Happy Valentine’s Day!
My wife and I celebrated a lovely tea time together on Monday (a first for me!), and then dinner at Goat and Vine in Old Town Temecula. In fact, I’m eating the leftovers as I type this, and it is one of the best-tasting Valentine’s Day dinners I’ve ever had, albeit not too fancy. That’s okay.
One author called it moving from “passionate love” to “companionate love.”
It appears that the brain cannot tolerate the continually revved-up state of passionate love. As the newness of passion fades, the brain kicks in new chemicals, the endorphins, natural morphine-like substances that calm the mind. The excitement may diminish, but the security of companionate love can provide a different, not necessarily lesser, pleasure.[1]
My kids have heard the idea of “loving her more now than I ever did before,” and took it to the weird place where they asked, “So, did you not like mom very much on your wedding day?” And they laugh about their “gotcha” question.
The answer is hard to explain, because on our wedding day, we were obviously madly in love—but that wasn’t the peak of our love. It was our highest peak up until that point in our relationship, but since then, our love just keeps growing. Our kids don’t understand that part yet, and that’s okay too.
Companionate love doesn’t mean we want to stagnate in our relationship, either. I hate when things plateau. I hate to see Christians who haven’t changed at all in years. I hate it when people have no drive to improve anything about themselves, and I hate plateaued marriages, too. The marriages that just seem to… exist. BORING. That’s a terrible place to be, but it’s fixable!
It just takes work.
I hope you’re not just “settling” in your marriage, but you’re constantly trying to work at it. Over time, you’ll move to a deeper kind of companionate love than you ever realized possible. Just ask the ones who’ve been at it a while. They’ll tell you it’s worth it!
-Pastor Ryan
[1] 1. T. Miracle, A. Miracle, and R. Baumeister, Human Sexuality: Meeting Your Basic Needs (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2003), 465.