Learning to Love

I have been very fortunate in marriage because I married a woman who is, in many ways, easy to love. Patience has always had a warmth and steadiness about her and a way of caring for people that drew me toward her from the beginning, but if I am candid about our early years, I did not really know how to love her very well.

I knew how to provide for her and lead because I thought that is what love looked like. What I did not understand nearly as well was the relational side of love—the listening, tenderness, emotional presence, and genuine curiosity required to know another person well enough that they experience the love you are trying to give.

She never sat me down and announced that she was going to teach me how to love. She simply loved me, and then she waited patiently for me to learn how to love her in the way she  deserved to be loved. She did not demand that I become a different man overnight, nor did she use my immaturity as a weapon against me. She loved me where I was while believing there was more in me. That was an early lesson in what mature love actually looks like.

We were young when we married, and there was plenty of infatuation carrying us along. We were attracted to each other, enjoyed being together, and were excited about the life we were going to build, but it did not take long for real life to begin teaching us that infatuation and mature love are not the same thing.

We faced difficulties fairly early, and both of us had the instinct to get up and do whatever needed to be done next. If there was a problem, we solved it; if there was a bill, we figured out how to pay it; and if life became difficult, we kept moving. That resilience served us well, but it also allowed us at times to keep going without sitting down at the table and talk about what was happening to us.

Somewhere along the way, I began to understand I did not always know how to love her in the way she needed to receive it. That was humbling because good intentions can make me feel quite satisfied with myself while doing very little for the person who is supposed to benefit from them. So I made a decision that I was going to learn how to love my wife, and what that really meant was that I had to learn Patience.

I wish I could tell you that I found one book, one sermon, or one piece of advice that unlocked all of this, but I do not think love works that way. I had to pay attention to what made Patience feel safe and what caused her to pull away, what gave her joy and what discouraged her, what she heard when I spoke, and whether what I intended to communicate was what she actually experienced. This is a skill I am still a student of.

I began to understand that this was really the work of becoming her friend, and friendship is more demanding than we sometimes make it sound. It requires honesty, openness, vulnerability, curiosity, and enough trust to let another person see what is really going on inside you. It also requires treating that person like a friend, which is something husbands and wives can unfortunately stop doing when familiarity turns into carelessness.

I have had to learn to turn the question back toward myself. If I want a loving wife, am I becoming a loving husband? If I want Patience to listen to me, am I willing to listen to her long enough that she knows I understand before I begin explaining myself? If I want honesty between us, am I helping create the kind of relationship where she can tell me something difficult without having to manage my reaction? Those questions have been far more useful to me than keeping score of what I thought Patience should be doing differently.

Marriage requires a radical commitment to love our spouses as they are while still believing in the person God is forming them to become. I think we get into trouble when either side of that disappears.

If I continually focus on what Patience needs to change, I can turn love into criticism and my wife into a project. On the other hand, if loving her means that I can never speak honestly about something that is hurting her or hurting us, then I am not giving her the kind of friendship I would want her to give me.

Over the years Patience has often seen things in me that I could not see very clearly myself, and because I knew she was for me and wanted the best for me, I became more able to hear those things without treating every observation as an attack. This is still a work in progress. I have tried to offer her that same kind of love, although I have certainly not always done it well. There have been times when what I thought was helpful felt like pressure to her, and marriage has forced me more than once to examine myself before deciding that she was the one who needed correcting.

Our culture often talks about love as though it is something that happens to us and then either continues or disappears, but after forty-five years of marriage I do not believe mature love works that way. Christian love has to be pursued and practiced, particularly in those ordinary moments when loving does not come naturally.

It is easy to admire the virtue patience, until your spouse disagrees with you, easier to talk about humility than to admit that your spouse was right about you, and easier to believe in service until you are tired and would rather have someone take care of you. Marriage gives us a remarkably honest place to practice the very qualities God continually shows toward us—patience, faithfulness, tenderness, service, and grace—because the person living with us sees whether those qualities exist when nobody else is watching.

There is even something a little humorous about how practical God has made this. It is easy to say that I love God because God does not have bad breath, leave things where I wish they had not been left, or get irritated because He had a difficult day. Marriage takes love out of the abstract and places it across the table from us in the form of another imperfect human being, while reminding us that the person across the table is being asked to love an imperfect human being too.

That last part has become increasingly important to me because I can spend a lot of energy thinking about what it is like for me to live with Patience while giving considerably less thought to what it must be like for Patience to live with me.

I have found that the more willing I am to give myself to loving Patience well, the more gratitude, friendship, and love I seem to find coming back into our marriage. I do not mean that as a formula for getting something from her; I mean that love has slowly changed me and changed the way I experience the woman God gave me.

After forty-five years, I am still learning her because she is still becoming, and so am I. My responsibility is not merely to keep loving the young woman I married many years ago, but to keep learning how to love the woman she is today and the woman God is continuing to shape her into.

What I understand now, which I understood very poorly when we began, is that love is not primarily about knowing the definition of love. It is about becoming the kind of person who knows how to love.

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