by Oluwafunke Allen
My husband and I got on a call recently with our marriage mentor, in a small group of other couples doing the same work we are — trying to grow, honestly, in a season that has asked more of us than most. One thing said on that call has stayed with me since, offered almost in passing by another husband on the line: he had learned, in his own marriage, that it helped enormously to simply spell out what he wanted done, instead of leaving his wife to figure it out on her own and quietly resenting her when she guessed wrong.
Change Starts in the Mind, Not the Behavior
“As he thinks in his heart, so is he” — Proverbs 23:7 (NKJV). Our mentor kept returning to this idea in different words: you cannot skip straight to new behavior and expect it to hold. If the thinking pattern underneath a habit never actually changes, the old behavior simply waits for the first hard day to come back. Real change works from the inside out — the mind first, and only then, sustainably, the hands and the mouth and the habits. “Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind” — Romans 12:2 (NIV). I have quoted this verse before, but our mentor’s framing added something I had not fully considered: renewing the mind is not a private, solitary project. It happens inside relationship, tested against a real spouse, in real disagreements, not in the quiet of your own head where every argument is easy to win.
Spell It Out — Don’t Make Love a Guessing Game
The husband on our call put it plainly: it makes things so much easier when one spells out exactly what is wanted, instead of asking a spouse to figure it out unassisted and then quietly judging the guess. I recognized myself in that instantly. I have spent years assuming that real love should not need instructions — that if he truly understood me, he would simply know. Our mentor gently pushed back on that assumption for the whole group. Needing to ask is not evidence that the love is inferior. It is simply how two different people, raised in two different households, learn each other’s actual language instead of guessing at it forever. “You do not have, because you do not ask” — James 4:2 (NKJV). I used to think that verse was only about prayer. It turns out it is also, quite practically, about marriage.
Everyone Is Conditioned by Somewhere
Part of the conversation turned to how differently people respond depending on where they were shaped — Nigeria, the UK, the US, each environment conditioning its people toward different defaults, different silences, different ways of showing love or asking for it. Our mentor’s point was not that any one culture gets it right. It was that grace has to include an honest accounting of where each of you actually learned how to love, before either of you can fairly ask the other to simply do it differently. “Bearing with one another, and forgiving one another” — Colossians 3:13 (NKJV). Bearing with someone means holding their conditioning in mind even while you ask them to grow past the parts of it that no longer serve either of you.
Willingness Is Not the Same as Change — Repetition Is
The hardest thing our mentor said, and the truest, was this: willingness alone does not produce change. You can be entirely willing, entirely sincere, and still watch yourself default to the old pattern the next time you’re tired or stressed. What actually moves willingness into change is repetition — asking again, showing up again, choosing the new way again, long after the first burst of good intention has worn off. “Let us not grow weary while doing good, for in due season we shall reap if we do not lose heart” — Galatians 6:9 (NKJV). “He who has begun a good work in you will complete it” — Philippians 1:6 (NKJV), paraphrased. Neither of those verses promises a fast finish. Both of them promise a real one, eventually, to the couple willing to keep showing up for the repetition rather than quitting the moment willingness alone fails to be enough.
Still Learning, Together
We are still, both of us, learning to spell things out instead of expecting the other to guess. We are still, both of us, unlearning conditioning neither of us chose as children. What I took from that call is not a finished formula. It is permission to keep asking, keep repeating, keep choosing the new pattern on the ordinary days when nobody is watching and no crisis is forcing the issue — because that, apparently, is where real change actually gets built. Hallelujah, and Amen.
