The First Cut is the Deepest

I just had a thought I wanted to get down and out. It is spurred on by reading a text message I sent to Rosanna back in February about wanting to labor to renew our first love.

There have been many married folk who have told me that the initial feelings of falling in love go away and that you can’t base your relationship upon them. This is the love you have at the first. It is passion, intense delight, easy self-forgetfulness, a motivation to be caught up in pleasing the other. It eventually fades, I was told, so you must rely on commitment instead of passion as if they were mutually exclusive. For the most part, I see this sort of understanding of love also indicative to how people who’ve told me such things relate to Jesus.

For example, I recall a time where we had a lady over for lunch one Sunday. My brother was seating his wife of a few months and accidentally got his foot pressed on by the chair leg as she was sitting down. He yelped and she quickly comforted him. The lady asked with a knowing smile on her face, “How long have you been married?” and they told her a few months. “I knew it,” she said with a sardonic grin. “That’s going to change.” She was implying that later in life if the same event happened, my brother’s pain wouldn’t be as important to his wife because she wouldn’t care so simply about him anymore.

Another couple told me that while they were engaged, they told each other they wouldn’t become like other couples by losing their infatuated delight in the other. After being married only a few months, they decided that it was naïveté that made them pledge as much and that while they still loved each other, those intense feelings had changed. Admittedly, it might be that we are only labeling things differently. I mention it because it sounds awfully close to the very wrong advice I’ve been given by believers and unbelievers alike.

The main point in these examples is that childlike affection and delight in the other’s good will eventually fade. In fact, this sort of love is looked down upon as immature because of how soon it evaporates when “reality” hits in.

I do not argue that it most often eventually does. But this is the difference and the point: Just because it naturally fades doesn’t mean it isn’t essential. If your relationship simmers down to the point of doing most things out of commitment and obligation, you have a very dead relationship. To the church at Ephesus, Jesus dictated this message:

“I know your works, your toil and your patient endurance, and how you cannot bear with those who are evil, but have tested those who call themselves apostles and are not, and found them to be false. I know you are enduring patiently and bearing up for my name’s sake, and you have not grown weary” (Revelation 2:2-3).

These are all good things that they are doing. They are doing many of the right things. There is much commendable in what they are doing. It is good and not criticized. I do not ever wish to criticize commitment or works as if they are bad or not a worthy foundation. They just aren’t the only ones.

But I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first. Remember therefore from where you have fallen; repent, and do the works you did at first” (Revelation 2:4-5).

Losing the first love… repenting… doing works. They’re interrelated. But at the very least Ephesus, which was doing a lot of good, had lost its first love and a verse or two later would have some consequences threatened if they continued in hard-heartedness.

In light of all this, I would say that thought the first love you have in your spouse is something that will naturally fade—unless you repent of the hardness of your heart and ask God for fresh eyes to view your spouse as a unique image of God. Don’t let the so-called inevitability of losing excitement prevent you from laboring to keep it. It may not come as naturally as before, but since when is our faith one of natural abilities?

Note: I don’t wish to go back to the level of love I had with Rosanna back in January of last year. The love I had for her then and the love I have for her now is much deeper and truer and based on my more full knowledge of her as a person. And it grows. By first love I don’t mean the level of love you had for your spouse (thought I’m willing to bet that many would take a positive step in the right direction if they could just get back to that!), but the self-forgetfulness and delightful focus you had when all you could think of was him or her as opposed to taking him or her for granted. It’s a finding of delights in the other person, and delighting in doing them good and making them happy and sacrificing for their good.