The Love Dare

My wife and my Sunday school class is going through the Love Dare study. For those of you who do not know what the study is about, then you can check out the website to find out more information. The Love Dare is a forty day Bible study for married couples to help strengthen their marriages. Each day give the couple a new challenge to help fortify their relationship, and these challenges build upon each other daily. Day one of the challenge is to practice patience like that noted in 1 Corinthians 13. The study challenges husbands and wives to say nothing negative to one another on the first day of the study. This challenge sounds easy enough, but it is incredibly difficult. The study encourages couples to remain silent if they cannot say something nice in order to resist the urge to speak negatively to one another. It references the age old adage that if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. This concept is so childlike that is seems like it could only make a trivial difference, but in my marriage, I have discovered it can make a big impact. In an age in which almost forty percent of marriages end in divorce, any help that my wife and I can get to help secure our marriage, we are willing to take. Something the Love Dare stresses is that marriages cannot just be based on feelings. I remember when I first fell in love with my wife, I got nervous every time she walked in the room. My palms would get all sweaty, and I would stress over what I wanted to say and how I should say it. Those feelings of anxiety eventually faded, and I even stressed about why I was missing those “butterflies.” A friend of mine told me that I must have fallen out of love with my wife (who was my girlfriend at the time), but I knew that could not be right. My wife and I continued to date, and I knew that what we were doing was right. It was not until we went through our pre-wedding counseling that I understood how those feelings were deceitful. Our minister explained to us that love could not be based on a feeling because feelings could change. There would be days that we simply would not “feel” married, but that did not change the fact that we were married. Love was a conscience decision to make things work. It was a commitment that could not waver with our feelings. Feelings deceive you. Anger, depression, frustration-those are all feelings that can make you want to leave your marriage, but those feelings are deceptive, and the commitment to your spouse must overpower your feelings. My wife and I are committed to our relationship regardless of what our feelings are that day. We do not want to worry about whether our feelings may cause us to stray from our commitments. This study will just strengthen the commitment we have already made and help us to become more than a statistic.