Why do so many married people not love each other?
Love and marriage… Why are so many people who love each other not together? And why do so many people who are in a relationship or married not love each other, as the saying goes:
in the first year of marriage, the man talks and the woman listens;
in the second year, the woman talks and the man listens;
in the third year, the man and the woman both talk, and the neighbours listen.
My brothers and sisters,
Christian marriage should be a happy and joyful marriage for the spouses, spiritually, psychologically and physically. God loves people and wants them to be happy, especially in marriage. The first love poem expressing this joy was spoken by Adam when he saw Eve: “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called woman, because she was taken out of man” (Genesis 2:23). Adam had looked for a helper fit for him and had not found one. When God created Eve, Adam’s heart was filled with love and happiness because at last he had found that helper. This joy should be the title of every marriage: Adam’s joy in his life partner, his joy in his wife Eve. Through the fall into sin, the beautiful picture of the first marriage in history was disfigured, and all kinds of problems, quarrels and bitterness entered married life.
To come back to my first question, to answer it we need to look at the types of people who love each other but are not together and fail to commit because they fall into this list:
– The spoiled: they rely on their parents for everything and refer everything back to them; their answers become their parents’ answers, and they forget that they must rely on themselves, become independent and have their own thinking and opinions.
– The attached: they are attached to people, friends or things that they will not give up for love, and these become conditions before love: “I want to live in Lebanon,” “I have my friend and you have to accept him,” “I’ll only accept you if my mother lives with us,” and so on.
– The class-conscious: they love someone of a lower social level than their own… forgetting that it is not money that makes people… They wait for that miracle, “maybe he’ll be rich one day,” which never comes… So they stay together, miserable, as if the Lord had social classes! And they stay afraid: “My parents won’t accept you; you need advanced degrees”… and so on.
– The demanding: they want everything for the wedding and the house: “I want the nicest car and the best phone… and if it’s not like this, I don’t want to see you…” “Why are you late? Where were you?…” With them, love is demanding, and they can’t bear being together.
– The perfectionists: they hardly need introducing… If a single hair is out of place, all hell breaks loose and the shouting starts.
– The legalists: they love the letter and have no mercy… “You must dress like this… you must talk this way… you must never make a mistake, whatever the reason… you must not be late… you must work this way…” They are the complicated religious types who think life is free of mistakes… like the Pharisees who follow the letter and not the spirit of the Law.
– The irreligious: they do not fear the Lord; their relationships have no conscience; they rush through the stages of love and have no lawgiver but their own desires.
As for the answer to “Why do so many people in a relationship or married not love each other?”, it is because they have forgotten the source of love and forgotten Psalm 127:1: “Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labour in vain.”
Today most marriages happen “for money” or “because we have to get married,” without love or will… relying on their parents… or because they “can’t hold back their desires.” So no marriage happens in truth, with real will and trust. Everything is rushed, without prayer or reflection… or, if they have got older, “so that we’re like everyone else.”
Where is the Lord in all this?
If the two who commit to each other do not have hearts open to the Lord and his Word, and if the Bible is not the constitution of their lives, they labour in vain!
“Male and female he created them… Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh” (Genesis 1:27; 2:24).
They must leave everything behind and build their family on their own, without parental interference!
“Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the Church and gave himself up for her” (Ephesians 5:25).
Love must flow from the source of love, the Lord, and be modelled on the Lord: a love that sacrifices itself and dies for the beloved!
“Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord” (Ephesians 5:22).
Does today’s wife trust her husband and submit to him? We are not talking about a slave’s submission… but submission in the Lord, meaning love and faithfulness.
“Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable; it does not think evil; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends” (1 Corinthians 13:4-8).
Do we live this?
I conclude by saying: for there to be true love, we must be with the Lord, love the Lord first and submit to him, and he will plant love in us so that we love one another. And let us not forget: whoever has Jesus has everything! Amen.
Father Milad Salloum
