How to Love Your Husband Well

First, Learn the Man You Actually Married

There is an easy mistake to make after consuming years of marriage advice:

learning an enormous amount about men while forgetting to study the particular one drinking coffee in your kitchen.

We hear that men need respect, men need admiration, men process emotions this way, men communicate that way, men want this, men dislike that, and eventually we can possess impressive anthropological knowledge of the male population while overlooking that husbands remain individuals.

Maybe your husband lights up when you tell him you are proud of his work.

Maybe public praise embarrasses him and a quiet sentence in the car means much more.

Maybe he experiences love through physical affection.

Maybe he enjoys having you nearby while he works on a project even though your official contribution consists of conversation and holding the flashlight at an angle he considers mysteriously incorrect.

Maybe he would happily spend three hours walking through a hardware store and sincerely believes this qualifies as quality time.

None of this is trivial information.

Learn what reaches him.

Pay attention to what makes him animated.

What subject makes him suddenly talk with his hands?

What does he want to build, learn, accomplish, repair, visit, or experience someday?

What kind of praise reaches him?

When does he seem most relaxed?

What does he quietly carry for the family?

What does he worry about that he does not say often?

What ordinary thing does he do so reliably that everyone has stopped noticing anyone is doing it?

Familiarity can make curiosity lazy.

After fifteen or twenty years, we sometimes behave as though we have completed the research and closed the file.

Meanwhile, the person keeps changing.

The man you married at twenty-five is not precisely the man beside you at forty-five.

Work changes people.

Fatherhood may change him.

Faith changes him.

Grief changes him.

Success changes him.

Failure changes him.

Aging certainly changes him; at some point both spouses begin making noises when standing up that were not included in the wedding vows.

Marriage itself changes him.

Knowing his history does not mean you have finished knowing him.

Keep asking questions.

Keep noticing.

Keep discovering.

Long marriage stays more alive when neither spouse becomes a completed file in the other's mental cabinet.

Loving Him Is Different From Improving Him

Picture Anna.

Anna loves David sincerely and can identify approximately fourteen ways his life might be improved before breakfast.

He could exercise more consistently, make the doctor's appointment, organize the garage, call his brother, read the book she gave him, drink more water, spend less time watching woodworking videos, and perhaps, if the day permits, develop a personal relationship with the towel hook directly beside the location where he currently leaves wet towels.

She means well.

This is how trouble begins.

There is a fine line between encouraging someone and quietly adopting him as a project.

A wife may see her husband's potential so clearly that she gradually begins interacting more with the man she believes he could become than the man currently standing in her kitchen.

Every conversation contains an improvement opportunity.

Every habit can be optimized.

She reminds, nudges, recommends, researches, sends links, buys books, and asks questions whose actual translation is:

“Have you considered becoming more like the husband I have mentally designed?”

Eventually home can begin to feel like another performance review.

Work already evaluates productivity.

Banks evaluate credit.

Doctors evaluate blood pressure.

The bathroom scale offers numerical criticism before breakfast.

A man should not cross his own threshold and immediately encounter another clipboard.

This does not mean a loving wife never challenges her husband.

Healthy marriage contains truth.

If something affects the marriage, children, finances, health, household, or future, she should be able to discuss it directly.

But truth and management are different.

Truth says:

“I'm worried about this. Can we talk?”

Management says:

“I have now accepted personal responsibility for ensuring you respond correctly.”

There are few things more exhausting than attempting to perform the Ruach's job in another adult.

Fortunately, the position is already filled.

Your husband gets to have his own relationship with Yehovah, his own convictions, his own growth, his own mistakes, and even his own moment when something you mentioned six months ago suddenly occurs to him independently and he enthusiastically presents it as a fresh revelation.

This is advanced marital sanctification.

Breathe carefully.

Love can encourage growth without assuming responsibility for producing it.

Appreciation Should Not Be Reserved for Father's Day and Funerals

One of the easiest things to lose in a long marriage is the ability to notice what has become normal.

Early in a relationship, almost everything is visible.

He drives forty minutes to see you and you think:

He came all this way!

Fifteen years later he spends six hours repairing something that would have cost hundreds of dollars to replace and the family reaction is essentially:

Good. It was broken.

Familiarity can turn gifts into infrastructure.

Think about the things your husband does so consistently that you barely register them anymore.

Maybe he goes to work whether he feels like it or not.

