ARE YOU SECURE IN YOUR MARRIAGE?

In sharing your innermost feelings with your spouse, especially those things that hurt you, your failures and fears, do you feel safe or scared? Do you make your spouse feel safe or scared to share with you their innermost feelings? Do you know what your spouse’s greatest fears are and why they struggle with them? Are the secrets your spouse knows about reasons for shame, or reasons for drawing you closer?

So why do we struggle to share with our spouse our innermost feelings? The fire and the fear of marriage is the fact that we can know each other so intimately yet this great blessing can also be the site of its greatest danger. Someone who knows us this intimately can either love us at depths we never imagined, or can wound us in ways we never fully recover from.  So often it is our spouse who can hurt us so badly till we resolve within us never to share with them our struggles or stresses. We fear they will reject us or look at us differently because of what we shared with them. We even fear that what we share with them at our most vulnerable state might be used against us at a later stage.

Sometimes those fears have nothing to do with our spouse but everything to do with our past. Probably your best friend, brother or sister or even parent betrayed you, laughed at you, belittled what you told them when you shared with them something so intimate to you. So you vowed never to do that again no wonder you are struggling to open up to your spouse.

How can we get to open up? We need the courage to do so knowing that this might just be the door to greater intimacy. Where our fear lies so often is where our greatest opportunity lies as well. What you fear might just be an opportunity for your spouse to get to know you better, empathize with you and even forgive you. It might just unlock that door into a greater intimacy. We can also on the other hand offer a safe space to each other by loving our spouse to the point that they are safe with us.

“There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear.”- (1 John 4:18)

God knows us so intimately, He knows secrets about us that we even hide from ourselves, yet He loves us at a depth we cannot even fathom. He accepts us the way we are. The atmosphere in your marriage must be one of freedom not fear. Like Adam and Eve in the garden, your closeness should intensify your intimacy. Being “naked” and “not ashamed” (Genesis 2:25) should exist in the same sentence, right in your marriage – physically and emotionally. In marriage we have the opportunity to wrap all the private information about our spouse in the protective embrace of love.