When we begin our life together, we sometimes imagine that the right choices will be obvious. Enemies of our relationship will loom large and ugly in the distance, and opportunities to express our affection will announce themselves with neon lights in our faces.

But if you’ve been married for more than five minutes, you’ve probably discovered that this isn’t true. The true enemies of marriage don’t always come with clear warnings and easy names, like infidelity or mother-in-law. They’re often more subtle. Things like canceling dates, losing our creative bent, leaving hard things unsaid, or pretending that we can let our relationship stagnate without drifting away from each other – these are the real traps.

We have a tendency to overinflate the importance of big things. In some ways, we’re trained to expect love to manifest itself in sweeping promises and grandiose gestures – and the enemies of love to emerge with scales. We ingest cartoonish love at a young age and equate falling in love with a rescue from a tower or a daring lunge into the path of danger. At the altar we swear that we’ll accomplish a whole host of noble-sounding things. We employ big-concept words like honor and cherish with no chance of knowing what they’ll mean next week, unless it involves scaling a tower over a fire-breathing dragon, in which case we’ll be ready.

We see this in our faith, too, sometimes. We debate the ranks of callings, like motherhood or missions, and ignore the people in our pews who fill their days with understated faithfulness. We kowtow to public leaders and super-Christians instead of honoring those who quietly bring life to their corners of the world. “Greater love has no one than this,” said the Lord, “that one lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13). But since he didn’t add, “And pick up your socks,” we forget that love means little things, too.

Sacrifice and bravery still serve as important expressions of love, but instead of relegating them to fairy tales and Braveheart, we need to recognize that we face opportunities every day to exhibit those very qualities. Some of us can point to specific days when we turned our marriages around, laid ourselves on the line, or accomplished something worthy of being passed on through legend. Instead, marriages are made of a million defining moments, many of which slip past without our notice.


more: http://www.ivoryfile.com/the-biggest-and-most-surprising-threat-to-your-marriage/