How can you say, I love you, when you won’t confide in me….(Judges 16:15)
It seems to me like Samson and Delilah started with sexual attraction, but ended with a tremendous breakdown in their relationship due to a lack of trust.
You see, attraction in relationships are great. Of course, it’s important to find your spouse attractive and want them sexually, but what’s even more valuable in relationships and what actually makes sex and everything else in your relationship better, is trust.
Once trust breaks down in the relationship, everything else goes down hill. The enemy now has ground to plant more seeds of division between the two of you and your relationship only further goes down the trail of thinking the other person doesn’t actually want what is best for you.
I have learned, in my relationship with my husband, that trust sometimes starts with being brutally honest with the other person over ways you’ve been hurt or felt forgotten. It could also be just simply expressing a need you have.
I need you to tell me that I’m doing a good job.
I need you to tell me that I’m beautiful.
I need you to tell me you believe in me.
If they are able to offer that for you, than rejoice, but if not, let it go and find your worth, not in the words of your spouse or significant other, but in the one who created you.
That is so key and important to becoming a person whose attraction doesn’t grow physically, but spiritually and emotionally. Learning to find your worth and value in God instead of other people. Because if we don’t we’ll just have growing resentment towards them because they’re not giving us all the approval we feel like we need.
Friend, when we get older, we’re just not as sharp physically as we once were, but what makes us more attractive is not what we have to offer in a photograph, but what we have set inside our hearts for others to come and find rest. Which means we have to let people in. If we don’t let our spouse in and work on growing our trust with them then we’ll only keep moving the opposite direction as them.
Then we’ll wonder why we feel so distant and disconnected, because we thought it was just about sex, but really, it’s about trust.
I have counseled with far too many Christian couples who are not experiencing any kind of intimacy in their relationship. I’ve heard people say that it’s been months or years since they have been intimate with their spouse. So friend, if this is you, please know you’re not alone and rejoice that things can get better as you grow your trust with your partner for a better future together.
Lord, being vulnerable and opening up our lives to someone else can be so scary. Forgive us when we try to protect ourselves. Forgive us when we don’t have hard conversations to grow our intimacy with our spouse. Grow us instead to be like you and to take that risk and be vulnerable, in Jesus name, Amen.
Heather Quiroz 