W10: Seeking to Understand

What do you consider the main purpose of marriage?  Is it personal fulfillment?  Is it relief from loneliness?  Is it an expression of love?

While all of these things are and should be a part of a healthy marriage one of the main purposes of marriage is to help exalt us and our spouses to a higher sphere of living.  The Lord’s purpose in establishing marriages and families is to help us (as we help each other) on our path to becoming more like him.  One of the ways that we do this is by cultivating charity so that we can treat one another as the Savior would.  When we do this we begin to understand the kind of love our Heavenly Parents have for us. 

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 Honoring Each Other

Dr. John Gottman teaches that one of the most important ways to avoid “emotional gridlock” is to seek to understand one another’s dreams and to honor them.  This doesn’t mean that we have to fully embrace every dream as our own, but we must show love and respect for our spouse by honoring the things that are nearest and dearest to their hearts.

When we seek to understand and to honor one another, we naturally treat each other with more kindness, patience, and encouragement.  We stop trying to play tug-of-war with our spouses, where each person is pulling in a different direction to try to get their own needs met.  Instead, we begin to run a three-legged race in which we are a team, lifting one another and pausing to help each other as we both move forward.  This teamwork cultivates an atmosphere of love and respect in your home rather than one of competition or tension.  As Dr. Gottman points out,

“After all, you don’t want the kind of marriage in which you triumph at the expense of crushing your partner.”1

 Charity

At times it can be challenging to see your spouse’s dreams as a blessing and opportunity in your life, especially when they seem to be at odds with your own dreams.  This is where the spirit of charity can help us.

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Charity is the pure love of Christ, the kind of heavenly love that we aspire to feel and to share.  When our hearts are filled with charity we reach out with compassion and empathy to others, finding more joy in lifting them up than in putting them down.  Charity allows us to see our spouse’s heartfelt desire as our own desire, because our pure love for them seeks only their happiness.  Where pride only sees obstacles, charity sees the opportunity to contribute to our loved one’s joy.

This is one of the main purposes of marriage.  Our Heavenly Father has provided us with marriage as the best possible place to practice charity, forgiveness, and service.  He has given us this divinely appointed covenant so that we may work toward becoming our best selvs.  As Dr. H. Wallace Goddard puts it,

“God is serious about cultivating our charity.”2
We often see challenges within marriage as hindrances to our own happiness.  But when we begin to love as the Savior loves, we see the value in putting others first.  We love unconditionally, not because we are seeking love and security for ourselves, but because we are compelled to share the Christlike love that overflows our hearts.  Dr. Goddard observes,

“Much of the emotional pain that we have does not come from the love that we were not given in the past, but from the love we ourselves are not giving in the present.”3
When our hearts are truly changed and charity becomes the foundation of our marriage, we will learn to give our love fully and freely, even to those who might at first glance not seem to deserve it.  In doing so, we can cultivate an atmosphere of caring and respect in our homes that will draw us closer together and unite our hearts as one.


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