Melody was satisfied with her marriage, even pleased or delighted, except for one curious aspect. As sound, solid, and of good character as her husband was, including a good provider, wise, strong, and sufficiently aware or even sensitive, Melody did not know that her husband really cared about her. It was the oddest conclusion, she silently admitted to herself, because she could barely name anything objective in his behavior, anything that she could point out to him if she had shared her sense with him and he had called her on it. Yet that’s the way Melody felt, and she couldn’t get rid of the feeling. Indeed, she was pretty sure that her husband just didn’t really think of and care about her. She was instead just there, like a household fixture. And she didn’t like it.
Care
Care for one another within the marriage is non-negotiable. Care goes without saying, without compromise, without question. As the above illustration suggests, care might begin with providing for, serving, and respecting one’s spouse. But care doesn’t end there, not nearly. The care that a marriage demands and requires goes much deeper than obvious basics, like a roof over the head and food on the table. It even goes much deeper than a broad collection of smaller objective particulars, like a mown lawn, serviceable motor vehicle, adequate health insurance, and well-cooked meal or two daily. Marital care goes farther even than maintaining one’s own freshly cut or coiffed hair, trimmed beard or nails, neatly pressed clothes, ideal weight, and pleasant smile and conversation, for your spouse’s enjoyment. Marital care reaches toward something deeper, maybe something more fierce, fresh, and essential to forming and sustaining the sacred union that marriage is.
Perception
Again as the above illustration suggests, a spouse may well sense when the other spouse doesn’t deeply care, if the perceiving spouse has the courage to even examine the issue. It may sometimes be better not to do so. Your spouse may not be ready or able to show care for you in the season or at the moment, making broaching or forcing the issue counterproductive. Assess your spouse’s physical, mental, and emotional state, and other circumstances, for explanations. Your spouse’s illness, injury, disability, lost job, or dispute with a parent, sibling, or friend may more likely be the cause rather than anything personal about or with you. The perception that a spouse doesn’t care, though, can easily grow if your spouse appears to care more for and about others, either when away from you or around you. The point here, though, is to be cautious about making judgments, especially judgments that attribute feelings or lack of feelings to your spouse. You only know your own true thoughts and feelings, not necessarily those of your spouse.
Reciprocity
You may be able to assuage your concerns over your spouse’s care for you simply by applying to yourself the standard of behavior that you would like from your spouse. If you would like more eye contact on greetings and during conversations, then offer it. If you would like more physical touch on greetings or departures, then offer it. If you would like more time and attention, then provide it to your spouse. You may find that you haven’t been consistently showing your spouse the care that you expect from your spouse and believe to be absent. Your spouse may simply have been unconsciously adopting and reflecting your own relational style and behaviors. A good guide may be that if you want more, give more. Don’t expect an immediate return. But in days and weeks, you may find that your spouse has gradually caught the unspoken hint, modeling your new or renewed caring behavior, and returning it in adequate or generous supply.
Disclosure
In those times when your spouse appears to have the full capacity to reflect care but instead aims it at others rather than you, you may find it wise to gently broach the subject with your spouse, especially if you are feeling jealous or suspecting emotional or other infidelity. If you broach the subject with your spouse, consider focusing not on what you assume your spouse feels or lack in feelings, which to you would be largely speculation. Rather, focus on your spouse’s observable behaviors, like the eye contact or physical touch that your spouse may refuse you but grant to others when greeting or speaking. Your spouse may realize that your spouse isn’t adequately exhibiting the care that your spouse feels for you. Beware disclosing too much, though, of your jealousy or suspicions. Trust, patience, and perseverance in these things can go a long way toward getting past any concerns, without unduly questioning and straining the marital relationship. Some spouses may be poorly equipped to respond reassuringly to a disclosure of jealousy or suspicion. To some spouses, such a vulnerable disclosure might produce the opposite response to the sought-after reassurance, like mockery or belittling.
Development
Recognize, too, that caring deeply for one’s spouse may not be entirely a matter of one’s instant and voluntary choice. You or your spouse may not be to blame if either of you do not yet, especially early in marriage, sufficiently care or exhibit care about and for one another. Care may instead be a developed, honed, refined, even hard-won, or divinely afforded attribute. Your spouse may desire to care and show care but may be incapable by present social and relational skills or even present character. Care may take not just the other’s interest, desire, or attention, but instead the other’s purification, confession, and redemption, or something sufficiently like those otherworldly and difficult to grasp and achieve processes and attributes. Let your spouse grow, while you grow, too. You may each have widely differing skills, maturity, and development relative to exhibiting care. Your spouse may, for instance, have grown to maturity in a family that wasn’t especially caring, such that your spouse currently lacks the present insight and caring character. A month, year, or decade with you, though, may open your spouse to degrees and levels of care of which you didn’t imagine your spouse to be capable. Once again, patience, trust, and perseverance may go a long way toward addressing the perceived deficiency.
