Marriage is a God-given privilege and honour. Not everyone gets to marry, and thus not everyone gets to have the lifetime opportunity to love someone exclusively and be loved back by the same person. It truly is a great thing.
A Personal Garden
In marriage, all husbands and wives are given the freedom to shower their love on the person they married. It's like having a personal garden that no one else can and should touch: you can grow all sorts of plants and flowers, apply fertilisers or other growth-inducing provisions, arrange it according to your preference, and enjoy all the full blooms and fragrances in their seasons — without fear of having someone reprimanding you for it. Think about it.
God gave me my wife, permitted me to lavish my love on her, and enjoys seeing me love my wife. He also wants that for you. He intended all of us to enjoy our spouses and to let them enjoy us.
Knowing this, we should learn to see marriage as both a personal privilege that no other person can have (your spouse is only yours), a responsibility that no one else shares (only you are tasked to love your spouse), and a joy that cannot be compared to another.
Prioritise Your Marriage
With this, I would like to encourage you to prioritise your marriage above any other human relationship that you have, even with your kids. Here are some reasons why you should do that.
1. God Commands It
"Therefore a man will leave his father and his mother and be joined to his wife, and they will become one flesh." (Genesis 2:24)
God decreed that in marrying, a man will leave his most important relationship – with his parents – and be joined to his wife. Such is the importance of marriage: One has to learn to leave behind every other human relationship to prioritise it. God created it this way, and doing it another way simply strains it.
2. Your Spouse Is One With You
"So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no man put asunder." (Matthew 19:6)
According to Genesis 2:24, a man is united with his wife in marriage, and they become one. In Matthew 19:6, Jesus commands that the new single unit formed by the man and woman's married union must and should never be broken.
3. It's Absolutely Rewarding
In Ephesians 5:28-29, we are told that "men ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as the Lord cares for the church."
Simple put, any man who loves his wife loves himself. When his wife is happy, she makes him happy. It naturally reciprocates. Love does beget love indeed, and this rings true in marriage.
