Love and War: Finding the Marriage You've Dreamed Of

by John Eldredge

It can be done. And it is worth it.

And so the hardness also comes as something of an embarrassment. (Don’t you feel embarrassed to admit how hard your marriage is?) Maybe it’s just us. Nope. This is everyone. We might as well come out and say it.

Of course marriage is hard.

Anyone looking for undeniable proof in the existence of God need look no further—the fact that any marriage makes it is a miracle of the first order.

too. It is normal for marriage to be hard. Even the best of marriages.

What would it look like for the two of you to find your way to something beautiful?

You see, somewhere along the way we all lose heart in marriage. We all do. It happens to the best of us.

what if God could bring you your heart’s desire? It’s not too late. It isn’t too hard. You are not too far along nor are you and your spouse too set in your ways.

And so we see from start to finish, the part of this great story we have been given to play begins and ends with a marriage.

Love is the single most defining quality of his character and his life.

it is also in the heart of a man and a woman to share some sort of quest, to fight some great battle together.

(And if we can’t find a great battle, we seem to start one with each other, as if to satisfy the itch.)

Your marriage is part of a larger story, too, a story as romantic as any that has ever stirred your heart, and at least as dangerous. The sooner you come to terms with this, the sooner you can understand what is happening in your marriage.

90 percent of the confusion, misunderstanding, struggle, and disappointment in marriage is due to the fact that we do not understand what God is up to.

God gives us marriage to illustrate his heart toward us. It is the deepest and most mythic reality in the world—that love is true, that God pursues us.

We do this all the time, we humans do—we lose track of what matters. So God sends us disruptions in order to jolt us back to our senses.

Our poverty is this lack of vision, this incoherence, and this above all else is why we so easily lose heart. It is absolutely crippling.

There is no place like marriage for those desires that God set in our hearts back in Eden—for battle, beauty, and a shared adventure; the desire for intimacy, companionship, and love—to come true.

marriage is the sanctuary of the heart.

You have been entrusted with the heart of another human being. Whatever else your life’s great mission will entail, loving and defending this heart next to you is part of your great quest.

God uses marriage to bring us the possibility of the deepest joys in life; Satan tries to use it for destruction.

Without you, your spouse will not become the man or the woman that God intends him or her to be and the Kingdom of God will not advance as it is meant to advance.

Let that reality sink in a little deeper—you are the human being who plays the most significant role in your spouse’s life.

Being married costs you everything.

God is with you. He is for you. He commands you to love and he says that with him and in him all things are possible. Not easy. But possible.

Learning to live with our opposite and all their little quirkinesses is part of learning to love.

The first big shock we receive in marriage is that it is hard. The second great shock usually follows hard on the heels of the first—that we are, both of us, a royal mess.

Opposites attract all right—our mutual brokenness is drawn together like a match and gunpowder. And God is in that, by the way. He is the author of your marriage. He planned this.

marriage is a divine conspiracy. It is a conspiracy divinely arranged and with divine intent.

He lures us into marriage and then he uses it to transform us.

when men fail, they tend to fail in one of two ways—either they become passive and silent, or they become domineering and violent. They either don’t offer their strength or they wield it in harmful ways.

We all have a way that we do life.

our style of relating.

The number one thing that gets in the way is your way. I don’t mean insisting on getting your way—dimming the lights or finding a better parking spot. I mean your way of going about life, your style of relating.

He simply knows that until we deal with our brokenness, our sin, and our style of relating, we aren’t going to be happy. Nobody around us is going to be very happy, either.

we are here to learn how to love.

Can you honestly talk together about your styles of relating? Do you even have a clue what yours is? Ask God.

Understanding your spouse by understanding the unfolding story of their life is priceless.

Making the time to really hear your husband’s story or your wife’s story will be time well spent. We want to encourage you to do this. Give each other a few hours. Ask questions. Listen. Invite God to guide and fill the time. It will bear so much good fruit.

there are the thousand little choices we make every day in which we either fall back into our old style, or we choose to live differently in order to love.

Something begins to stir in our hearts. Wow, this could get good. I mean, we could really go places here! This begins to happen when we shift the focus of our energy from needing the other person to change (as in, “if only you would change, my life would be so much better!”) to asking God, “How do I need to change?”