Love Dare Day 17

Determine to guard your mate's secrets (unless they are dangerous to them or to you) and to pray for them. Talk with your spouse, and resolve to demonstrate love in spite of these issues. Really listen to them when they share personal thoughts and struggles with you. Make them feel safe.



Feel free to post your thoughts/experiences on this dare

You can be close friends will someone from childhood to college. You can be close to a sibling that is about the same age as you. But nothing rivals the closeness of a husband and wife. Marriage is the most intimate of all human relationships.

That is why we need it so much. Each of us comes into life with an inborn hunger to be known, loved, and accepted. We want people to recognize and value us. The prospect of sharing our home with another person who knows us down to the most intimate detail is part of the deep pleasure or marriage. Yet this comes with a danger. Someone who knows us this intimately can either love us at depths we never imagined, or can wound us in ways we may never fully recover. It is both the fire and fear of marriage.

If home is not considered a safe place, you will both be tempted to seek it somewhere else. Perhaps you might look to another person. You may look for comfort in work or in outside hobbies, something that partially shields you from intimacy but also keeps people around you who respect and accept you.

You mate should not feel pressured to be perfect in order to receive your approval. They should not walk on eggshells in the very place they ought to feel most comfortable. The atmosphere in your marriage should be one of freedom. Your closeness should only intensify your intimacy. Being 'naked' and not 'ashamed' should exist in the same sentence, right in your marriage, both physically and emotionally.

Some of your spouses secrets may need correcting. Therefore you can be an agent of healing and repaid-not by lecturing, not by criticizing, but by listening in love and offering support.

Some of these secrets just need to be accepted. They are a part of this person's make up and history. Although these issues may not be pleasant to deal with, they will always require a gentle touch.

In either case, you and you alone wield the power to reject you spouse because of this, or to welcome them in, warts and all. They will either know they are in a place of safety where they are free to make mistakes, or they will recoil into themselves and be lost to you, perhaps forever. Loving them well should be your life's work.

This may be an area you have failed in in the past. If so do not expect your mate to immediatly give you wide-open access to their heart. You must begin to rebuild trust.

The reality of intimacy always takes time to develop, especially after being compromised. But your commitment to re-establish it can happen today-for anyone willing to take the dare.