Pretend with me for a minute you have a garden. It is obvious of course that a garden needs to be tended to for the flowers or plants in it to survive or flourish. When you water and care for the garden a moderate amount, the flowers stay the same; when you work hard and give it extra care with the right amount of water, food, weeding, etc., the flowers blossom even more than the beginning. But when you don’t care for the garden or only care for it when you’re in the mood, the flowers all die.
Marriage is exactly the same way when you put in a moderate amount of work into the marriage (garden) loving and caring for one another, then your love and passion (flowers) will, for the most part, be maintained; if you both put hard work into loving each other, showing kindness, tenderness and forgiveness, it blossoms even more than when you were first married! However, if you only show love to each other when you feel like it, once the honeymoon stage fades away and both of you don’t feel like showing love as often, the loving actions will become less and less; pretty soon that love and passion (flowers) dies.
Many people enter marriage thinking that they are going to feel that way forever without doing any work. But when the initial high of the romance subsides, and they don’t proactively care for their spouse unless they feel like it, the loving feelings and passion diminishes and then they begin to think stupid things like maybe they married the wrong person, or that they need to sell the garden and buy another one. The truth is they just needed to be proactive about loving their partner.
But here’s the good news when you have a dead garden: flowers can be regrown. With some planting, watering, feeding and weeding, a dry and dead garden can get back to where it was in the beginning; and even better, more flowers that are bigger and more beautiful can grow if exceptionally hard work is put in.
Just because flowers die it doesn’t mean that it’s time to get rid of the garden or cement over it; it’s the same in marriage. If you find the love and passion in your marriage has died, you can rekindle it to where it was before and even more.
Though you cannot control what you feel all the time, you both have an enormous ability to influence your feelings. How you might ask? Much scientific research has shown that feelings tend to follow actions. When you act on something you are sending a very powerful message to your brain, and the brain begins to believe it and then sends messages to your emotions to feel those things.
For example, when you commit loving and kind actions to your spouse you are not only communicating love to them and meeting their emotional needs, but you are also telling your brain that this person is valuable, lovable, delightful, and worthy of respect and care. Your brain then begins to believe it and then sends these messages to your emotions to feel this way when you hear their voice on the phone or see their face in the morning or when you get home from work.
This is why it saddens and even annoys me when I hear of couples that get divorced because “they just don’t love each other anymore,” or “they’ve grown apart.” It’s as pointless and stupid as selling your garden and buying a new one because the flowers died. If the flowers died it is usually not because the garden is no good, it is because of either laziness, ignorance or both. Likewise, if the love in your marriage dies, it is often not because the marriage is no good, but because of laziness or us not knowing the power in actively showing love to our spouse whether we feel like it or not.
If you find you are in a place now where you have lost all the feelings for your current spouse, trust me when I say it is far better to learn to actively love the spouse you have and grow the flowers of love and passion now, then to go through a painful divorce and start over with someone else; especially when kids are involved.
If you choose instead to sell your garden or cement over it (divorce) and go find another garden that is lush and vibrant with plants and flowers like your previous garden once was, I’m afraid to say that without learning that you must put in work and disciplining yourself to do the work, the new garden (marriage) will end up as the old one did: dead and dry. Why not save yourself the great financial and emotional cost of a divorce, for both you and your children, and begin taking care of and re-growing the flowers in the garden you have now.
Now, of course, there are exceptions to what I am saying. If there is a co-owner of the garden (spouse) who is purposefully tearing up the flowers and or spraying weed killer on the plants (being unhealthy, or abusive with no desire or effort to change) that is a different story but more often than not, we can both regrow (or further grow) the flowers in our garden of love, trust, and romance through choosing to love and cherish with our actions.
(To read more about having a great marriage, get a copy of Micah’s book, “The 3 C’s of Marriage by clicking the link below. Currently for free with Kindle Unlimited).
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