Mature Love

This bit of conversation on the FamilyLife Today radio program made me pause to listen last week.  It fit right in with some recent conversations with friends, and captured exactly what my husband had expressed when I talked with him about the difference between newlywed flirting and “old married couple” interaction.  You can listen to the entire broadcast or read the transcript here, but these are my favorite parts of the conversation…

Someone has said that romance is friendship set on fire. We get married because of romance – at least that’s the initial attraction that two people go through that…begins the relationship. And yet, for many, the high point of their relationship is early marriage. They enter into a phase of marriage that many couples never get out of, and they don’t realize they were meant to graduate and mature and move through that second phase of marriage into a more mature, satisfying love relationship, and it can be like an hors d’oeuvre, the main course, and dessert all wrapped up in one.
-Dennis Rainey

Most folks, when they get to disappointment, think, “How can we get back to how it was at the beginning?” And yet…that shouldn’t be the goal – to get back to how it was at the beginning – but to get to something that’s even better than what we had at the beginning. This mature love is really a deeper, more profound, more substantive kind of love than the infatuation and the heavy, passionate romance we had at first.
-Bob Lepine

What we had at first is the hope of that kind of relationship. Once we move through disappointed love to the commitment kind of love then we realize that the hope can actually happen. Therefore, it’s more fulfilling.
-Barbara Rainey

quotations from the transcript of a discussion on FamilyLife Today, January 6, 2011

Flirting 101

A friend asked me recently for some new, creative ideas for flirting with her husband.

Ideas that were more than just the same innocent ways she’d flirted with him throughout their courtship.  But ideas that didn’t always lead straight to the bedroom (because that’s not always possible with little people running around).

It got me to thinking about what flirting was, exactly.  I knew that flirting with my husband needed to make him feel loved and wanted–and what way would a man want to be more wanted than sexually? Could flirting between a husband and wife not lead to the bedroom?!

So, I went to the dictionary.  According to Merriam-Webster, flirting is:

to behave amorously without serious intent; to show superficial or casual interest or liking; to come close to reaching or experiencing something

Thus, apparently, flirting only suggests interest in the bedroom–it points to or opens the door, but doesn’t carry you over the threshold!

If that’s the case, I’m thinkin’ it’s the morning suggestion of what you want after dinner.  It’s the look in your eyes that makes him know he’s wanted, even if you can’t have him right now.  It’s the sweet nothings and the nicknames you whisper for his ears only.  It’s the quick little touch or the deep kiss that makes him know you want more later.

It’s everything that keeps the interest so high at home that any other flirtation he’s offered won’t hold a candle to what he has in you, his wife.

So, if they aren’t too scandalous to share, what are your favorite ways to flirt with your hubby?

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To Display God’s Glory

“Marriage is not merely the arena for sexual activity; it is presented in Scripture as the divinely designed arena for the display of God’s glory on earth as a man and a woman come together in a one-flesh relationship within the marriage covenant. Rightly understood and rightly ordered, marriage is a picture of God’s own covenantal faithfulness. Marriage is to display God’s glory, reveal God’s good gifts to His creatures, and protect human beings from the inevitable disaster that follows when sexual passions are divorced from their rightful place.”

-R. Albert Mohler, Jr., Desire and Deceit: The Real Cost of the New Sexual Tolerance, pg. 35-36

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Marriage Glue

As an engaged girl, and a newly-wed, people often told me that sex was overrated. Perhaps it can be, and yet sometimes I wonder if sex, the way that God intended it to be, is rather underrated after all.

I entered marriage with few expectations. Truly, I had never thought much about that part of marriage until our engagement, and even then, I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect when it came to intimacy. I knew it was important, I knew that God intended it to be a beautiful part of marriage, but I was unprepared for how truly beautiful intimacy, as a part of a loving, God-ordained marriage, really is.

Sex has been more wonderful and amazing than I could have thought possible, and in much more than the physical enjoyment of making love. Good sex isn’t love, but it is the result of love, and it is this sacred part of marriage that bonds the emotions and binds the heart in ways that other kinds of closeness could never do.

Truly, it seems like this physical experience is that good glue in marriage that cements our emotional oneness that brings a strength and fullness to our marriage relationship that I treasure. And as I give of myself in this way to my husband, freely and completely, it is impossible to hold back any thing else–emotionally, mentally or physically.

Good sex isn’t just about how it feels–though the feeling is definitely a great part of it–but about what you give to each other. And in giving, and not focusing on what I may or may not get out of it, I find that I always feel like I’ve gained something beautiful, every single time.