by Oluwafunke Allen
Statistics will tell you exactly how marriages break. They break under financial pressure. They break under relocation, under job loss, under chronic illness, under grief. They break under the slow erosion of two people who quietly stopped really talking to each other somewhere around year seven. If you have been married any real length of time, you have probably lived through at least one season on that list. I have lived through several of them, some stacked on top of each other, and I am here to tell you — Hallelujah — that a marriage built on something sturdier than mood can survive every single one.
A House Built on Rock, Not on Feelings
Jesus told a short, plain story about two men who each built a house. “Everyone who hears these sayings of Mine, and does them, I will liken him to a wise man who built his house on the rock: and the rain descended, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house; and it did not fall, for it was founded on the rock” — Matthew 7:24-25 (NKJV). The other man built on sand, and his house did not survive the same storm.
A marriage is a house two people live inside of, and feelings make wonderful furniture but terrible foundation. Feelings shift with sleep, with hormones, with money, with the news of the day. The Word does not shift. When Kunle and I have hit a season where neither of us could locate the feeling that got us married in the first place, the ground underneath us was never supposed to be the feeling. It was supposed to be the rock.
Covenant, Not Convenience
“Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their labor. For if they fall, one will lift up his companion… Though one may be overpowered by another, two can withstand him. And a threefold cord is not quickly broken” — Ecclesiastes 4:9-12 (NKJV). I have always loved that this passage does not stop at two. It insists on a third strand. A marriage held together by only two people, however committed, is still a two-strand cord — strong, but not unbreakable. Bring God into the actual weave of it, not as a guest invited for the wedding and then quietly uninvited from the daily grind, and you have something storms genuinely struggle to tear apart.
This is why I have never believed marriage is meant to run on convenience. It is a covenant — the same word scripture uses for God’s own unbreakable commitments to His people. Covenant does not ask, is this still working for me today. It asks, am I still standing on what I promised, on the days it costs me something to stand there.
Loving the Way Christ Loved, Especially When It Is Hard
“Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself for her” — Ephesians 5:25 (NKJV). That is a high bar. Christ’s love was not a feeling He managed to sustain on His best days. It was a love that suffered, that stayed, that gave itself away even when the giving was not reciprocated in the moment.
“Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up… bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails” — 1Corinthians 13:4-8 (NKJV). I have told my own husband, more than once and meaning it fully ,that he loves me the way Christ loves — patiently, and past what I would have thought any ordinary man could sustain. I did not always believe I deserved that kind of love. Learning to receive it, without flinching or deflecting it, turned out to be its own long-term project — arguably harder, some seasons, than learning to give it.
When the Storm Doesn’t Let Up
“When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and through the rivers, they shall not overflow you” — Isaiah 43:2 (NKJV). Notice what the verse does not promise. It does not promise you will avoid the water. It promises you will not drown in it. We have walked through seasons of illness that neither of us saw coming. We have walked through a relocation that tested every plan we had ever made together. We have walked through the specific, disorienting turbulence of a woman’s body changing in ways medicine still does not always explain quickly enough to either the woman living in it or the man watching her go through it. Statistics say marriages break under any one of these. Ours has not. Not because we are extraordinary people — we are as ordinary and as tired as anyone — but because we have kept going back to the same well, over and over, instead of looking for a new one every time the
old one felt dry.
The Word Applied, Not Just Recited
“But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves” — James 1:22 (NKJV). It is one thing to know that love suffers long. It is another thing entirely to still be gentle at eleven at night, in the middle of an argument neither of you started on purpose. Scripture read is information. Scripture applied, in the actual middle of a hard Tuesday inside a real marriage, is what the storm is actually testing.
Every verse I have quoted here, I have had to practice badly before I practiced it well. That is, I think, the whole point. God did not give married couples His Word so that we would recite it beautifully at each other during a fight. He gave it to us so that, over enough hard seasons, applied badly and then a little better and then a little better than that, two ordinary people would end up with a marriage neither of them could have built on their own strength alone.
