Marital reconsiliation advocacy often cites Malachi 2:15 as a command.
“Has not the Lord made them one? In flesh and spirit they are His. And why one? Because He was seeking godly offspring. So guard yourself in your spirit, and do not break faith with the wife of your youth.” I believe this equally applies to wives regarding husbands.
On January 28, 2008, Time magazine titled its “Annual Mind & Body Special Issue,” “The Science of Romance: Why we need love to survive.” [1-2]
The lead article gets into chemistry and the use of functional magnetic resonance imagers (fMRIs) in search of answers. One notion that struck me in particular was a discussion of couples “who meet under the influence of alcohol or drugs or in a state of high excitement,” a condition that “may cool when their bodies return to baseline.”
Further to this direction, “Psychologist Arthur Aron of the State University of New York at Stony Brook says people who meet during a crisis — an emergency landing of their airplane, say — may be much more inclined to believe they’ve found the person meant for them. ‘It’s not that we fall in love with such people because they’ve immensely attractive,’ he says. ‘It’s that they seem immensely attractive because we’ve fallen in love with them.’
“… Of course, even a love fever that’s healthily shared breaks eventually, if only because —” Time contributor Jeffrey Kluger writes, “like any fever — it’s unsustainable over time.”
Use of the word “partner” in Malachi 2:14 here is instructive; indeed, a criteria and prerequisite to a sound marital foundation. Not something easily discerned, we might imagine, “in a state of high excitement.”
Conversely, there is an important reality check provided in “The Science of Romance” that’s important to note for longer-term perspectives.
“The eventual goal of any couple is to pass beyond serial dating — beyond even the thrill of early love — and into what’s known as companionate love. That’s the coffee-and-Sunday-paper phase, the board-games-when-it’s-raining phase, and the fact is, there’s not a lick of excitement about it. But [if] partners are going to stay together for the years of care that children require, they need a love that bonds to them to each other but without the passion that would be a distraction.”
With that let me put a flag on the field here and suggest you take the paragraph above as a reason to slow down any move toward divorce court based on diminished flames of passion. I hate to see any marriage lost for lack of reality check.
And I’ll also add, then, that God has provided some on-point counsel here in Song of Songs.
Off-Site References
“Scientific validation for the love ‘of your youth’” / August 20, 2009 / Divorce Pastor (accessed August 25, 2024)
- “Why We Love: Breeding is easy, but survival requires romance too. How our brains, bodies and senses help us find it” / January 28, 2008 / Jeffrey Kluger / Time (pages 54-60; via The Vault, accessed August 25, 2024)
- “Why We Flirt: That smile! That glance! That rapt attention! We flirt even when we don’t need to. And that can be good” / Belinda Luscombe / Ibid (pages 62-65); “Star Pairs: Celebrities in love are just like the rest of us — except in all the ways they aren’t. That explains why we can’t look away” / Richard Corliss (pages 67-70); “Marry Me: Say yes, and you’re in for more than love, children and a home. Better health and a longer life are part of the deal” / Lori Oliwenstein (pages 73-76); “Crazy Love: Our partners may be obsessive, possessive, even dangerous. There’s a reason we stick around — often at our own peril” / Steven Pinker (pages 82-83); “Young Love: Romance is a grand parent. Your debut may not come until you’re in your teens, but you spend a childhood rehearsing” / Tiffany Sharples (pages 93-96); and, “Romance Is An Illusion: Could something that feels so real be a mere trick of the mind? Sure, when the survival of the species is at stake” / Carl Zimmer (pages 98-99)