Real Life Marriage: When Loving Means Letting Go

There's something to the Golden Rule that we should do unto others as we would have them do unto us (Matthew 7:12). The only thing is, showing love is not a matter of just doing for them what we want done for us. I wrote about that recently. Well, I'm still learning a lot about love, and that learning process is not looking exactly like I expected.

I thought that I needed to love my husband how he wanted to be loved. I do need to work at that. I need to always keep working at that. In trying to be attentive to his needs, though, I realized something: loving him often means letting go. I have to let go of what I think love means. I have to let go of my own standards of love. I have to let go of things that are important to me, but may not matter to him (because what's good for me and what says love to me are not the same for him). Sacrificial love is an emptying of my own desires and expectations.

In some ways, loving my husband also means letting him go. It means trusting that he knows himself best and can take care of himself when he says he wants to do things his way. It means letting him do things that he deems good for him, even if those things cause me some discomfort. It means letting him be himself, because I married him to spend my life with him, not make a clone of myself.

Letting go does not mean letting our marriage go, though. In fact, I think that letting go can enrich our marriage. It can build respect. It can built trust. It can build appreciation of our differences. It is just difficult to do.

I promised in my wedding vows to always choose my husband. I promised in my wedding vows to always love my husband. I never dreamed that loving would include letting go, or that letting go would be so painful, though. But hey, who ever said love would be easy?