Why Love Isn’t Enough to Keep You Together
- Ashleigh Slater Crosswalk Contributor
- Published May 13, 2024
In 1975 the musical duo Captain and Tennille recorded the song Love Will Keep Us Together. The song quickly struck a chord with listeners. It spent four weeks at #1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 and went on to become the #1 song that year.
But what does this song from the 1970s have to do with your marriage today?
Well, this idea - that those feelings of intense romantic love that brought a couple together will keep them together long-term - has pervaded our culture. Maybe you’re one of those couples who approached the altar with the expectation that “being in love” is the foundation for a strong, healthy, until-death-do-us-part marriage.
It’s true that these in-love emotions are exhilarating and worth savoring. I know because I’ve felt them too. But as someone who’s now been married for over 20 years, can I get real with you? And I mean uncomfortably, in-your-business real?
Captain and Tennille, along with a myriad of songs, movies, books, and TV shows you’ve grown up with, are wrong. While these “I’m in love with you” feelings may have brought you together, you need more than feelings to keep you together long-term.
When True Love Meets Marital Culture Shock
Those falling-in-love emotions we enter marriage with won’t remain heightened forever. According to author and seasoned marriage counselor Dr. Gary Chapman, after a short period of heightened emotion, “we all descend from the clouds and plant our feet on earth again. Our eyes are open, and we see the warts of the other person.”
When the daily grind of life takes over, when the annoying habits surface and when hardships happen, our spouse is no longer without blemish in our eyes. We may even have moments when we aren’t sure if we like them, let alone love them.
Why Obligation Isn’t a Dirty Word
Ted likes to jokingly say it’s his “obligation” to love me. What he’s really saying is, “In those moments when my feelings aren’t drawing me toward Ashleigh, the covenant I made with her and the commitment I made to her is.”
In our marriage, we’ve had beautiful, happy, very good days, weeks and months. But we’ve also had our share of what a fictional boy named Alexander called “terrible, no good, very bad” ones too. We’ve walked through seasons where our feelings no longer served to bring us together, but attempted to push us apart.
Because of this, we haven’t built the foundation of our marriage on how we feel about each other in any given moment. After all, “the heart is deceitful above all things” (Jeremiah 17:9) and feelings are fickle. Instead, Ted and I determined early on that our mutual commitment would always trump our emotions.
It’s been in those difficult moments that Ted and I have clung tightly to the promise we made for better and for worse. Because ultimately it is the commitment to live out this promise “to have and to hold no matter what” that makes a marriage strong, healthy and enduring.
And here’s what’s interesting: We’ve found in the rough patches, when we respond with right action even when our feelings aren’t inclined to, it’s often the first step to reconciliation. The funny thing is that eventually, our emotions follow where we choose to lead them, and we come out of even the hardest situations with a deeper, more endearing love for one another.
3 Realistic Expectations Every Marriage Needs
How can you successfully navigate marriage even in those moments when you don’t feel “in love”? Here are three expectations I encourage you to bring to your relationship. They’ve helped Ted and me, and I think they’ll help you too.
1. You Won’t Break If You Bend
Choosing to love will sometimes require you go against your preferred ways of doing things, whether it’s how a household task is accomplished or how you react to difficulty.
How can you bend?
Start small. For example, choose to love your spouse when they load the dishwasher differently than you do, or when they respond to a work situation in a way that’s opposite from how you would.
2. Compatible Couples Have Conflict
Even the most compatible couples experience conflict regularly. Where there are imperfect people in an authentic, intimate relationship with each other, there’s bound to be conflict. It’s not about whether you will fight as a couple, but how you fight that matters.
Make it your goal to work through and resolve disagreements together. You can do this by adopting an “us-first” approach rather than a “me-first” one. This means striving to understand each other’s perspectives, extending grace, and holding loosely your need to be right.
3. Bad Habits Take Time to Break
Just like it takes time to form a habit, letting go of ingrained behaviors isn’t a quick and easy process. It’s not instantaneous.
When those annoying habits don’t change immediately or in the manner we desire, we tend to embrace a “Goldilocks” attitude toward our spouse. No amount of “in love” feelings can squelch our frustration when their change isn’t “just right.”
How can you be patient with those old habits when change is slow in coming?
Take a moment to put the habit in perspective. A helpful way to do this is to think about your own bad habits. Maybe you have one or two (or ten) that bug your spouse. When you realize, “Wait, I’ll bet that is annoying,” it’s easier to show grace and patience with each other as you both work toward change.
Love+ Will Keep You Together
I’ve got to admit, when I first read the lyrics to “Love Will Keep Us Together,” I didn’t walk away with a lot to chew on; let’s just say there isn’t much depth to its message.
Even so, I didn’t close the browser window on these lyrics empty-handed. Reading them brought to mind the words of the song “I Will Be Here,” which was played at our wedding: “I will be true to the promise I have made to you and to the One who gave you to me.”
While “being in love” certainly brings us together as couples, it’s this kind of true-to-our-promise love that serves as the best foundation for a strong, healthy, until-death-do-us-part marriage.
Related Resource: Why Staying a Team Takes Time... and Is Worth the Investment
Sometimes, we forget in marriage that staying a team takes time. As a result, we can find ourselves slowly drifting away from one another. However, research shows that couples who spend time together regularly and consistently are happier and have a better relationship. Listen to the latest episode of our podcast, Team Us, and hear how Ted and I stay committed to being a team… and why it’s worth the investment.
Photo Credit: ©Getty Images/YakobchukOlena
Related Resource: Listen to our podcast on marriage: Team Us. The best marriages have a teamwork mentality. Find practical, realistic ideas for strengthening your marriage. Listen to an episode here, and then head over to LifeAudio.com to check out all of our episodes:
