| November 19th, 2015

The #1 Reason I Do Not Feel Love In My Marriage Is …

marriage problem is me

In the beginning, everything was perfect. Adam had an open and deeply connected relationship with God. They walked and talked together without anything to hide. And Adam had an open and deeply connected relationship with Eve. They were “naked and unashamed!” God built us with a God-sized hole that only He can fill.  And after creating us and viewing our interaction with all that He had created, He stated,  “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him. “ Genesis 2:18.

My Need to Feel Loved Is God Given

God built us with a need to connect with someone. There is nothing wrong with our God-given desire to have a loving relationship.  I believe He desires for us to deeply connect, emotionally, physically and sexually with that someone for life. God designed marriage to address the problem of our need to connect. He built the institution of marriage for the purpose of meeting the need within our soul.  He intended for us to be together forever.

Why Relationships Are So Messy

“Christ died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again.”  2 Corinthians 5:15

One of the gifts of The Crucible Project is our teaching about how our judgments are based in ourselves. The old adage, “you spot it, you got it” lines up pretty well with what our Savior spoke about the speck we see in other’s while there is a post in ours. One of the reasons are relationships are so difficult is because we project a lot of our own stuff onto our spouse.  We think the problem is out there, with her, instead of inside, within us.  Another reason is that our spouse knows us so well that we are told a huge amount of feedback about ourselves, some of which we have a hard time seeing in ourselves.  Perhaps God’s gave us the spouse He did to make us a better man… and draw us closer to Him.

Loving First

In Ephesians 5:21 – 33, Paul encourages us to love sacrificially, as Christ loved the church.  That had me thinking about what sacrificial love really is and why is it so powerful. When we have a baby, they are totally dependent on us for life. We love the baby through all the ups and downs of their first several years. We are up late at night, early in the morning and all throughout the day. We clean up messes, spills, explosive diapers and other bodily fluids.We love our baby when we don’t feel like it and when we do feel like it.  We love our baby although they do not do anything for us at all.  There is no reciprocation.  There are no loving words or actions.  If they ever do for us any of what we have done for them, it is probably not for about five or six decades later.

We engage in sacrificial acts of love, unilaterally, without expecting anything in return for a very long time.  Engaging in sacrificial acts of love, even when we do not feel like it, creates love in our hearts. Our loving actions create love within us. In our sacrificial acts of love, we feel a great amount of love.

SACRIFICIAL ACTS OF LOVE = HAVING MORE LOVE IN YOUR HEART

Waiting on your spouse to make you feel loved moves you further away from what you are seeking.  The fastest way to build love in your marriage is for you to act with sacrificial love first.  In action, along the way, you begin to move from the need to be loved, to knowing you are a loving person.  As I change from a stance of blaming her for not being loved, I find that I begin to feel loved.

Questions, men:

  • Have you also found that taking unilateral actions of love helps you feel love?
  • Can a man love sacrificially to a fault?
  • What is the upside of taking loving actions unilaterally?

– By Roy Wooten

Roy completed his initial Crucible weekend in 2009 and has been the longtime leader of The Crucible Project community in Houston. Roy and his wife Devra have led over 135 of their Life Together Forever Couples Weekends and are the authors of The Secret to Lifetime Love: Speaking and Hearing Truth. He also authored Full Throttle Into Fatherhood and is the Executive Director of Shield Bearer Counseling Centers in Houston, Texas. Follow Roy at LifeTogetherForever.com.

 

Photo Credit: Image courtesy of Roy Wooten.