Expectations
When the subject comes to caring for one another within the marriage, adjusting and tempering expectations may at times be necessary or appropriate. That’s not at all to say to avoid high expectations. Have high expectations, especially ones to which you can hold yourself. Indeed, set your expectations for your own care for your spouse higher than you can presently reach and provide to your spouse, until you have grown or received and accepted the capacity to reach higher. Just beware setting high expectations to which you hold your spouse accountable. As already discussed above, your spouse may not yet have the maturity or character, or may momentarily or in this season not have the energy, vitality, wellness, or focus to meet your high standards for spousal care. Treating your marriage as your own set of expectations of your spouse’s care isn’t likely the vow you undertook when entering into marriage. Marriage vows are generally not to consistently judge your spouse as failing to meet your high marital standards, whether you meet those high standards or not. Marriage vows are generally to abide with one another through thick and thin, when thin may refer to exactly those days, weeks, months, and longer seasons when you’re not feeling your spouse’s full care. Learning to see and love your spouse as they truly are, limited in capacity, insight, and sensitivity just like you, may be the far better approach than setting unreasonable expectations.
Time
Consider, though, what generous care within your marriage might look like, whether as a lesson for you, your spouse, or both of you. Marital care may begin with devoting sufficient time to one another. In a sense, time has no substitute. Your time away from your spouse may be essential to one or both of you earning the necessary marital household support or fulfilling other high callings. Yet time with your spouse remains essential for both of you. When, as you sometimes hear, couples grow apart, that distance often begins and increases with their time apart. Time together tends to help couples grow together. Or maybe the time apart is simply being further apart and time together is being closer together. A good marriage may mean physical proximity, more than a good marriage means many other things, because proximity is literal closeness, at least physically, when physical closeness can be the strongest source or an essential aspect of emotional and symbolic closeness. Time together: insist on it, value it, savor it, and enjoy it, and the strong sense of caring you and your spouse desire should follow.
Attention
Giving due, indeed generous and even lavish, attention to one’s spouse is, beyond mere time together, another key ingredient to spousal care. You might be physically together but otherwise occupied, whether with television shows, podcasts, social media scrolling, reading, or other activities that engage most or all of your attention. Sometimes, sharing a show or podcast that engages both of you can, to a degree, be giving attention to one another. But not often, and not without soon engaging the other in mutual reflection over the subject. Attention to anything else reasonably or fully absorbing is generally inattention to one’s spouse. Even an occupied mind, such as mulling a work or friendship issue, can constitute inattention to one’s spouse when physically together. When physically together with the purpose of being so, give your attention to your spouse. Make a practice of turning off the television at home or radio in the car, and taking out your earbuds on a walk, whenever your spouse is present. Inquire of your spouse’s health, thoughts, feelings, and interests. Recall common memories, and make joint plans. Directing your full attention toward your spouse at regular intervals may be your single most-powerful act of care, even more so than all the hours earning a living or maintaining a household.
Interests
Not only taking an active interest in your spouse but also sharing interests can be a powerful way of drawing closer and exhibiting deep care. Your spouse doesn’t just need time together. Your spouse doesn’t just need your attention when together. Your spouse also needs to share interests. Fortunately, marriage offers many common interests to share. The two of you need not both be musicians, artists, dentist, doctors, or engineers, to have interests to share. You both need not love to knit, assemble puzzles, or bird watch, although common recreational activities can help. You may each be as different in education, training, vocation, and recreational interests as night and day, and yet marriage will still offer the two of you common interests to share. The two of you will still eat together, sharing food and restaurant interests. The two of you will still live together, sharing home design, decorating, and furnishing interests. The two of you will still manage household tasks together, sharing needs, conditions, efforts, and their outcomes and resolutions. You will still share finances together, as another point of interest, study, insight, sharing, and mourning or celebration. If you have children together, you will have an endless supply of shared interests around their care, upbringing, maturation, relationships, needs, desires, failures, and accomplishments. And then just wait for grandchildren. If you’re not finding common interests in your marriage, then you may not be looking for them. Do so regularly and with good intention, and you’ll find plenty to keep the two of you sharing common interests.