Perhaps he maintains the vehicles, checks the doors at night, handles insurance calls, takes children places, fixes things, makes breakfast, cleans the kitchen, pays bills, cuts grass, carries heavy things, takes care of animals, manages taxes, tackles unpleasant jobs, or quietly notices something everybody else forgot.

Perhaps his contributions are entirely different.

The point is that a human being is doing things that make your shared life work.

Say thank you.

Not strategically.

Not because some marriage expert said men respond favorably to praise and now you are testing the hypothesis.

Appreciation becomes manipulation when gratitude is merely currency used to purchase more desired behavior.

Say it because gratitude should become visible.

And make it specific.

“Thank you for working so hard for us.”

“You handled that beautifully.”

“I love how patient you are with her.”

“You make me laugh.”

“I noticed you took care of that before I even asked.”

“I'm proud of you.”

“You are really good at this.”

Specific appreciation says more than thanks.

It says:

I see you.

A husband should not have to die before everyone gathers in a room and finally gives a detailed presentation about everything wonderful he did.

Speak Well of Him When He Is Not in the Room

Groups of married women sometimes perform a peculiar bonding ritual in which they trade husband complaints like baseball cards.

One mentions socks beside the hamper.

Another raises with cabinet doors.

A third introduces a grocery-store story so impressive that the entire table concedes the round.

Everybody laughs, and somewhere five miles away several perfectly decent husbands experience an unexplained disturbance in the force.

Humor about marriage is good.

Two people sharing one bathroom for decades have generously provided civilization with material.

But there is a difference between affectionate humor and contempt, and women should learn to recognize it.

Protect your husband's dignity when he is not in the room.

That does not mean pretending he never frustrates you.

It does not mean you cannot seek wise counsel when something genuinely matters.

Every woman needs trusted people with whom she can occasionally say:

“I love this man dearly, and today he is making me nuts.”

That is different from making your husband's weaknesses a recurring form of entertainment.

Pay attention to the overall pattern.

If your friends know every annoying habit your husband possesses and very little you admire about him, something is becoming distorted.

The way we repeatedly speak about someone eventually affects the way we think about him.

Contempt practiced socially does not remain neatly outside the marriage.

Tell the good stories too.

Tell your friend what he fixed.

Mention how tenderly he handled your daughter.

Tell someone why he made you laugh.

Let your children hear you speak respectfully about their father.

And every once in a while, let him accidentally overhear you praising him when you did not know he was listening.

Those moments stay with people.

Respect Is More Than Avoiding Disrespect

Respect sometimes gets reduced to a list of prohibited behaviors:

do not insult him, interrupt him, humiliate him, mock him, or roll your eyes so dramatically that an optometrist needs to be consulted.

Those are useful starting points.

But respect is much richer than avoiding obvious contempt.

Respect means taking another person seriously.

That includes listening when he talks about something important to him even if the topic would never have made your personal list of exciting Tuesday-night conversations.

It means considering his perspective instead of waiting patiently for the tiny opening in which you can resume explaining yours.

It means trusting competence where competence has been demonstrated and resisting the urge to correct trivial details publicly because the story absolutely cannot continue while everyone believes the restaurant was on Fifth Street when technically it was Fourth.

You can let that one go.

Respect also means allowing differences to remain differences rather than automatically declaring one person's approach defective.

Maybe he needs time before discussing a difficult decision while you want to talk now.

Perhaps you notice emotional subtleties he misses while he sees practical implications you overlooked.

Maybe you are a planner and he adjusts easily as circumstances unfold.

The existence of two approaches does not automatically establish which spouse possesses superior spiritual maturity.

A healthy marriage becomes easier when both people learn:

different from me is not necessarily wrong.

Respect can also disagree.

A wife who respects her husband enough to tell him the truth offers something more valuable than artificial agreement.

She can say:

“I don't think that's wise,”

without saying:

“How could any intelligent person possibly think this?”

She can challenge a decision without attacking his character.

Respect does not pretend he is always right.

It remembers that he retains dignity even when she believes he is wrong.

Sometimes Love Means Doing Something Because He Loves It

Sometimes ordinary marital love looks wonderfully unimpressive.

Maybe you could not care less about football.

You do not know what a nickel defense is, and frankly the entire sport appears to consist of enormous men knocking one another over while people in headsets become emotionally unstable.

But your husband loves his team.

So occasionally you sit beside him, eat something involving melted cheese, learn three players' names, and cheer when he cheers because watching him enjoy himself is enjoyable to you.

That is love.

