By SirKay.
The greatest destroyer of marriage besides infidelity and money is marital apathy. Unlike infidelity and money, there’s often no noise involved – it is a silent, slow and sure marriage killer.
Marital apathy occurs when couples start taking each other for granted and start drifting into separate lives. Most couples forget that marriage requires constant effort and needs to be built on a daily basis. Marriage is a union of selflessness, but the unfortunate truth is that most people are selfish and they’re in it mostly for what they can get out of it.
Marriage is like a bank account: you can’t withdraw money you’ve not deposited into the account no matter how much faith you have.
When you’ve conscientiously invested in that account, a time will come, you will be able to withdraw money from it and if it’s a compounding interest sort of investment, the money in the account might be able to carry you through tough times or even retirement. Why? The reason being you’ve invested constantly without withdrawing over the years. If you’ve not invested much, your marriage might collapse under the weight of hard times when you start making demands on it or it comes under pressure.
The reason a partner will fight for his/her marriage is often that they’ve invested too much in it and they can’t afford for it to fail. A partner that has so many good memories of loving times with his/her partner will not easily give up if a third party shows up in the marriage or the marriage faces a huge challenge threatening to terminate it. If your partner travels for a week and you don’t miss them, then there’s a serious problem in your marriage. Your marriage is lacking in passion; it has fallen into apathy.
The challenge of this write up is for each married reader to take deliberate action and be intentional in re-igniting their marital bliss and not just leave things to chance. It takes more than prayers for a farmer’s crop to succeed, in the same vein, it takes more than prayers for your marriage to succeed and thrive.
There are ways by which our marriage can be re-ignited, not as a one-off effort, but an intentional daily effort, whereby your intent is to please your partner deliberately. The book of 1st Corinthians 7:34b, says “…but she that is married careth for the things of the world, how she may please her husband.” That passage denotes intentionality and not apathy. So, what are the things we can do on a daily basis to re-ignite our marriage? Court daily, Compliment her daily, Challenge her, cherish her and Chat with her
For many, courtship ended after the wedding day. That is wrong, courtship should be for life if you want to enjoy a blissful marriage. If you think treating your wife like your ‘girlfriend’ is canal, then you might have to settle for a boring and lifeless marriage. We read of Isaac ‘sporting’ with his wife to the extent that Abimelech knew they are not siblings but couples. You might want to ask, what sort of open display of affection was transpiring between this two?
The second thing you must do is compliment her/him daily. It is not too much and it doesn’t cost a penny but yields a huge dividend. Tell your spouse how beautiful their eyes are, how enchanting their smile is, how beautiful they are, how smart they are, how hardworking they are…and mean it. If you’re just saying it, they will get to know and you’ll be a fraud. Don’t bother if they don’t respond or compliments you back in return, just keep doing it. How long does a farmer water and tend a plant before he sees harvest? Do it by faith and in love – on a daily basis where possible.
Challenge your spouse by seeing the potential in them and encouraging them to lunch out and achieve greatness. This has often been called ‘talking to the king (or queen) in your spouse.’ Most women tend to speak to the ‘fool’ in their husbands as Vashti did in the book of Esther. She disregarded her husband openly. If you expect your spouse to be great, you’ll have to see greatness in them regardless of whatever you’re seeing now.
Cherishing your spouse might entail buying things for them, helping out, valuing the time you spend together and showing you’re genuinely interested in them. If you come in from a day’s work and just get on with things without touching base with your spouse that does not connote cherishing. Imagine a nursing mother that leaves her baby with a carer and goes to work. Will she go straight to the kitchen after returning home from work and be there for an hour without seeing the baby first? No. She will drop everything and spend the first few minutes’ showering that baby with love before settling down to do other things. It’s little things like this we neglect that builds up to the big things that wreck marriages or drain them of life and passion.
The last thing is to chat with your spouse. That is, put everything else on hold, sit down, and have a good chat about anything of interest to both or either of you. People often think time spent in family devotion counts. No, it doesn’t. While this has its place spending time together talking cannot be replaced by praying together. It is not a waste of time spending time with your husband talking about his day at work or her experience in the supermarket. If it’s of interest to them, then you must show interest and give them your ears. It’s selfish to do otherwise, be it under the guise of ‘I’m reading bible’ or ‘I’m praying’. There’s time for everything.
If you manage to do most or all of these things, your marriage will automatically be re-ignited and you’ll start to enjoy heaven on earth. You can do it. Start today.