols of having personal encounters with God are faith (Heb. 11:6), trust (Prov. 3:5), prayer (Luke 9:29), accurate knowledge and application of His word (Col. 3:16), sacrifice (Ps. 50:5); all done consistently, and with the right motive – love.
It is when you know Whom you believe that nothing can separate you from loving Him – not even life, death, or human threat.
And how sweet would this be when you and your spouse (or partner) know God experientially, you love Him mutually and you know each other inside out?