Maybe he walks through the garden center while you explain why this hydrangea is completely different from that hydrangea, despite his untrained eyes reporting what appears to be a shrub standing beside another shrub.

Maybe he watches a period drama with you in which everyone spends eight episodes failing to communicate because letters travel by horse.

Maybe he accompanies you to the craft fair, holds your bag, drinks overpriced coffee, and displays heroic endurance while examining forty-seven booths containing handmade soap.

That is love too.

Healthy marriage contains thousands of little moments in which one spouse participates in something partly because the other enjoys it.

Nobody has surrendered personhood because she spent an afternoon at a car show or he watched the movie she loves.

Love enlarges our interests because another person's happiness begins to matter to us.

The important word is:

reciprocity.

We are talking about two people caring for one another, not one person whose preferences permanently dominate the household.

Sometimes you enter his world.

Sometimes he enters yours.

Sometimes you find something both of you love.

And sometimes the most affectionate sentence in the English language is:

“Have fun, sweetheart. I will be here when you get back.”

That counts too.

Affection Belongs in Ordinary Marriage

Physical affection is abundant early in many relationships and surprisingly easy to lose to logistics.

When a couple first falls in love, they sit beside each other despite the existence of completely adequate additional furniture.

There is hand-holding, leaning, kissing, touching in passing, flirting, smiling across rooms, and an impressive capacity to stand unnecessarily close while performing ordinary activities.

Then life becomes crowded.

Children climb onto every available body surface.

Work becomes stressful.

Somebody always needs something.

There are groceries, bills, dishes, lunches, emails, appointments, and enough household administration to employ a small municipal government.

Gradually affection can become reduced to the kiss before work and the touch that clearly means somebody is initiating sex.

Bring ordinary affection back.

Touch his shoulder when you pass.

Sit beside him.

Kiss him when nobody is leaving.

Hold his hand in the car.

Hug him long enough that the hug does not qualify merely as collision avoidance.

Flirt with your own husband.

This is legal.

Marriage is, in fact, an exceptionally appropriate venue for it.

Affection quietly communicates:

“You are still my person, not merely the other adult assigned to household operations.”

And let him love you too.

If he compliments you, you are not legally required to challenge the accuracy of his statement.

If he says you look beautiful, resist presenting Exhibit A concerning your hair, wrinkles, weight, lighting, and the precise angle from which he is currently viewing you.

Try saying:

“Thank you.”

Revolutionary.

Let Him Take Care of You Too

This can be difficult for capable women because competence is useful right up until it becomes a refusal to need anybody.

You know how to handle things.

You can make the appointment, research the answer, solve the problem, schedule the week, find the missing document, coordinate six people, and keep the household moving while drinking coffee that has been reheated three times.

Somewhere inside that ability, a woman can stop leaving space for her husband to contribute to her.

Then, sometimes, she wonders why he stopped trying.

Healthy interdependence requires both giving and receiving.

Let him help you.

Ask for support when you need it.

Let him make dinner.

Let him carry something you could technically carry yourself.

Let him solve a problem.

Ask his opinion and genuinely consider it.

Let him do a task without standing nearby narrating the superior method by which you would have completed it.

Imagine Claire asks Ben to pack lunches while she handles something else.

Ben agrees.

Five minutes later Claire walks into the kitchen and discovers he is placing grapes into a container she does not normally use.

She now stands before a major crossroads in her spiritual development.

She can accept the possibility that the children will survive grapes transported in alternate plasticware, or she can assume operational control because apparently lunchbox continuity has become a matter of national security.

If you want partnership, make room for another person's method.

There are occasions when the method genuinely matters.

Explain why.

But far more often, the goal matters and the method does not.

Do not ask for help and then turn the helper into an intern.

Your husband deserves the dignity of contributing to your life, not merely benefiting from your competence.

Home Should Not Feel Like Another Place He Is Graded

This does not mean a wife must maintain a spotless home, greet her husband wearing lipstick, and have dinner simmering while instrumental music plays softly in the background.

Sometimes he walks in while somebody is crying, the dog has eaten something medically inadvisable, dinner is still theoretical, and the washing machine is making sounds previously associated with heavy industrial equipment.

Real homes contain real life.

But emotional atmosphere matters.

A person should generally experience home as a place where he is known and loved, not where every error is immediately catalogued.

If your husband's arrival routinely begins with everything he forgot, everything the children did, everything broken, every bill due, and every task needing his attention before he has managed to put down his keys, there may be room for a better opening sequence.

This goes both directions.

