True Love is a Choice: Why Commitment Gets Better With Time 💍
🧭 Beyond the Butterflies: Why Love is a Verb, Not a Mood ✨
The world teaches that love is a passive feeling—a spontaneous, euphoric state that you “fall into” and, just as easily, “fall out of.”
This model of love is fragile. It is based on fleeting emotions and performance. When the feelings fade (as chemical euphoria inevitably does), the relationship is deemed broken.
The truth is the opposite: True love is an active decision made daily, and it deepens as an act of will, not an accident of emotion.
Why does true love get better with time?
Because as love moves from feeling to choice, it gains the resilience of a covenant. The commitment you make in the hard moments is the root; the renewed feelings of affection are the fruit.
Part I: The Choice is a Command (The Biblical Mandate) 📜
Love as Action, Not Sensation 🗣️
The strongest evidence that love is a choice is that God commands it. You cannot command a feeling, but you can command an action and a conscious decision.
- The Command to Love God: Jesus commanded, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind”. This requires a purposeful setting of our affections (a choice).
- The Command to Love Others: Jesus gave the new commandment to “love one another, just as I have loved you”. Since Christ’s love was sacrificial—He “lays down his life for his friends”—it is a demonstration of action and commitment.
- The Command to Love Your Enemy: Christ commanded us to “love your enemies” and “pray for those who hurt you”. It is impossible to feel intense affection for an enemy, proving that love must be a conscious decision to pursue their betterment.
The Revelation: True love, based on the 1 Corinthians 13 standard, is patient, kind, and enduring. It is a decision to righteously pursue the welfare of another person, regardless of how you feel in the moment.
Part II: Why Love Gets Deeper with Time ⚓
From Contract to Covenant 📈
The decline of initial “euphoric feelings” is often misinterpreted as falling out of love, when it is actually the necessary transition point for love to mature.
- Investment Makes It Easier: The longer you stay committed to the journey, the more your love deepens and grows. Choosing love daily—the small acts of kindness, the effort to keep the spark alive—becomes a habit, making the subsequent choices easier over time.
- The Refiner’s Fire: Long-term marriages inevitably face hardship, change, and conflict. When couples stick together through difficult times and actively work to resolve problems, marital quality does not inevitably decline; it tends to remain high or even improve over the decades.
- The Cost is the Value: Real, enduring love is about sacrifice, serving, giving, and forgiving. The more you give of yourself and sacrifice your personal preferences, the better the relationship becomes. Real love is not self-seeking; it is costly.
The Revelation: The depth of your commitment—the root—is what ensures the return of peace and joy—the fruit. Commitment creates, maintains, and expands love.
Conclusion: Choose You, Today and Forever 🌟
How do you sustain a lifelong love?
By choosing to say “I do” and “I will” over and over, rather than relenting to “I did”.
The kind of love that never fails comes from Christ, and He models the choice to be gracious, merciful, and faithful daily. When you choose to love your spouse in this manner, your commitment shines through, reinforcing your bond each step of the way.
Reflection: What is one choice you will make today to put your spouse’s welfare above your own feelings?
For more on the biblical power of this commitment, you can read 9 Powerful Secrets for a Marriage That Lasts a Lifetime.r the world. ✨
