Tag: feelings

When Love Feels Dead, Should The Marriage End

I understand why some think their marriage is over when the love they used to feel for their spouse now feels dead. After all, it seems ingrained in our thinking if something dies you must get rid of it and replace it.

A lot of people view love as something akin to planting a tree in the backyard. If it dies you dig it up and replace it with a new one. Or, when a pet dies and you replace it with a new one. We do the same with a lot of our relationships with other people as well. When friendships fade and die off, we look for new ones. When leaders or mentors lose their place in our lives, we find replacements.

It’s no wonder we approach marriage with the same mindset as we do all these other relationships. The feelings of love can and often do fade. And there are times when those feelings can be outright flat lined, dead, completely gone. But does this mean the marriage has to be over?

This Should Not Be Missing From Your Marriage

Truthfully, marriage is complex. It takes the complexity of many factors to make a marriage thrive the way God created it to. However, on this post today I want to discuss just one thing that should not be missing from your marriage. Because when it is missing, it makes the journey of marriage very difficult. At least it was for me.

The uncertainty that flooded my mind time after time in my marriage was torment. It reminds me of when I was a boy pulling petals off of flowers over a childhood sweetheart.

“She loves me, she loves me not; she loves me, she loves me not.”

The insecurity of not knowing if my wife would love me one day and then not love me the next was incredibly difficult to live with. It wasn’t that she was always giving me a reason to feel insecure. There was just always something missing in our relationship, something I didn’t know how to describe, but I knew it was missing.

As it turned out, it was the same thing Janet was always missing that made her feel so insecure about our relationship. And neither one of us knew how to fix the problem because we never really understood the problem. We had times when our love for each other seemed strong enough, yet we both lived with the nagging feelings of not knowing how long our love would last.

Love Is More Than A Feeling, It’s Also A Choice

On a previous post, I Want To Know What Love Is, I talked about love as a feeling and how difficult it is to describe that feeling. In that post, I said, “not one time does the Bible refer to love as being something you feel.”

But after saying that and reading in the word this week I had to go back and edited that line. It now reads, “Not one time does the Bible refer to love as something you only feel.” The important change I made was adding only.

I had to make that change because to be honest love has to also be a feeling. It is that thing inside causing us to say, “I love you and I want to marry you.”

And when we do something that shows our love we explain, “I did it because I love you.” Read more