The Love Delusion

The root of any romance today is love, but it wasn’t always so. In the past love was secondary to duty and obedience. Today, love is all that matters. Over-emphasis on love is encouraged by stories about how love conquers all, is fulfilling, brings a never-ending happiness and is rarely marred conflict. Sure, we all know that this isn’t the reality of love, but this view of love affects our hopes for romance.

I am just as sappy as the next girl of dreaming of an intense, all consuming love. Yes, I found that with my husband in the first stages of our relationship, it’s called infatuation. But, what about the day-to-day life?

A lot of day-to-day love is really boring. It is taking out the trash, doing the dishes, and paying the bills (all things that I hate). What people don’t realize is that the best day of their lives includes all that boring stuff (okay, so maybe not the three that I listed, but all the others).

Romantic movies make you think your relationship is supposed to be so amazing, passionate and exciting all the time. This affects my marriage. I have never lived a "normal" life and I have always tried to seek normal. The world makes love seem like some all consuming passionate feeling all the time. When I don’t have that, sometimes, I wonder if something is wrong.

People think that love is supposed to be what it’s portrayed as and when those feelings fade, people think love is gone. Unfortunately, this doesn’t often happen until after you’re "stuck" a.k.a. married. So, when the feelings fade, people start looking at divorce and moving from one partner to another. Most people today don’t realize that there is more to marriage/love - there’s also God-given purpose. Biblically, love is about loving the other person and giving to them, not just about what they do for you.

This is an actual message left for me by the hubby!

Now, I am as guilty as the next person. I seek that passion for my marriage all the time, and it affects my marriage (usually not in a good way). When I don’t get that passion that I am seeking, I often get sucked into one of those negative thought cycles that I posted on not long ago. My saving grace? God. It’s the Holy Spirit and that moral compass that he has installed in my heart. No matter how many negative thought patterns I have gotten sucked into (and it’s been a lot), I have not been able to bring myself to leave my husband, because at the end of the day, he provides me with the unending and constant love that I truly crave.

Love is not that consuming passion that it’s made out to be by the media. The reality of it? The husband who comes to the rescue when we are not even talking to each other, but I accidently break a ton of dishes around my feet. It’s the husband who does his best to manage our household when I am lying incapacitated on the couch for months with back pain. It’s the day to day offer to fix my plate or get me a drink. That is love. That is a love that I don’t see an end to.