You share something personal about what’s happening in your life with someone you’re attracted to and you wait. You’ve extended a heart string. A string that has the potential to begin connecting your lives together. These connections increase as you share more and more with one another in the form of personal information, shared experiences, points of commonality and physical connection. The more you share the more strings attach your hearts together and your relationship begins to grow.

Your relationship is dynamic. You’re either moving toward or away from one another, and even if you feel like you’re not moving, you are. As you encounter issues or challenges that all couples face, depicted by the bricks in my picture, you can be drawn closer together by working together for a resolution or separate a little more by adding another “brick” to the walls that guard your heart. If you are able to resolve challenges together, your hearts become more connected, if not, the connections diminish.

Unfortunately most of us are unaware of this whole process. To make things more complicated we all bring trunks of stuff relating to our past into the relationship that have a big impact on our ability to address these issues effectively. There’s stuff we know about ourselves that we may or may not have shared and there’s stuff we’re completely unaware of that fuels emotional turmoil within us and in our relationships when triggered.

In addition you also bring: your friends, your childhood, expectations you know you have and those that you’re unaware of, past relationships, your family, ideas about relationship roles, ideas about God and more. All of this mixed together makes up the relational path you’re walking on either moving closer together or farther apart.

My prayer for you is that God will be the primary relationship for both you and your spouse and that you will continue to move toward Him gaining a deeper understanding of yourselves and Him in the process. The closer you move toward Him the more you’ll be able to reflect His grace and mercy to one another and in doing so more fully reflect God’s love to the world.