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Keeping Love Alive, July 18
Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as it is fit in the
Lord. Husbands, love your wives, and be not bitter against them.
Colossians 3:18, 19
.
How much trouble and what a tide of woe and unhappiness would be
saved if men, and women also, would continue to cultivate the regard,
attention, and kind words of appreciation and little courtesies of life
which kept love alive and which they felt were necessary in gaining the
companions of their choice. If the husband and wife would only continue
to cultivate these attentions which nourish love, they would be happy in
each other’s society and would have a sanctifying influence upon their
families. They would have in themselves a little world of happiness and
would not desire to go outside this world for new attractions and new
objects of love....
Many women pine for words of love and kindness and the common
attentions and courtesies due them from their husbands who have selected
them as their life companions.... It is these little attentions and courtesies
which make up the sum of life’s happiness....
If the hearts were kept tender in our families, if there were a noble,
generous deference to each other’s tastes and opinions, if the wife were
seeking opportunities to express her love by actions in her courtesies to
her husband, and the husband were manifesting the same consideration
and kindly regard for the wife, the children would partake of the same
spirit. The influence would pervade the household, and what a tide of
misery would be saved in the families! ...
Every couple who unite their life interest should seek to make the life
of each as happy as possible. That which we prize we seek to preserve and
make more valuable if we can. In the marriage contract men and women
have made a trade, an investment for life, and they should do their utmost
to control their words of impatience and fretfulness, even more carefully
than they did before their marriage, for now their destinies are united for
life as husband and wife, and each is valued in exact proportion to the
amount of painstaking effort put forth to retain and keep fresh the love so
eagerly sought for and prized before marriage.
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