Popular culture feeds us a steady diet of grand romantic gestures and big bouquets of flowers, while handsome lovers say all the right sweet nothings to make your heart melt before sweeping you off your feet.
This is all lovely, but it has nothing to do with real love.
This is actually self-love, where everything is aimed at my happiness. Me, me, me and all me.
Real love is none of these things.
It looks quite different. It’s hubby doing the school run day after day, happily eating scrambled eggs because once again I did not make the week’s meal plan or go grocery shopping on time and – quite supernaturally – not freaking out when I dent the car… again!
Also filling the ice trays. Filling the ice trays is the example that author Gary Thomas uses in his book Sacred Marriage, in which he challenges the idea that the purpose of marriage is to make us happy.
Rather, he says, it is to make us holy by putting another’s needs before your own. It sounds like a passion killer but its quite the opposite.
I read the book in our first year of marriage (almost 12 years ago) and it profoundly challenged my world view on love.
Thomas says he was continually irritated by his wife’s failure to refill the ice trays. He went as far as timing how long the simple task would take, planning to say that surely if she loved him she could take the extra 10 seconds to refill the tray.
God stopped him in his tracks by turning the question back on himself. Surely if you love your wife you could spend an extra 10 seconds refilling the ice trays for her?
For me the ice tray is the pile of dirty socks and underwear around or on top of (never inside) the washing basket. I can either grind my teeth and curse his lazy ass, or I can choose love.
Love, I am learning, is a verb and the more sacrificial, the more it means.
Marriage is both the best and the hardest thing I have ever entered into, and without love it would be impossible. It’s like having a spotlight put on all your worst faults with nowhere to hide.
But when two people love each other sacrificially, the by-product can only be happiness.
Witnessing the marriage of a younger cousin of Pieter’s last weekend, reminded me how far we have come. And we are both far from perfect.
It was fun when we were courting and my head was all ‘muisneste’ (a very apt Afrikaans saying, meaning ‘a head full of mouse nests’), that fuzzy state of distractedness that comes when you are falling in love.
But having walked through good times and bad, knowing he has my back, and having chosen to forgive and love one another when it was not easy, has resulted in something far more satisfying.
This I believe, is true love.
Follow The North Coast Courier on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram & YouTube for breaking news
Telegram Broadcast Service: https://t.me/joinchat/yJULuN8NaCs5OGM0
WhatsApp Broadcast Service: Add The Courier to WhatsApp at 082 792 9405 and WhatsApp your name and surname to be added.
