Keeping Romance Alive In Your Marriage

It's not easy.

The candlelit dinners and the exciting conversations, discovering a whole new person...they were a long, long time ago.

Now it's bills and morning breath and the kids need to get to soccer practice and macaroni again?

You know everything about each other, and then some. TMI, as the texters say.

But do you?

Before courtship began, we amassed the contents of our personalities, the sum or our experiences, separately. Discovery was a movie we'd never seen. a book we'd never read, with the exciting possibility of becoming part of that book one day.

Now we're together all the time, trapped (and yes, everyone feels that way some days) in the same book.

Groundhog Day with hair in the sink and wet towels dropped on the floor.

That's the paradigm we live.

Let's break it.

First, we are still separate people, individuals before God and each other.

Those baffling things we see in our mates that sometimes drive us to distraction...that is exactly the kind of separate development that produced something we loved.

To build back the romance, start a journey of rediscovery. learn how your spouse is growing - not from the standpoint of how it affect you, but looking at how they are drawing closer to who they're meant to be, and closer to God.

Ask.

"What are you reading these days? What do you think of it?"

"How does this movie affect you? How does it make you feel?"

"What did you think of the sermon? How do you see it working in your life?"

Yes, guys, you have to talk about how you feel. As men, we want an audience, and here, that audience - that wants to hear you - is called Wife.

And you may need to learn more about romance in Lancaster County than you ever thought you could stomach. But if this is what makes your wife light up, if this is what makes her heart sing...don't you want to know?

Ladies, yes, you may have to listen to why he likes Rick Atkinson's The Guns At Last Light. There may be few things you'd less like to hear about than the end of WW2 in Europe, but if your husband finds inspiration there, if it makes him look up, and gives him role models that the boy in him wants to emulate...don't you want to know?

Don't you want to know?

Don't you want to look into those eyes, familiar and yet ever-new, across a table lit by flickering candles, and listen...and imagine how you can grow further together?

Don't you want to be inspired to a new "our song" that celebrates what you are together today?

Marriage is supposed to be a voyage of discovery, in which we never stop learning about this wonderful person, this child of the Almighty, who has chosen to share our life.

The discovery doesn't end when the honeymoon does, and neither does the romance.