Why is it that many relationships, especially love relationships usually begin with fervent and glowing love, but a few years down the line, it would wax cold?
If the lifespan of most honeymoon or prewedding periods could be lengthened, issues such as divorce, separation, spousal killings, or domestic violence wouldn’t have been the outcome of many marriages.
Love in marriage is a different experience when you compare it with prenuptial love. One is more intoxicating than the other because the realities and the challenges of life have not set in, while the other doesn’t sparkle anymore because there’s nothing else to see. One burns swiftly like a harmattan fire, but the other smokes and smells.
The challenges of married life such as conception issues, third-party influence, financial and sexual issues have made many people’s love to obey the law of diminishing returns.
Many would start their love life well, but end it on a sad note. Not everyone who started well ended. The difference between those who end well and those who do not is their inability to manage their crisis and differences.
The love that endures must stand the test of time regardless of the challenges you face. Now, let me ask, will your love endure?
The true test of love is in its ability to manage and endure the crisis. Many things depreciate, however, if your love must appreciate, it must be renewed and sustained. Any love you do not revive will not survive.
Factors that enhance a long-lasting love.
1. Jesus Christ
Many may not love to hear this, but I would say it unapologetically. Your relationship with Jesus would help you sustain and renew your love for your spouse.
Take a look at Jesus’ presence at the marriage at Cana, if the organizers didn’t know Mary, His mother who had access to Jesus, that’s how their wine would be exhausted. However, wine is a type of pleasure, love, or the Holy Spirit.
In the journey of marriage, there’s every tendency for your love for each other to diminish, but when this happens, go back to Jesus Christ and do whatever He tells you to do.
When you spend time daily at the feet of Jesus, it helps your love to grow. This is why couples must never joke with their individual and joint fellowship with the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit, it’s very important. Remember, couples who love God first love each other better.
2. Patience
It takes patience to boil a stone soft and I have never seen any problem it can’t solve. If your love would endure, you both need a great deal of patience.
Patience is a virtue, you can’t acquire it as a formal education because it is enlisted among the fruit of the Spirit. Without patience, you’d exhaust the love in your marriage because not all issues are worth fighting or arguing.
Patience can be earned when you prayerfully ask God for it, you yield to the Holy Spirit (that’s if He’s resident in you) as He leads you, or you learn it the hard way. Love is patient, but if yours is not, then you’re walking in its opposite.
3. Fan the flames
For a fire to keep burning, you’d have to add more wood to it. There are many things couples do that extinguish the fire of love in their marriage. Character flaws and your failure to fulfill your roles and responsibilities would affect your love life.
Fan your love to flames through understanding, the fear of God, openness, oneness, communication, transparency, and your devotion to God, however, all these must be mutual.
It is the love that you fan to flames that endures.
Similarly, fill your love tank (or bank). If you withdraw more than you deposit, there would be a deficit. And if you deposit more than you withdraw, there would be a surplus.
Don’t allow the ashes of familiarity, undue expectations, anything or anyone to put off the flames of fire in your love life. Keep your love aglow; let it burn.
4. Associate with the right people
Who you associate with determines the outcome of your love life. It was the relationship Jesus’ mother had with the bridegroom that bailed them out.
Scriptures rightly assert that if you walk with wise men you shall be wise, but a companion of fools shall be destroyed. Edit your relationships mercilessly. Don’t bring the wrong people who would come with their wrong influence into your marriage.
Forsake every wrong company that would undermine the bliss in your marriage. There are some companies you must never keep if you want your love to endure.
Be mindful of the friends or families you keep, they can either strengthen your love or destroy it.
5. Be one
Many do not understand why God’s mathematical calculation of one plus one in marriage equals one, and there is a reason for that.
When you don’t walk and work as one, there’s nothing you can achieve as a couple in marriage, and your love would never endure. You’d only live together as housemates, and not as one flesh.
Be one in purpose, in spirit, and in mind. Never joke with the power of marital oneness. Although this assertion wasn’t used in the context of marriage, in marriage, two shall chase ten thousand to flight as they involve God in their relationship.
Now, take a cursory look at your marriage, is your love enduring, or its waxing cold? Is it the way you loved your spouse when you started that you love them now? Why did you now live like cats and dogs, or strangers?
Dear lovers, if your love would endure, patiently ignite the fire of love, and then fan it to flames as you associate with the right people would be beneficial in your relationship. Remember, when your love endures, it will stand through thick and thin, but when it’s feeble, many waters would quench it.
