Love Is More Than a Feeling

Committed love requires you to choose to see the good in your spouse every day.

Michael Tucker is speaker/director of Faith For Today, and host of the award-winning show Lifestyle Magazine.

Feelings are fickle. You can be completely in love with your partner one day, butterflies in your stomach and all, and completely turned off by him or her the next day and desperate for marriage advice on how to save your relationship. This creates a very unstable foundation for the marriage.

If you want to have a healthy relationship, you must change the way you think about love. There’s nothing wrong with the “butterflies in your stomach” kind of love, but those feelings are temporary. There must be something more to it, otherwise the relationship will fall apart as soon as the feelings are gone.

ROMANTIC LOVE VS. COMMITTED LOVE

Falling in romantic love is easy and effortless. You don’t have to do anything; it just happens. The only problem is that it is just as easy to fall out of romantic love. 

Committed love on the other hand is quite different. It requires you to choose to see the good in your spouse every day as opposed to focusing on the things that annoy and irritate you about them. It also requires you to accept them as they are—flaws, quirks, and all—and not try to change them.

It is easier to stay in love with your partner when you think of it as a commitment. Committed love is about being supportive, affectionate, kind, caring, and loyal to the one you love. It is a willingness to share life and all its unromantic aspects with your significant other.

This marriage advice can keep you from falling out of love with your husband or wife after the honeymoon period. It can also help you to create a stable foundation for love and marriage, one that is not based on fickle feelings.