Sharing Is Caring: Selflessness in Marriage

Sharing is caring, or so they say. How many of us truly see it this way? We love it when people share their things, time, and love with us, but how often do we like to return the favour? Relationships, marriages specifically, revolve around sharing. When two people are joined together in marriage, they are said to be one flesh from that point. It means that the two have become one, and whatever is your husband’s, becomes yours and vice versa. This is where the sharing comes in.

A common difficulty in marriage is that two individuals have to start getting used to each other and need to not only be individuals, but also a team. If you’ve been in high school or college, you’re probably familiar with group projects. During these group projects it’s often difficult to get to a consensus immediately. You have to consider what your group members want and weigh it against what you want to put into the project. The same goes for your marriage team. Your spouse can have an opinion on a particular subject and yours may differ. This is completely fine, because after all, you’re still two individuals.

The difficult part is making it work when the two opinions are completely opposite. In such cases you need to not only focus on your own wants, but you need to consider your spouse’s wants too. In marriage you can’t be selfish, you need to be selfless. You should be concerned with the needs and wishes of your spouse as if they are your own, because, in fact, they are. As Christians we must not only look out for our own interests, but take an interest in others too (Philippians 2:4 NIV). How much more important is this when the other person is our life partner?

“When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me.”

– i Chorinthians 13:11 (NIV)

Perhaps you can remember from your childhood, or you’ve seen it before: children do not like to share and are often selfish. Children don’t want to share because they are not mature enough to understand the point of sacrifice. Marriage is an institution between a man and a woman; two mature people. Before we get married, we need to make sure we’re matured enough to handle the things that will come our way during marriage. We ought to put away any childish (selfish) way that we may still have and start to behave like the adults we are. Selfless people know what it means to share. Selfless people know what it means to sacrifice. Why? Because they put other people’s needs before their own.

“Selfless people know what it means to share.”

Sharing means sacrificing something you have in order to help or please someone else. The Word compares the relationship of husbands and wives to the relationship of Christ and the church (Ephesians 5:22-32 NIV). As we know, we are the church and Christ is our husband. What Christ did on the cross for us is the greatest sacrifice ever. This act of love was very selfless and must have been extremely painful, yet Christ did this because He loves us. In the same way, when we are in a marriage, there will be times when we need to sacrifice something that might be painful, but we’ll still do it out of the love we have for our significant other. Not only did Christ show His selflessness by sacrificing His life for us, He also made sure to leave us a whole lot of words of wisdom. He shared His knowledge with us so we would succeed in life. He cared, so He shared.

Let us mimic Christ in all we do; this includes our marriage. Let us show our (future) spouse we’re caring by sharing our time, our love, our possessions, basically our complete life with them. Do you care to share?

God bless,
Ruth Osei
Co-founder of The Purpose Wife