Five Pieces of Love Advice I Learned the Hard Way

The Christian band Caedmon’s Call has a song called “Mistake of My Life.”

This lyric has always struck me as funny but true:

Since we met, my life's been so up in the air

I'm here today but by next week I could be there

On the street, struggling to support my newest vice

With a sign that says 'I will work for love advice'

'Cause I will mow your lawn 

If you'll tell me what I'm doing wrong

At times, we all need love advice. There was a time I might have spent an afternoon cutting someone’s grass if they could tell me how to do better in a love relationship. Turns out, though, I didn’t have to mow a lawn. I had to go through a failed marriage. And I came out with some advice that may be helpful to people seeking to make a romantic relationship work. Some of it may seem obvious, but it’s all true.

1) Feelings cannot sustain a relationship.

We have all felt it. The delicious rush of desire for our beloved. They are beautiful. Wonderful. They can seemingly do no wrong. We want to be with them at every waking moment. Until they say something hurtful, or do something that annoys us. Then the cracks begin to show. Our initial feelings of desire and awe cannot look past the hurtful word spoken or the fact that they share a different political view. 

So do we really love the person, or do we love the idea we concocted of them? Can we love them when they are irritating? Feelings are fleeting. We can be happy one second, and angry the next. Can our union survive these inevitable shifts in emotion? 

As C.S. Lewis says: “If the old fairy-tale ending ‘They lived happily ever after’ is taken to mean ‘They felt for the next fifty years exactly as they felt the day before they were married,’ then it says what probably never was nor ever would be true, and would be highly undesirable if it were. Who could bear to live in that excitement for even five years? What would become of your work, your appetite, your sleep, your friendships?”

2) Love is a choice.

When feelings shift and fade, we have to make a conscious decision to love the other. As Lewis observes: “Ceasing to be ‘in love’ need not mean ceasing to love. Love in this second sense—love as distinct from ‘being in love’—is not merely a feeling. It is a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit; reinforced by (in Christian marriages) the grace which both partners ask, and receive, from God. They can have this love for each other even at those moments when they do not like each other; as you love yourself even when you do not like yourself.”

Love is a choice you make every day, sometimes every minute.

3) It’s not about you, it’s about the two of you.

A mentor of mine once told me that you can never win an argument with your lover. It’s true. Why? Because when you marry, you become one entity. So if you “win” an argument with your lover, you’ve just defeated yourself. Because you are both one.

When you fight with your spouse, you’re fighting against yourself. You both lose. The trick is learning to die to yourself and your own selfish desires and ambitions. Always strive to find the resolution that benefits you both since you are now “one flesh,” according to God.

4) God redeems and restores.

No matter how much you have hurt your lover or vice-versa, there is always the possibility that God can repair what’s been broken. He brings beauty from ashes. If we turn to God and seek his help in loving the way we are supposed to, we can see miraculous reconciliations occur, whether it’s a fight over not washing the dishes or an extramarital affair. Some problems are obviously harder to overcome than others. But God can redeem and restore. 

5) Your story is not over.

Are you struggling in your relationship? Separated? Did you get divorced? Whatever your circumstance, your story is not over until you die. As poet Alexander Pope says: “Hope springs eternal in the human breast.” And as Philippians 1:6 says: “I am confident of this, that the one who began a good work in you will continue to complete it until the day of Christ Jesus.”

Take hope in the reality that, whatever bad thing has happened, your story is not over. And God is the good and loving author of it.

If someone asked me for love advice in my 20’s, I would not have been able to share all this. But now I can from experience. They are simple lessons, but they are true.