Episode 1. When Passion Dies
Men and women are meant to get married. Of course, not all do and that’s perfectly fine, but most do. And after five or ten years most marriages aren’t what they should be. Right? So let me shock …
Men and women are meant to get married. Of course, not all do and that’s perfectly fine, but most do. And after five or ten years most marriages aren’t what they should be. Right? So let me shock you here. You, if you’re married – yes, you – are meant to have an absolutely fantastic marriage.
Last week on the program we spent just one day chatting about marriage, It was the last week of a series that I called “The Art of Living”, all about living a fantastic life and you can’t talk about that without at least touching on the subject of marriage. But marriage is such a huge topic you can’t just spend a few minutes of one day talking about it. So today, this week, in fact over the next few weeks we’re going to chatting about marriage, and here’s why.
Marriage is one of the most common things we do in life. Okay, not everyone is called to be married but at some point in their lives, most people enter into what’s meant to be a permanent, lifelong union between a man and a woman. It’s a completely natural thing to do. And this thing – marriage – has the potential to be the most sublime, wonderful relationship and part of our lives imaginable. Sadly, very sadly, that’s not how most marriages turn out.
In the West divorce rates at a staggeringly high 40% and north of that. But even in cultures where divorce isn’t a big thing, even in marriages that don’t end up in divorce, the relationship between husband and wife a few years on can end up as anything but sublime and wonderful. What starts off in most cases as a passionate relationship between two people, passionate at all levels, can often end up in a kind of a cold war with massive emotional, spiritual and oft times physical Berlin Wall running straight through the middle of that relationship. Husband on one side, wife on the other and never the twain shall meet.
Just stop and think about this. Marriage, the most natural thing in the world – man and woman coming together as one, most commonly bringing children into the world; family, this basic unit of our society that has so much potential for many let me say for most – ends up as something that falls way short of what it could be. It makes you want to cry. It’s a staggering, global pandemic that’s reaping havoc in the lives of way too many people. It’s a tragedy that’s unfolding in countless lives and relationships and families around the globe. Marriages that fall way short of what they could be.
Well, what goes wrong? Why does it happen? Lets just wind the clock back; if you’re married or if you’ve ever been married, do you remember how it all began? Boys meets girl, there’s a courtship, there’s a romance being completely besotted with one another, being totally, madly, passionately in love. Hey, that’s why you married your wife or your husband in the first place. You were passionate one about the other. There was no one else for you.
Let me ask you these years on. Is it still like that? Do you still feel that amazing passion? I just don’t mean the physical passion; I mean that total passion you felt for her or for him way back then on that day that you exchanged your vows.
I’ve recently been reading one of the best books I have ever read. Now, I don’t say that lightly. It numbers in my top five books of all time. It’s written by a man whose been counselling married couples for a couple of decades – an American called Dr David Clarke. The book is called “Kiss Me Like You Mean It – Solomon’s Crazy In-Love How To Manual”. It’s wickedly funny, it’s incredibly insightful and yet it unpacks God’s plan for a man and a women to have a passionate marriage relationship.
We’re going to talk quite a bit about that book over the coming weeks. It’s had a huge impact on me and I know it will have a huge impact on your marriage relationship too. Have a list to what Clarke says about passion in a marriage:
“You wonder: ‘Can we ever get our passion back? Can we ever again be crazy in love?’ God has an answer for you. It is a big yes! You can’t help losing your passion. That happens to every married couple. What you can do is what Sandy and I did. You can get it back.”
Did you pick that after 21 years of counselling – I don’t know, hundreds, thousands of married couples; that’s all this guy does, marriage counselling – he concludes that every married couple loses the passion. Every married couple loses the passion. In fact in the second sentence of the very first paragraph of the first chapter of the book he asks this question: why in 100% of all marriages does passion disappear just a handful of years after the wedding?
You see, it’s not just your marriage, it’s not just my marriage, it happens to 100% of all marriages and that’s a pretty definitive statistic. Why? Because this world conspires to tear us apart; husband from wife, wife from husband. Work responsibilities, paying the mortgage, putting food on the table, dealing with the pressures and the stresses of life. You know, stress is the single most widely felt problem in the lives of people around the globe today.
The man’s bad habits start annoying his wife. ‘Why does he have to be like that?’ And her bad habits are driving him crazy too, just quietly. And with the kids demanding attention and the job taking more hours out of the day than it has a right too, there you have it. The passion’s gone.
So exactly what is passion? Here’s what my dictionary tells me: “A strong, barely controllable emotion of love”.
Everyone who has been married will probably remember that feeling of passion from way back in the dim distant past. And if you’ve only been married for a short time it’s highly probably an emotion that seems to elude you these days. But this same man that’s counselled thousands of couples over the last 20-something years has something else to say about passion. Listen to what he says again:
“What you can do is what Sandy and I did. You can get it back.”
And it’s that getting it back that we’re going to chat about over the coming days and weeks on the program. Why? Because God’s plan for your marriage, for every marriage, is that a man and a women, a husband and wife should be passionately, madly, crazily in love with one another. Not in theory, not as some elusive ideal that no one can attain, but in actual reality.
Just stop and think about that in the context of your marriage. Imagine not just recapturing the initial passion in your marriage relationship but discovering a passion that’s all the more rich and deep for the many, many miles and trials that you’ve travelled through together. God’s dedicated a whole book, a complete book of the Bible to the passionate love between a man and a women, The Song of Songs sometimes called the Song of Solomon, in the Old Testament. It’s the story about the love between King Solomon and the Shulammite woman. Listen to the passion they have for one another:
“Like a lily among the thorns so is my darling among the maidens” writes Solomon in Chapter 2 verse 2. And the women, the Shulammite writes: “My beloved is dazzling and ruddy, outstanding among 10,000” about her man.
True passion, writes David Clarke, is not a phase of marriage it’s designed by God to be a permanent part of our marriages. That’s an amazing challenge to many, I know. And that’s why we’re going to spend some time over these coming days and weeks in the company of Solomon and the Shulammite women through the Bible’s exposition of passionate marriage, and in the company of David Clarke through his fantastic book “Kiss Me Like You Mean It”, because God wants to put the passion back into your marriage. It’s that simple.
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