A wife deserves the same kindness when she walks into a room after a demanding day.

The principle is not:

women should greet hardworking husbands cheerfully.

The principle is that transitions matter, and people often need a moment to become emotionally present in a new space.

Maybe your rhythm is a kiss, a hug, ten minutes, a cup of coffee, and:

“How was your day?”

before the operational briefing begins.

Sometimes the crisis cannot wait.

Pipes burst without regard for relational best practices.

But most days are not burst-pipe days.

In thousands of little ways, healthy spouses tell each other:

“I'm glad you're here.”

Encourage Him Without Flattering Him

Encouragement and flattery are not the same thing.

Flattery says something because it wants a result.

Encouragement notices something true and speaks life into it.

A wife may see dimensions of her husband nobody else sees.

Other people know the competent employee, capable father, funny friend, skilled craftsman, leader, provider, or calm problem-solver.

She may also see the man sitting on the edge of the bed wondering whether he made the right decision.

Do not underestimate what your voice can mean there.

“I've watched you handle harder things.”

“I trust your judgment.”

“You're a good father.”

“I saw how you treated him. That was kind.”

“I'm proud of you.”

“Whatever happens, we're a team.”

Those sentences do not magically make every decision wise.

Sometimes love also says:

“Sweetheart, I adore you, and this appears to be a spectacularly bad idea.”

Healthy marriage needs both.

But there is something deeply stabilizing about knowing one person in the world does not interpret your worst day as evidence of your permanent capacity.

Be that person for him when you can.

Protect What He Tells You

A good husband may eventually tell his wife things he does not tell many other people:

fears, insecurities, regrets, worries about work, disappointment, concerns about aging, struggles in faith, places where confidence is far thinner than it appears.

Treat that information as entrusted property.

Do not weaponize it later.

If he once told you he worries about failing as a father, do not grab that fear six months later because you are furious about how he handled the teenager.

If he confesses insecurity about work, do not use it during an argument about money.

If he tells you something hurt him, do not ridicule his sensitivity the next time you are angry.

Once vulnerability becomes ammunition, people learn to stop handing over bullets.

Marriage should be one of the safest places in a person's life to tell the truth.

There may be circumstances where wise counsel is needed, and confidentiality does not require secrecy when real help is necessary.

But there is a great difference between seeking counsel and exposing a spouse because anger wants an audience.

Love protects what was entrusted to it.

Stop Keeping Score

Marriage has an accounting problem, and I do not mean the checking account.

There is another ledger running quietly in the background:

I cooked four times this week.

I initiated the last date.

I called your mother.

I drove the kids three times.

I folded your laundry.

I apologized first yesterday.

I listened to your story for twenty-eight minutes and you asked one question about mine.

Real imbalance sometimes needs addressing.

If one person consistently carries most of the household or emotional load while the other remains comfortably unaware, partnership requires a conversation.

But discussing an unhealthy pattern is different from turning every act of love into an invoice.

Marriage is rarely fifty-fifty on any given Tuesday because human beings do not operate at synchronized capacity.

One spouse may carry more during illness, pregnancy, grief, work demands, recovery, school, caregiving, or a difficult season.

Later the balance may reverse.

Healthy marriage is less like splitting every task precisely in half and more like both people remaining attentive to whether the shared load is reasonably carried.

If you begin assigning decimal values to laundry, lawn work, emotional support, school transportation, plumbing repairs, grocery shopping, intimacy initiation, and the number of times each person emptied the dishwasher during the fiscal quarter, the spreadsheet may have become hostile.

Fairness matters.

Scorekeeping corrodes generosity.

Address the pattern when there is one.

Then put the calculator away.

Give Him the Benefit of the Doubt He Has Earned

One of the quiet gifts of a healthy long marriage is accumulated evidence.

Over years, you learn whether your husband generally loves you, whether he usually tells the truth, whether he wants your good, whether he is dependable, and whether his character has earned trust.

Use that evidence when interpreting ambiguous moments.

If he seems quiet, it may not be about you.

If he forgets something, forgetting might genuinely be the entire explanation.

If his text says “ok” instead of “Okay, sweetheart ❤️,” perhaps he is at work typing one-handed while somebody asks him a question.

Not every punctuation mark requires forensic analysis.

Human beings have a funny habit of assigning ourselves complex motives and other people simple ones.

I snapped because I haven't slept, I'm worried about Mom, work was difficult, my hormones are doing something disrespectful, and nobody remembered to buy coffee.

