So the leaving, cleaving, and knowing each other results in a new identity in which two individuals merge into one–one in mind, heart, body and spirit. This is why divorce has such a devastating effect. Not two people are left, but two fractions of one.
---He found that he had some deeply ingrained but faulty ideas about love that dated back to his pre-Christian life and the many romantic affairs he had enjoyed. He still thought of love as a mysterious experience replete with delicious feelings that just came. When he married Genie because she was an outstanding, somewhat sheltered, Christian girl, he expected the thrilling feelings to just come again without any effort on his part. When they did not soon appear, he became resentful and, instead of learning to be a lover, he went from counselor to counselor, trying to find someone who would (magically) get the process started for him. He agreed that although he was an exemplary husband in outward details, he had failed to give his wife what she really needed and desired. He wanted a wife who thrilled him, but he did not want to go through the process that would eventually bring this about. He had never made the choice to love Genie because she was his wife; he had never recognized or affirmed his wife's unique value to him. He had made no attempt to learn the art of loving. Instead, he was waiting for her to inspire the feeling of love in him.
---If you are afraid to try it because you are afraid you will be hurt, consider this: the risk of pain is always the price of life.
---Researchers claim that although men have the reputation for being matter-of-fact and practical, they are unlikely to let practical considerations guide their love life.
---Of course this means that you may have to give up outside attachments and daydreams about someone else if you have substituted another as the object of your affections. Many people who are not in love with their partner begin dreaming about someone else in an attempt to fill the emotional vacuum. Even if it is only in the fantasy stage, you need to forsake it and focus your thoughts on the one you married.
---The best atmospheres include: dim lights; a cozy winter evening before an open fire; sitting out on a porch or patio in spring or summer moonlight; times spent on or near the water, especially at night; strolls through a beautiful garden; walks on mountain trails or in the woods; drives in the hills; a peaceful, homey setting; romantic, intimate restaurants; picnic lunches in a quiet park.
---Some people may be confused about infatuation vs. true romantic love. Infatuation is based on fantasy; true romantic love has a foundation of strong but tender realism. Infatuation is occupied with externals; real love is a response to the whole person. Infatuation fades with time; love keeps on growing like a living thing. Infatuation demands and takes; love delights in giving.
---If your are infatuated, your emotions will clamor to take complete charge and they probably will do so. In real love, your reason, instructed by biblical concepts, guides your emotions and shapes your relationship according to God's wisdom.
---In general, intimacy consists of a blending of the five facets of love that have been described in previous chapters. It does not happen easily in a marriage for there are too many hindrances that would impede its growth. And it will never happen automatically. To use W. H. Auden's description, an intimate longterm marriage "is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotion but the creation of time and will." Time and will are primary factors in developing the intimacy that will cause you to stay in love! Auden concludes that this makes a marriage "infinitely more interesting and significant than any romance." As newlyweds set out, determined to build intimacy because it is worth doing and because it offers them lifetime regards, they will find Auden's conclusion to be true. Their marriage will become the most interesting, significant relationship on this earth in their view. Romantic fiction will pale in comparison with the realities they enjoy every day.
---"To live in dialogue with another is to live twice. Joys are doubled by exchange and burdens are cut in half by sharing."
---"We both love strawberries and ships and collies and poems and all things beauty, and all those things bind us together. Those sharings just happened to be; but what we must do now is share everything. Everything! If one of us likes anything, there must be something to like in it—and the other one must find it. Every single thing that either of us likes. That way we shall create a thousand strands, great and small, that will link us together. Then we shall be so close that it would be impossible—unthinkable—for either of us to suppose that we could ever recreate such closeness with anyone else."
---How comforting to know it is impossible for us to tangle up things so badly that God cannot work them together for our good.
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