Commitment
Sometimes, to show an appropriate depth of care, the marital relationship requires more than time, attention, and interest. You may need to commit something to your spouse and your marriage that requires that you give up something else. Big examples may include committing marital funds or credit to pay for your spouse’s next degree, along with forgoing your spouse’s potential earnings while your spouse pursues that next degree. You may need to commit to moving back to your spouse’s hometown to care for your spouse’s aging parents. You may need to forgo one job opportunity or one graduate school admission, in favor of a personally less desirable job or graduate school, because of your spouse’s own personal needs or opportunities. You may need to forgo a desired promotion at work or take an unplanned and undesired leave from work, in order to care for your spouse during an illness, after an injury, or in the course of childbirth and rearing. Spouses can take turns sacrificing opportunities or interests for one another and for the marriage, or one spouse can make a major sacrifice without the other spouse’s ability to return the favor equivalently, all to demonstrate the deep care that the marriage may need or require. And while one may think of these acts as losses or sacrifices, they are instead not losses at all but gains, and not simply for the probable returns in marital care and security but also in themselves, in honor of all that marriage means.
Exercise
One of the simplest, most immediate, and most practical ways to spend time together is to share exercise routines. The daily health habit of exercising need not be an individual, isolating routine. Depending on their relative fitness levels, capabilities, and needs, spouses may find that they can stretch, run, swim, bike, kayak, and canoe together, and even spend time in the gym together lifting weights and using fitness apparatus and machines. Spouses exercising alongside one another may need to regulate their rhythms, routines, and pace, but that regulation shows unspoken care and respect in physical communion. Housework together, yard work together, or other productive routines that simultaneously provide a healthy degree of exercise can increase the meaning and value of the uniting activity. If you’re not already doing so, try exercising together. Even if you do not find all exercise routines fitting to share, you may find one or two routines that will give you additional positive time together.
Adventure
To show the deepest marital care, you and your spouse may also need to experience your marriage not just as a journey but as an adventure. An adventure suggests challenge, mystery, anticipation, striving, revelation, discovery, and courageous acquisition of hidden and guarded things of great value, even treasures. The adventure on which you and your spouse embark together may on its surface look simply like a professional education for one or both of you, or a dramatic move as a new couple to a distant community where you’ve both dreamed of living, or starting an exciting new nonprofit or business together on the side while one or both of you are working. Your joint adventure may instead look on its surface like having six children on a farm, or running an orphanage in a distant country together, or simply living ordinary lives but striking out once every year on the most dramatic of vacation trips the two of you could possibly afford and imagine. Or the two of you may share the dream together of producing community plays that one or both of you wrote, or traveling on weekends to art fairs to sell jewelry or sculpture that one or both of you made. These activities, though, would only be the surface expression of deeper things, like timeless beauty, inestimable value, courageous sacrifice, and arresting insight, that you and your spouse would be seeking and sharing, when pursuing these things as an adventure.
Health
Marital care can include several other significant things, one of which is one another’s physical, mental, and emotional health. One of the simpler but harder things to do can be to care for one’s spouse in sickness, while also in health. The illness of a spouse may remove several things that the well spouse usually enjoys, including the love, care, companionship, time, attention, interest, and household services of the ill spouse. None of those losses should affect the well spouse’s care, concern, and respect for the ill spouse. The well spouse should likewise expect to provide everything within the well spouse’s capacity for the welfare of the ill spouse. Those things, both continuing regard and devoted care, are the simple but hard things. They are not hard because they are confusing. No, they are things one must obviously do and one ordinarily wants to do. But caring for an ill spouse can be physically, mentally, and emotionally draining, and can otherwise affect the marital lifestyle, household, finances, goals, aspirations, and related conditions and interests. Those losses can be the hard parts. Recognize and mourn them rather than ignore and minimize them. But see in those hardships the depth of the care and commitment, and the gain rather than the loss, of the marriage.
