I have been a Christian my whole adult life and I still do not know how to love my wife.
I want you to let that sit for a second, because I think a lot of men carry this as a shame they will not admit out loud. We read Ephesians 5 — love your wife as Christ loved the church and gave Himself up for her — and we nod at it the way you nod at a bill you cannot pay. Yeah. Sure. That is the standard. Got it. Moving on.
And then we get up and go into our day and we are impatient and we are short and we are checked out and we are defensive and we snap back at a tone we did not like and we tell ourselves it was not that bad and we go to bed and do it again tomorrow.
If any of that describes you, I am writing this for you. I am also writing it for me, because this is the conversation I am having with God right now, and it is not finished.
The Ephesians 5 problem
Here is the thing nobody tells you when you first read Ephesians 5: the standard is not "be a decent husband." The standard is Jesus on a cross. As Christ loved the church and gave Himself up for her.
Read that slowly. He gave Himself up. All the way up. Not "tried harder." Not "was more patient this week." Not "remembered the anniversary." He laid His life down. That is the floor for how a Christian man is supposed to love his wife.
I have never met a man, including me, who is actually doing this. I have met a lot of men who are pretending to do this. I have met a lot of men who have replaced the standard with something smaller — something like "be a good provider" or "do not cheat on her" or "be nicer than my dad was." All of those are fine. None of them are Ephesians 5.
The gap between the Ephesians 5 standard and my actual life is so wide that for years I just... stopped looking at it. I read the verse, felt a tiny sting of conviction, and moved on to a passage that did not make me feel like a fraud.
That is not a strategy. That is avoidance.
What I do now
I am not going to give you a framework. I do not have a system. I do not have a morning routine that fixes this.
What I have is a prayer. I say it most mornings — not all, because I am inconsistent, and I want you to hear that — before my feet hit the floor. And when I forget in the morning, I try to say it sometime during the day. It is not polished. It is not liturgical. It is ugly and it is honest and it is exactly what I mean.
Here is the prayer:
> "God, I believe You have done everything to save me. I really do. But when it comes to loving my wife the way You have called me to love her, I feel like all of that goes out the door the second I walk into the kitchen. I do not know how to do this. I get irritated. I get frustrated. I want to snap back. I want to win. There is a lot of stuff in my heart from my parents, from my childhood, from things that have happened to me that I am still dragging around like a sack of rocks. I need You to help me sort through that. I need You to do surgery on my heart. I want to be right — not just for my wife. For You first. And then out of the overflow of being right with You, let me actually love her the way You are calling me to. I have no idea how to do that. Show up in a real way today. Please."
That is it. That is the prayer.
It works on the nervous system the way confession works on the conscience. You tell God the truth out loud, and then you spend the next sixteen hours finding out whether you meant it.
Why polite prayer does not work
Most of us pray like we are emailing a customer service department. We lob a request over the wall and we hope somebody gets back to us with a coupon code. "Hey God, quick thing, help me be more patient today, thanks."
That is not prayer. That is a support ticket.
Polite prayer works great if your goal is to feel vaguely spiritual without anything actually happening. If your goal is for God to change how you love the person you sleep next to every night, you are going to have to get uglier than that.
Raw prayer is what happens when you stop trying to look like you have it together in front of the God who literally knows you do not. It is what happens when you say "I do not know how to do this, and I am scared I am going to screw up my marriage, and I need You to actually do something, not just make me feel better about myself."
The difference is not in God. The difference is in you. Raw prayer is the beginning of surrender. Polite prayer is performance.
What started to change
I want to be honest about what has happened since I started praying this prayer more days than not.
I did not become patient. I still snap. I still have the dumb argument about the dishwasher. I still say things with a tone that I can hear myself using in real time and wish I was not. The raw material of me is the same raw material.
But something underneath started to shift. I started noticing things about my wife that I had not noticed in twenty years of marriage. I started asking better questions. "What do you mean by that? What does that look like to you? Are you okay?" I started, in the middle of moments that used to make me defensive, feeling something surprising — a wave of compassion I did not manufacture. That is not me. That is the Spirit doing something I did not ask Him to do on the day I asked Him to do something.
And the weirdest part, the part I almost do not want to say because it sounds like a Hallmark card: I started praying for her specifically, and God started answering those prayers in her. Things shifted in her heart that I had nothing to do with except for the asking. I watched it happen. I still watch it happen. It is the closest thing I have to proof that He is real and He is listening.
What Ephesians 5 actually asks of you
Here is what I think I have finally figured out, and I want you to hear it because I wish someone had said it to me at 24.
Ephesians 5 is not asking you to love your wife perfectly. It is asking you to love her sacrificially. Those are not the same thing. Perfection is a performance. Sacrifice is a direction.
The man who loves his wife as Christ loved the church is not the man who never loses his temper. He is the man who, when he loses his temper, repents fast. He is the man who prays specifically for her when he does not know what else to do. He is the man who stops trying to win the argument and starts listening for what is actually being said underneath the argument. He is the man who gets raw with God every morning because he knows he cannot pull this off without Him, and who gets raw with his wife in the afternoon because he knows that is where the sacrifice actually lives.
You are not going to get this right.
But the standard was never "get it right." The standard was "lay yourself down."
Start there. Tell God the truth about where you are. Ask Him to do surgery on your heart before He does anything through you. Watch what happens.
I have a ways to go.
So do you.
Let's go.