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- Kel
- Member
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Re: How is it possible...?
What is love? Is it a feeling? If you love someone a little, are you still in love with them? Love is not just a feeling though - it is not simply a fondness for someone. Not romantic love, anyway. What is our measure for love? For many of us,1 Corinthians 13:4-7 tells us what love is:
- Love is patient
- Love is kind
- It does not envy
- It does not boast
- It is not proud
- It does not dishonor
- It is not self-seeking
- It is not easily angered
- It does not keep a record of wrongs
- It does not delight in evil
- It delights in the truth
- It always protects
- It always trusts
- It always hopes
- It always perseveres
For me, those verses both showed me that my ex husband did NOT love me, but it made me feel as though Iiiiiii needed to keep exhibiting those actions in order to prove MY love for him. If love always hoped and persevered, then didn't I need to keep hoping and persevering? That's what I kept doing - until one day I realized that I no longer had hope. Hope cannot be manufactured. I tried - believe me. So what did that mean? Did it mean I no longer loved him, either? It took me a long time to figure that out. YEARS. Eventually, I came to understand that I was simply miserable - sad, forlorn, lonely. Without the hope that it could ever change, I had to figure out how to continue on. And I saw that no healthy marriage could thrive in that environment - that it was a recipe for resentment. THAT's not love. That's not where I wanted to live. That's not what I wanted to choose. I could no longer choose unhappiness as my status quo - and that's what I believed I'd be doing if I continued on in that marriage. And then I decided that healthy, happy children cannot be reared and formed in a loveless marriage. That it should NOT be their blueprint for their own future relationships. So that meant that it would not be to the children's benefit for the marriage to stay intact.
If you really want to figure out if your spouse is in love with you (vs. just saying it, or showing SOME of it), go back and look at the Love Is list. Love does not dishonor. Love is not self-seeking. Love always protects. Love delights in truth. If what you're seeing are actions that don't meet those qualifications, then It's.Not.Love.
Kel
You are not required to set yourself on fire to keep other people warm.