Love Muscles

“Gramma, why did you marry Papa?” Of course I gave the proper answer, “Because I loved him soooo much and wanted to be with him forever.”  I was 18 years old when I said YES! to marriage. What I knew of love was not very accurate or realistic, but I knew that he was the one I wanted to grow old with.

Remember when you first determined who you wanted to spend the rest of your life with? Remember why? My response to why I wanted to be Mrs. Dana Brady 41 years ago would have been immature and uneducated. I wanted to keep the feeling I was experiencing forever and was certain that our love would sustain that euphoria. But then life happens. He works late and stops making her laugh. She has bad hair days and burnt meatloaf. Kids come on the scene and you cease to even be a couple. Now you are parents. Exhausted parents! What happened to that feeling? What happened to “love?”

When I think back over the years of our marriage, I can’t sort out how much has been happy and how much has been sad. I don’t know how much has been play and how much as been work. I don’t know how much laughter or how much tears. It is all blended together to create our journey. And I wouldn’t trade it for the world. You see, all those Mountaintops were amazing and thrilling. And all the valleys were where we learned how to love. How to live. How to give.

If you are struggling in your marriage, know that God is helping you build your love muscles. Without such experiences, we don’t grow. Of course, it is possible to allow those struggles to build resentment rather than love muscles. Anger and resentment will turn into bitterness and that will turn your “happily ever after” into wasted years and stale relationships.

As I write this column, I am aware of a few couples that I care deeply about who are struggling through the valley of their marriage. I pray for them daily because I know that it is much more common to walk away than to commit to loving more and meeting needs and making sacrifices and owning your share of the reason you have landed here.

At 18 I didn’t know that love was hard work. I didn’t know that it could hurt so badly. I didn’t know that it was more than a spectacular feeling. I just wanted it and wanted it to grow and grow into wedded bliss. Four decades later, I know that we made a commitment to each  other and no matter what, we were determined to figure out how to fulfill that commitment. It wasn’t just to co-exist, but to truly LIVE and LOVE with all our might. And that meant we sometimes had to give more love than we received. It meant that we had to talk to godly people who knew how to love for a lifetime and take their advice. It meant sacrifice and learning to communicate inoffensively. It meant putting the desires of each other ahead of our own… even when one of us wasn’t reciprocating!

I love being married to Dana. I love the time that we spend together. I love the comfort and contentment we feel when we are together. And I even love knowing that there will still be times when we aggravate or ignore, when we inadvertently hurt each other. There will be times when we get lazy and don’t get it right. But I really love knowing that we have discovered that, just as soon as we notice our error, we will pounce on the cure. And we will love each other the very best that we can, because we have some pretty strong love muscles.

“Thanks, God, for those valleys that have made our love strong. And bless all my friends with great workouts in the valleys, rather than the sorrow that doesn’t produce the growth You have designed. And help them to find the happily ever after that we have found. Amen”