Marriage Advice: It’s All About Loving Service

There is no shortage of podcasts, blog posts, TikTok videos, YouTube shorts, Instagram stories, movies, and television shows delivering marriage advice. Despite our shifting cultural mores and the different ways we date and think about relationships, we remain endlessly fascinated by marriage, how this intimate relationship works, and its place in our society. Is there a secret to what makes a good marriage?

There will be as many different opinions on what makes a successful and good marriage as there are people in the world. It takes wisdom and discernment to figure out the wheat from the chaff and to understand what works for your marriage with its unique circumstances and challenges. This article simply adds to the conversation by talking about one aspect of marriage that can get downplayed or distorted – loving mutual service between spouses.

Challenges Marriages Face

Whether you’re married or not, you will likely be exposed to marriage and some of what comes with it. Through witnessing the marriage of a friend, your parents, siblings, neighbors, or your own, it will be apparent that marriages face various challenges. Even marriages that are joyful, vibrant, faithful, and deep will have things that they need to overcome.

Some of a marriage’s challenges come from within, due to personality differences, difficulty with communication resulting in conflict, mismatched priorities and unmet expectations, infidelity, and so on. Other challenges that a marriage encounters may be things that happen to the couple that they must contend with, including illness, grief and loss, financial issues, job loss, etc.

A given marriage may go through seasons of plenty, joy, cooperation, and contentment. If asked, the couple would likely answer, “Yes, we’re happy.” That same marriage might go through a different season in which perhaps they might hesitate to say they are happy. This doesn’t mean they don’t love each other; it simply means marriage doesn’t always look or feel the same as the couple goes through different experiences.

Marriages can and do thrive, even under difficult circumstances. The scenario painted above is somewhat simplistic because a marriage, just like a life, has many moving parts. A couple might be doing great with their parenting and partnership with managing their household, but sexual intimacy could be an issue. A marriage can thrive in some areas but need work in others, but couples can work together to make their marriage flourish.

The Place of Loving Service in Marriage

One of the ways that a couple can work together to make their marriage flourish, even under difficult circumstances, is by having an attitude and mindset of loving service toward each other. In much of life, the mindset we’re taught as the way to get ahead and ensure you get what’s yours is to speak up for yourself, claim what’s yours, not allow anyone to get in your way, and put yourself and your interests first.

Marriage can simply become yet another transaction intended to bring utility to my life. It’s about me finding fulfillment and meeting my personal life goals. One pastor and author put it this way:

Both men and women today see marriage not as a way of creating character and community but as a way to reach personal life goals. They are looking for a marriage partner who will ‘fulfill their emotional, sexual, and spiritual desires.’ And that creates an extreme idealism that in turn leads to a deep pessimism that you will ever find the right person to marry – Timothy Keller, The Meaning of Marriage

In such a situation, the thought that marriage succeeds only when the couple views it as an arena to nurture character and offer loving service to one another gets lost in the shuffle. A lot of conflict in marriage occurs when the spouses selfishly want their way and aren’t considerate of each other’s needs.

There’s an anecdote that has been attributed to the anthropologist Magaret Mead, which, while it may be heartwarming and inspirational, most likely isn’t true. It goes something like this:

Many years ago, the anthropologist Margaret Mead was asked by a student what she considered to be the first sign of civilization in a culture. The student who asked the question expected Mead to talk about and point to implements such as fishhooks, clay pots, or grinding stones. However, she surprisingly said that the first sign of civilization was a femur that had been broken and healed.

Mead went on to explain that in the animal kingdom, if you break your leg, you die. You essentially become meat for prowling predators, as no animal survives a broken leg long enough for the bone to heal. A broken femur that has healed is proof that someone took the time to stay with the person and tended to them through recovery. ”Helping someone through difficulty is where civilization starts,” she said. “We are at our best when we serve others.”

Now, while the anecdote isn’t something Margaret Mead actually said, and while there’s evidence that animals do care for injured members of their pack, tribe, or herd, it does make a true statement. We truly are at our best when we serve others. The reason for that is rooted in another story, but this time a true one that explains the nature of our universe.

When the apostle Paul was trying to help a church overcome issues of grumbling, selfish ambition, and everyone looking to their own interests and not those of others, he pointed them to Christ’s example. Even though Jesus Christ was God, He didn’t grasp at that title and all that it implied, but He was willing to become a human being. More than that, he was humble enough to die the death of a criminal.

But Paul doesn’t end there. Jesus’ humility is the reason why God the Father has “exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Philippians 2:9-11, NIV).

On many occasions, Jesus said that those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted, and His life was an example of that. He deserved worship and adoration, but instead, He said He came not to be served, but to serve (Mark 10:45). The commands of the God of the universe are toward loving service of others; anything else goes against the grain and causes harm to us and others.

Loving and serving your spouse doesn’t mean becoming a doormat, allowing for verbal or physical abuse, or other such misconceptions. It does mean looking to the interests of others and not just your own. It means not looking at others and thinking about what you’ll get but considering what you can give and how to be compassionate toward them. If both partners take this mindset, it can make for a healthy and happy marriage.

Marriage Advice: How to Increase Loving Service in Your Marriage

There is a real and justified fear of being taken advantage of whenever talk of serving others comes up. It can feel like a huge risk, and it’s quite vulnerable to seek to serve your spouse without necessarily expecting anything back. It feels like a recipe for being taken advantage of. It’s important to remember that for that reason many marriages end up being competitive. Each spouse is out for themselves first, and they don’t want to yield ground.

Offering loving service to your spouse can look like listening with empathy, compassion, and patience when you’re arguing. Try and see things from their side. It can mean taking something off their plate so they can have a bit more time for self-care. It can mean doing what you promised you’d do, like taking out the trash or handling the kids’ bedtime routine, and not getting resentful when you aren’t thanked for it.

When you serve one another, it doesn’t mean that you can’t express your needs or concerns. That wouldn’t be a healthy marriage. Share those concerns, but don’t let that stop you from loving your spouse or seeking to “Outdo one another in showing honor” (Romans 12:10, ESV). It isn’t an easy path to walk because we’ve learned distrust and self-preservation from our first parents (Genesis 3:1-13).

With help, a couple can slowly move their marriage from feeling like a competition toward cooperating with and serving one another. It isn’t an easy thing, and there’s a lot of work that needs to be done like forgiveness, learning accountability, healthy communication, and growing conflict resolution skills. A couple can move from wounding each other toward attending to each other’s needs.

You can speak to a Christian marriage counselor or therapist to work with you to better understand the dynamics in your relationship, address issues that undermine your well-being as individuals and a couple, help you with goal setting, work through issues of forgiveness, and learn how to communicate your needs effectively without blaming or shaming one another.