Misconceptions About Love & Marriage: Hard Work

Anyone who has ever studied what the Bible says about marriage will be familiar with Genesis 2:24, which describes God’s plan for the relationship between a husband and wife. In the King James Version, it reads this way: “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.”

Because it’s so familiar, we often miss a very interesting part of the verse: the word cleave. That word is not exactly a normal word in our language. It means “to pursue with all of your energy.”

It literally means that you have to work. The formula is very simple. Marriage is work. Marriage only works when we work at it.

But unfortunately, we’ve got it backwards. Our tendency is to work at a relationship only at the beginning. Once we know we have “won” the affection of the other person, then we typically get lazy.

I remember when Karen and I first started dating. I was sixteen years old. Our first date, believe it or not, was a Three Dog Night concert. When I picked her up that night I was at my absolute best. I’d washed my car. I was wearing my nicest clothes. I was on my best behavior. She was impressed.

But two years later—after we’d been together all that time—I wasn’t giving a second thought to my car, my appearance, or my behavior. Why? Because she was already mine.

You fall in love because you work at it. All couples work at it at the beginning. It’s when you start to take each other for granted, though, that some couples begin to fall out of love.

We stop working at our relationships. Or maybe we work on a few big events through the year—Valentine’s Day, a birthday, a vacation—and we hope those things will sustain us the rest of the year.

But it doesn’t last. Love is the most perishable commodity on Earth, and unless you care for it every day, it can spoil. When God provided manna for the children of Israel, He commanded them to gather it fresh every morning. There was no storing it, because it turned rotten overnight.

Why did He do this? To build dependence between Him and His children, and to show how faithful He was.

Love between a husband and wife works the same way. It is only as strong as it is today. A marriage requires daily work and daily interaction. A lot of married people—guys especially—look at marriage according to a point system. If we go shopping with her, we earn a point. Watching a romantic movie earns a point. Buying jewelry earns a lot of points.

And that may be an acceptable way to think about meeting each other’s needs, but what we need to remember is that the points disappear at midnight. The next day, we start over. Marriage is daily work, just like God said in the very beginning.

In Revelation 2:4, Jesus tells the church at Ephesus that they have forsaken their first love. He tells them to repent and return to the things they did at first.

A lot of married people—whether they’re struggling in marriage or are simply getting by—have forsaken the things they did to impress their spouse at the beginning. What if you returned to your first love? What if you worked hard again at that relationship?

The result might be that you fall back in love…again.