He snapped because he is inconsiderate.

Interesting.

Maybe he is tired too.

Generous interpretation is not naïveté.

We are not explaining away patterns of dishonesty or harm.

We are talking about refusing to create a character indictment from every imperfect moment.

Sometimes a forgotten errand is simply a forgotten errand.

The Supreme Court need not convene.

Say What You Mean

We will devote an entire article to communication because heaven knows we need one, but loving a husband well includes allowing him to know what you actually need.

There is, as far as I can determine, no biblical evidence that the wedding ceremony grants husbands the spiritual gift of telepathy.

A wife can spend an astonishing amount of emotional energy believing:

If he really loved me, he would know.

Know what?

That she wanted help even though she said she had it?

That she wanted him to plan something even though she told him birthdays were not important?

That “I don't care where we eat” was actually a complex statement containing several unspoken restaurant exclusions?

Have you seen Free Guy?

When Dude gets put into the game before he's even finished being coded?

“Catchphrase!!!”

Sometimes I picture the poor husband standing there 😂 trying to run marital software that nobody actually installed.

Read her mind.

Feature unavailable.

Understand what “fine” means in this specific context.

Coding incomplete.

Catchphrase!!!

Tell him.

Not every thought needs expression, obviously.

Humanity remains grateful for filters.

But if something genuinely matters, clear communication is more loving than a secret test.

“I need help tonight.”

“I'd really love it if you planned our anniversary this year.”

“I need you to listen before we try to solve this.”

“That hurt my feelings.”

“Could you take care of this?”

“I'm overwhelmed.”

“I miss you.”

“I want some time together.”

There.

Now he has actual information.

That seems considerably more promising than handing him an invisible examination and becoming disappointed by his score.

Do Not Compare Him to Another Woman's Husband

Comparison can make a very good life look defective with astonishing speed.

Your friend's husband plans romantic weekends.

Yours repairs everything in the house but seems never to have independently imagined a weekend requiring reservations.

Her husband writes beautiful anniversary posts.

Yours texts:

“Need anything from Lowe's?”

and somehow means:

I have loved you faithfully for twenty-three years.

Learn the dialect.

Another man may indeed be more expressive, athletic, ambitious, handy, outgoing, financially successful, romantic, or visibly spiritual in some particular way.

That observation could be completely accurate.

It is also incomplete.

You are looking through a window into someone else's marriage while living inside your own.

Your friend knows dimensions of her husband you do not.

She may deeply admire the very thing about your husband that you stopped seeing because it became ordinary.

Comparison takes another man's highlight and places it beside your husband's Tuesday.

That is not a fair contest.

Know the good man you have.

Keep Becoming Interesting Too

Loving your husband well does not require making him the sole subject of your life.

In fact, marriage is often richer when both people continue becoming more fully themselves.

Read things.

Learn things.

Develop interests.

Care for your health.

Deepen your relationship with Yehovah.

Maintain friendships.

Build skills.

Ask questions.

Try something new.

Have thoughts that are not about household logistics.

Do something that makes your eyes light up while you describe it.

A wife who remains curious about life gives her husband someone continually worth knowing.

So does a husband who keeps growing.

Marriage was never meant to be two people who stopped developing at the wedding and then spent the next forty years discussing property maintenance.

Give him room to become.

Keep becoming yourself.

Then keep meeting one another there.

Laugh With Him

Shared humor deserves far more theological appreciation than it receives.

A couple that can laugh together possesses a remarkable form of resilience.

Not mockery.

Not avoiding every serious emotion with a joke.

Not laughing at wounds that require tenderness.

But the private humor of marriage—the stories, impressions, ridiculous phrases, movie lines, mistakes, facial expressions, and moments nobody else would completely understand—creates a little language belonging only to the two of you.

Maybe you can look across a crowded room and know exactly what the other is thinking.

Maybe a family disaster has a sentence permanently attached to it.

Maybe you quote the same movie every time a particular thing happens.

Maybe one spouse makes a characteristic mistake and the other does not even need to speak; the eyebrow is sufficient.

Marriage itself regularly supplies material.

You schedule a romantic dinner and spend twenty minutes discussing the insurance deductible.

You begin a meaningful conversation in bed and somebody remembers the dryer is still running.

You carefully pack everything required for a road trip and then spend the first forty miles disagreeing about the route.

You finally have an evening alone and discover you both genuinely want to be asleep by nine-thirty.

Romance.

Catchphrase!!!

Laugh.

