Valentine’s Day is over, now what?

Last Friday was Valentine’s Day. Chances are that someone reading this either got engaged, got married or knows someone who did.

Congratulations! Marriage is, in my mind, the second biggest decision a person can make in life. The biggest is whether or not you will accept Jesus as your lord and savior. It’s a decision every person makes whether they know it or not.

Marriage, however, is a much bigger commitment than deciding what job to have, where you will live or even to have children. Some may argue that having children is a bigger choice than marriage and in some ways they are right, but not entirely. You can undo a marriage but you can’t undo a child. Undoing a marriage, however, often leads to the undoing of a child.

Human beings are divinely designed to be permanently united as man and woman, husband and wife. Within that familial setting children enter this world. Their growth into adulthood requires a stable family life and the love, nurturing and discipline of both a mother and father. That is the way humans were made and that is the design for a healthy life.

The marriage vow is a permanent, binding contract and commitment. Divorce should never be an option except under certain extreme cases. When people break, you don’t throw them away. You help fix them. The same goes with a marriage. Every marriage is going to have rough spots. Those are the times where you step up and grow stronger together through self-sacrifice and commitment, not selfishness and abandonment.

People who work to make their relationship and their marriage better usually end up improving themselves and those around them, including their spouse and children. Countless studies and statistics have shown that children who grow up in a stable and committed family are far more successful in school and life than those from single-parent households.

That further supports my point that the choice of a spouse and the commitment to the marriage – the foundation of family and society – is more important than most any other decision a person will make in this lifetime. The less we value marriage, the less we value people and vice versa.

Most any marriage expert will tell you that the key to a good and lasting marriage is communication. As Stephen R. Covey says in his book “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People,” “Seek first to understand, then to be understood.” When you try to see things from the perspective of other people you often get a bigger and more complete picture than what you began with.

To offer some good advice about making marriage last, FamilyLife recently shared some comments made by people who have been married 50 or more years. This is some of what they said:

 “When you go to bed, always kiss good-night. We always kiss good-bye when we leave each other.”

“I’m the boss. I make sure that everything she wants gets done.”

“Treat each other with kindness, love and respect. Just work it out together. Don’t fuss. We stay mad an hour or two, but that’s it ... and it's fun to make up.”

“Look at things in different ways and concentrate on the ‘good’ in your relationship. I always say, ‘This too shall pass,’ and it usually does.”

“You do a lot of counting to 10 ... or 20, if necessary.”

 “When he was young, he was high-tempered, so I usually didn’t say much. But when you don’t say anything, you don’t have to take anything back.”

“When we said ‘I do,’ we didn’t say it was just for tomorrow. You’ve got to tie the knot where it can't be untied.”

Good advice!