Chapter 21—A Happy, Successful Partnership
God has ordained that there should be perfect love and harmony
between those who enter into the marriage relation. Let bride and
bridegroom, in the presence of the heavenly universe, pledge them-
selves to love each other as God has ordained they should.... The wife
is to respect and reverence her husband, and the husband is to love and
cherish his wife.
Men and women, at the beginning of married life, should reconse-
crate themselves to God.
However carefully and wisely marriage may have been entered
into, few couples are completely united when the marriage ceremony
is performed. The real union of the two in wedlock is the work of the
after years.
As life with its burden of perplexity and care meets the newly
wedded pair, the romance with which imagination so often invests
marriage disappears. Husband and wife learn each other’s character
as it was impossible to learn it in their previous association. This is a
most critical period in their experience. The happiness and usefulness
of their whole future life depend upon their taking a right course
now. Often they discern in each other unsuspected weaknesses and
defects; but the hearts that love has united will discern excellencies
also heretofore unknown. Let all seek to discover the excellencies
rather than the defects. Often it is our own attitude, the atmosphere
that surrounds ourselves, which determines what will be revealed to
us in another.
There are many who regard the expression of love as a weakness,
and they maintain a reserve that repels others. This spirit checks
the current of sympathy. As the social and generous impulses are
repressed, they wither, and the heart becomes desolate and cold. We
should beware of this error. Love cannot long exist without expression.
Let not the heart of one connected with you starve for the want of
kindness and sympathy.
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