Being Faithful to Your Spouse (Before You Meet)

I remember the scene clearly: one of my best friends in college knocking on my door, tears swimming in her eyes, trying so hard to hold them back. My, “What's wrong?” Her pulling me into the enclosed stairwell where we could talk privately, telling me the guy she had just started dating had broken up with her. It was totally unexpected. She was crushed. And as she told me, she began to sob and choked out the words, “I don’t understand. What went wrong? I thought he liked me. We had so much fun together. And last night was so romantic. We walked around campus holding hands and talking for hours. Then today, he said he thought we should break up because he just doesn’t feel that way about me.” And then the tears came even harder with the remembrance of his words. Words of rejection. Sugar-coated words and yet with a clear, unmistakable meaning: I tried you out and have decided you’re not what I want. So I’m discarding you now.

This should make us all angry. How can we do this to each other? What gives us the right to “try out” another person, to win their affection, to touch them and steal their kisses and allow hours of their time to be focused on us when we don’t know yet if we want to cherish their heart forever, when we don’t know yet if we’ll still want to be spending time with them eight weeks from now? What gives us the right to treat each other this way? And the only answer any of us could honestly give to that question is because it feels good. “I am attracted to him or her, and I enjoy pretending like we’re married. I like holding her, I like kissing him, I like having all their time and attention centered on me. It makes me feel great.” But isn’t this a selfish way of thinking?

Because what about when it’s over? When the pretending ends and the dress-up clothes come off, and you’re left like my friend in the dorm stairwell: hurting, confused, and broken—totally disillusioned and asking what went wrong. Why don’t we put an end to this selfishness, to begin thinking not of ourselves but of that other person, of their feelings and their heart?

Or what if we went deeper, looked further into our future, into God’s plan, and actually thought about another person…the one God will have us marry one day, our future husband or wife. What if they were always on our mind, the one we will walk through this life with, side by side, committed to forever, the one we will become one flesh with someday, the one God has prepared and set apart just for us? What if we always thought of them, prayed for them, and desired only them? What if we were faithful to our future spouse before we ever laid eyes on them? How different things would be. That is what this book is all about.