Today All Groan Up welcomes a guest post from Debra Fileta. She is a professional counselor, national speaker, and author of the new book Choosing Marriage. Enjoy!
There’s a disturbing trend that’s sweeping our culture: people getting married because they’re in love.
Now, that may not sound disturbing to you at all. In fact, that may be exactly what you were taught to do.
Maybe it’s what you’ve heard and seen in the couples around you.
Maybe it’s what you’ve read about, and watched on TV.
And maybe, it’s how you’ve approached marriage for yourself.
Because first comes love, then comes marriage.
It’s what songs are made of, and dreams are dreamed.
But what if we’ve got it all wrong? What if our definition of “love” is completely off?
What if our expectations of being “in love” are actually causing more harm than good?
Because just as quickly as you can fall in love, you can fall right back out of love.
Just as quickly as emotions come, emotions can go. When we follow our feelings into marriage, we can also follow our feelings right back out of marriage.
CHOOSING LOVE VS. BEING IN LOVE
Feelings come, and feelings go, and those who build the foundation of their marriage on how they feel will eventually find their marriage crumbling. It’s easy to follow our hearts, but it takes courage to LEAD our hearts.”- Debra Fileta, Choosing Marriage
It takes courage to lead our hearts into healthy relationships.
It takes courage to lead our hearts into making good choices.
It takes courage to lead our hearts in recognizing the traits and qualities that make a good marriage, and the qualities and traits that do not.
We live in a culture that would rather us have feelings over faithfulness.
Sexual chemistry over compatibility.
Infatuation over integrity.
Attraction over attitude.
Glamour over godliness.
Hotness over humility.
Being in love over choosing to love.
So please, don’t get married just because you’re in love.
Get married because you see the important qualities and traits in someone that will make for an incredible partner, a partner who will faithfully walk by your side through the ups and downs of life, and love you through thick and thin.
Get married, when and only when, you are ready to CHOOSE love. Every single day of your life.
Because that, my friends, is what makes for true love. No matter what Hollywood tells you.
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Debra Fileta is a Professional Counselor, national speaker, relationship expert, and author of True Love Dates, Choosing Marriage, and the creator of the True Love Dates blog where she writes candidly about love, sex, dating, relationships, and marriage.
That is true.
Thank you for this! This is long overdue. I’d like to share my experiences.
I had three disloyal husbands complete with corresponding “crashed and burned” marriages. The first wasn’t yet out of the closet, the second was a serial cheater and the third was a meth addict. I blamed myself, telling myself and others that the problem was that I had a “broken picker” and at that point, pretty much resigned myself to the fact that men may ‘fall in love’ but simply do not ‘stay in love’ and took myself completely out of the marriage picture. I often said things like, “three strikes I’m out and benched for the rest of the game.”
Then one day, quite by accident, I made a friend online and the more we talked and learned about each other, about our goals, ambitions, visions for the future; what we believed was the main cause of divorce and what marriage should be; the more we realized we were wholly compatible and set marriage as our end of the year goal. This was not without it’s challenges as I was born, raised and living in the U.S. and he was not. But, we had a common goal and we persevered.
In November 2019, I boarded a plane from the U.S. for Botswana, Africa where I met in person and married my trusted friend. In our wedding speeches in front of all of his family and friends, we spoke of “choosing love” instead of “falling in love”. We had decided far earlier in the friendship to choose to love one another, to not allow chemistry dictate our actions and choices. This doesn’t mean we have no chemistry. We do, but we didn’t at first; chemistry will develop under loving conditions, but infatuation has never had place in our relationship and that has made all the difference. We entered our marriage, eyes wide open and clear headed about what the future would entail.
Here we are nearly 4 years later, immigration completed and building a life together in a state of peace, harmony and independence that was non-existent in my prior marriages. We are truly a TEAM. This marriage is fulfilling in ways I never dreamed of as a young romantic girl carried away by Hollywood’s imitation of real love and neither of us can imagine a future without the support and genuine love, concern and care of the other.
Our marriage was unconventional, for sure. But I highly recommend it. So thank you for this article shining a light on the root cause of the heartbreak of letting your emotions commandeer your decision making and how to avoid that pitfall.