Some things need changing.

Some things need forgiving.

Some things need a serious conversation.

And some things are simply two humans attempting to share one life without ever having received the installation manual.

Know the difference.

Love Him on Tuesday

Grand gestures are wonderful.

Anniversaries matter.

Vacations can restore connection.

Gifts are fun.

Romantic surprises become treasured memories.

But marriages are not primarily lived on anniversaries.

They are lived on Tuesday.

Tuesday is remembering the meeting he was nervous about and asking how it went.

It is making the coffee.

Touching his shoulder in the kitchen.

Sitting beside him for ten minutes.

Laughing at the story you have heard before.

Picking up the snack he loves because you saw it at the store.

Letting him enjoy something without insisting you understand the appeal.

Saying thank you for a thing he has done so routinely that everyone else stopped noticing.

Tuesday is choosing not to say the devastatingly clever sentence you constructed while angry because, although it is objectively excellent material, you love the man more than you love winning the scene.

Tuesday is apologizing.

Tuesday is accepting his apology.

Tuesday is telling him what you actually need.

Tuesday is letting him help.

Tuesday is saying:

“Go. I know you've been looking forward to this.”

Tuesday is crawling into bed after an entirely unremarkable day and being grateful that this particular man is still beside you.

Marriage is mostly Tuesdays.

Learn to love him there.

Final Thought

One day, if Yehovah gives you enough years together, you may look across a room at your husband and see several men at once.

You will remember the younger man you married, perhaps with more hair and fewer opinions about back pain.

You may remember the new husband still learning how to share space, money, responsibilities, relatives, expectations, and a bathroom with another adult.

Perhaps you will remember him holding a newborn as though someone had handed him unexploded ordnance.

You will remember the working man, the father perhaps, the dreamer, the worrier, the man who failed, the man who surprised you, the man who grew, the man who made you laugh, and the man who stayed.

He will remember several women too.

The young woman he married.

Perhaps the exhausted mother.

The woman who worked.

The woman who changed.

The woman whose body changed.

The woman who went through seasons he could not fully understand.

The woman who occasionally redesigned household operations because apparently Tuesday required a new command structure.

The woman who was wrong sometimes.

The woman who forgave him when he was wrong.

The woman who loved him.

That last part will matter far more than whether you executed wifehood perfectly.

There will be things both of you wish you had done differently.

Words you would retrieve if marriage came with an edit button.

Seasons when you were distracted, tired, selfish, fearful, overwhelmed, or frankly not especially delightful company.

Long marriage exposes enough humanity to eliminate most illusions about perfection.

But hopefully beneath all of it there will be a long pattern of goodness.

You learned him.

You noticed him.

You spoke well of him.

You protected his vulnerabilities.

You laughed with him.

You told him the truth.

You stopped trying to supervise every stage of his development.

You allowed him to take care of you.

You made room for things he loved.

You occasionally spent an afternoon doing something you found profoundly uninteresting because watching his face light up was worth the price of admission, and he did versions of those things for you.

That is the beauty of an ordinary good marriage.

It is not built from uninterrupted romance, flawless communication, perfectly divided chores, permanent agreement, or two spiritually mature adults who never become unreasonable after insufficient sleep.

It is built from thousands of small decisions to seek one another's good.

Those decisions become the history of a marriage:

the kiss in the kitchen,

the difficult conversation handled kindly,

the apology,

the private joke,

the hand reached for automatically,

the meal saved because somebody was working late,

the coffee brought without asking,

the dream encouraged,

the weakness protected,

the truth spoken,

the forgiveness extended,

the ridiculous argument nobody remembers anymore,

and all those ordinary Tuesdays.

Perhaps that is what an older Titus 2 woman eventually means when she tells a younger wife to love her husband.

She is not merely saying:

“Feel warmly toward that man.”

She is saying:

“Pay attention. Learn him. Enjoy him. Respect him. Be trustworthy with his heart. Tell him what you need. Let him love you. Give generously without disappearing. Stop trying to perform Yehovah's work inside him. Laugh often. Apologize quickly. And do not become so busy evaluating the man he could become that you forget to cherish the good man walking beside you now.”

Because someday one of you will experience the final ordinary Tuesday you share together, and neither of you will know when that particular Tuesday arrives.

So love him now.

Not Husband™.

Not the man another woman married.

Not the imaginary husband assembled from every quality you have ever admired in somebody else.

Him.

The actual man beside you.

Don't take my word for it... Open your Bible.