Worship
One of the most unifying and heartening of activities that spouses can share is participation in a faith community, especially worship. Communal devotion to the creator can be an incredibly powerful, regularly enjoyable, and remarkably transforming marital practice. Worship with your spouse aligns your bodies, spirits, and souls. You and your spouse may not find daily time to love and celebrate one another, but a worship service together even as little as once a week can quickly cleanse the marital spirit and revivify the marital relationship. Both the liturgy and sermon may also clear the marital air and correct attitudes corrupting the marital bond. Worship and other participation in a faith community, such as volunteer service, social events, tithing and donations, and scripture studies, also share the marriage’s commitment, resources, and vitality with others toward the highest attainable ends. Make regular worship together a practice, if you can.
Prayer
Prayer together can be an intimate faith practice that reaches beyond the communal aspect of worship, straight into the spouses’ minds, spirits, hearts, and souls. Praying daily together, either spontaneously, when blessing a meal, or at an arranged routine time, brings you and your spouse not only physically together but also together in every other aspect. Prayer together requires the mind and heart to listen and share. That the praying couple directs prayer not to one another but instead to their creator opens a path for communication between them that would never otherwise exist. Praying spouses bare their souls before one another, not in beseeching or complaining to one another but in beseeching, submitting, loving, and listening to their creator. Spouses praying together hear and affirm their partner’s deepest concerns and greatest aspirations. A married couple praying together is so powerful for the marriage and others that if prayer did not already exist as the most ancient and venerated of practices, then a modern marital counselor might just invent it. Make a practice of praying together regularly, if you possibly can.
Irritation
None of the above discussion should minimize the irritations and annoyances that living together, even in holy matrimony and wedded bliss, can conjure. Errors and omissions, and even poor habits and insensitive indisciplines, can plague a marital relationship, especially one that does not have a strong foundation and in which the spouses do not have sound character and strong constitutions. A key to getting past those challenges is not to let them pile up as a burden inside one spouse or obstacles between spouses. One can practice the habit of dismissing the error or indiscipline of a spouse as soon as it occurs and you notice it. Just look the other way. You are doubtless also irritating or annoying your spouse at times, who is likewise looking past or around your own annoying nature as much and as often as possible. A potentially better practice is to regard the spouse’s errors, omissions, or indiscipline as an opportunity to serve the marriage and household with a remedial measure. Hang up your spouse’s coat cast across the back of the entryway chair as often as you see it there, even several times a day, in glad service. Move your spouse’s shoes away from the lower ledge of the doorway step where you would trip over them and break a wrist or ankle, as many times as you see them there, again in happy service to the household cause. Your spouse is doing likewise somewhere else in the home, in the same devoted household service. A gentle reminder may do, but your spouse will eventually notice your repeated service anyway, and either make amends with a reformed practice or develop an abiding sense of gratitude. You may be caring more for your spouse by not constantly reminding and instead continually serving, if you can develop the good marital character to do so without irritation. In the big picture, you’d much rather have a spouse after whom to look than not have a spouse. None of the above discussion ignores the potential that emotional, sexual, or physical abuse or infidelity holds to interfere with the care that one wishes to show one’s spouse. Annoyances and irritations are one thing, while adultery and abuse are other things. See the next chapter for resolving those and other more-serious conflicts.
Reflection
On which of the above measures, including time, attention, interest, commitment, adventure, health, and grace regarding minor irritations, do you and your spouse do well in demonstrating marital care? On which of these measures do you and your spouse do poorly or not as well as you believe that you could? How can you alter your attitude, behaviors, and practices to better show that you care deeply and consistently for your spouse? What are your common interests that you share, explore, pursue, and discuss that draw you together? How does your marriage feel like an adventure more than a long march, or how might you see it as, or make it feel more, adventurous? What is your attitude toward things that your spouse does that could irritate you or do irritate you? Do you have effective compensating mechanisms, within your own control, on which you rely when your spouse annoys you?
Key Points
Abiding care for one’s spouse is a critical component of marriage.
Perception of care in observable action matters more than intentions.
Beware disclosing insecurity over care to a spouse unable to provide it.
Expressing care to one’s spouse can be a learned and acquired maturity.
Don’t let unreasonable expectations of care spoil a good marriage.
Care begins with committing time to one another’s physical presence.
Care includes concentrating attention on one’s spouse when present.
Care includes taking interest in one’s spouse and common interests.
Care includes making significant commitments to a spouse’s interests.
Exercising together can build bonds, fitness, and respect.
Care can include treating one’s marriage as an exciting adventure.
Care includes constant devotion to your spouse’s good health.
Worship and other faith participation together strengthens bonds.
Prayer together knits the minds, aspirations, spirits, and souls.
Don’t let minor irritations interfere with generous care for your spouse.