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This past Friday 14 February was Valentine’s Day. If you’re married or in a committed relationship, hopefully you were able to plan something special. If not, it’s never too late – plan something special for your significant other today. As the old Chinese proverb goes, “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second-best time is now.”

Perhaps you think Valentine’s Day is silly and just a way for florists to sell more flowers. Firstly, the story of Saint Valentine is one of incredible courage and sacrifice (here’s a fantastic article and a brief history lesson from dear Dads4Kids friends and regular Daily Dad contributors Byron and Francine Pirola).

Secondly, in Australia, most florists operate as small, independent establishments. Many are family-owned, have strong local community connections, and need our support. Do I need to go on? If you haven’t already, be sure to call or visit your local florist and order some flowers for your spouse. Make a great investment in your most valuable relationship, and support a local business. A win-win, as they say!

Milestone

In May last year, my beautiful wife Jodi and I celebrated 20 years of marriage. Significant for her as she’s put up with me for 20 years, and significant for me as it’s been 20+ years of learning to love. Thankfully, I also love learning, but in all seriousness, marrying my wife is one of the best things I have ever done, and I thank God for her every single day.

In 1988, award-winning Australian country Gospel singer-songwriter Steve Grace released a beautiful ballad, Lessons Of The Heart. It was Track 8 on his classic Children of the Western World album, an LP that got plenty of plays during my childhood. It’s an epic ’80s ballad complete with octaved guitar solo and reverb-soaked drums that tastefully come in towards the end, but it’s stood the test of time.

Steve speaks to my limited love experience when he sings:

“It’s what’s in your heart that matters to me,
it’s the truth of your love and your company.
Somehow I’ve known it from the start,
I’ve been learning, lessons of the heart.”

C.S. Lewis, the brilliant British writer, literary scholar, and Anglican lay theologian, wrote compellingly of love:

“There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness.

But in that casket – safe, dark, motionless, airless – it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.”

As Erich Fromm, a German-American social psychologist from the other end of the philosophical spectrum, wrote, “The main condition for the achievement of love is the overcoming of one’s narcissism.” Indeed. I imagine Lewis and Fromm would have disagreed on many things, but when it comes to the cancerous effects of selfishness and narcissism on human relationships, they both sang from the same hymnbook.

In pursuing my ongoing love education (something I certainly need), I came across this excellent PDF resource, Four Proven Ways to a Strong and Stable Marriage, derived from research by the Institute of Family Studies (IFS). The four proven ingredients of a happy, lasting marriage, while not exhaustive, are all based on thorough survey data from the United States and make for fascinating reading:

1. Be Fully Committed to Your Spouse and Your Marriage
2. Be Protective of Your Spouse
3. Participate in Shared Church Attendance
4. Establish a Pattern of Going on Regular Date Nights

While the research and IFS team are US-based, the same four ingredients certainly apply to our Australian marriage context. If you’re like me and need all the help you can get, the report is well worth the read (you can download it here).

Lovework

Keep learning to love. Work on discovering your spouse’s love language and speak, or enact, their love language as often as you can.

Try putting into practice the Four Proven Ways to a Strong and Stable Marriage from the Institute for Family Studies. If you’re looking for a date night soundtrack, Lessons of the Heart is a great place to start.

As C.S. Lewis wrote, don’t lock up your heart in a “coffin of your selfishness”. Instead, love those closest to you with openness and vulnerability. By God’s grace, familial love like this might just be the closest one can get to Heaven on earth.

Yours for learning to love,
Nathaniel Marsh

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Republished with thanks to Dads4Kids. Image courtesy of Adobe.