It’s almost painfully obvious, but romance changes after marriage. For many men and women, the pursuit comes to a halt, the bonds of marriage secure. Some couples are happy and content with a “functional” marriage where they meet some needs and help each other. Other couples sink into the same behavior, but not the matching pattern of desire. They allow the passion fire to die or smolder, but the fuel remains. A stray spark from another relationship could easily ignite the passion.

I had a chance to get to know my spouse’s grandparents before they passed away. They had been married all their adult lives and I asked them what they thought were ingredients in a successful marriage. I got a simple one-word response: “Honesty.” When I queried them more, they went on to explain that you should never keep things from each other. There should be no secrets between you and your spouse.

As a result of their input and some other advice, my wife and I promised each other that if we ever felt feelings for someone outside our marriage, instead of hide it, we would tell the other before anything had a chance to build. We promised to listen without reacting out of anger or jealousy. Some may doubt the wisdom of such a plan, but it worked. Early in my marriage, an attraction flared up in my heart between me and a co-worker. When I told my wife, we worked together to identify what was really going on. We headed off the attraction before it had a chance to develop into a serious threat.

We have made other promises to each other. This is only a partial list of the commitments we have made, but each of these is designed to keep us together through the worst times. Some have been broken, much to our pain and regret. When we’ve held them, they’ve served us well.

• Conflict is inevitable; work with it – We cannot have a perfect, peaceful marriage. No one can. As long as we have conflict, we have a duty to seek the other person out to resolve the issue.
  
• No sleeping apart out of anger – If we can’t stay in the same room while we work things out, we can move into another room to cool off, but we can’t go to sleep. To sleep while we’re angry at each other conveys self-love over love for the other person. If we are truly seeking the benefit of the other person, we seek peace with them before we seek peace for ourselves. Besides, waking up to conflict is the worst way to wake up.
• No mentioning the “D word” – Divorce is not an option. Period. It cannot be referred to, jokingly or otherwise, as a possible ending to our marriage. To be able to mention it puts it on the negotiation table as an option and the threat of it as a weapon. It is the equivalent to using a WMD in our conflicts and using it would unleash a firestorm of trouble.
• We will clean our nets together – The Bible mentions that fishermen mended their nets. The simple cause of this was that in the process of catching fish, you pulled up debris with your nets. Over time, that debris would accumulate, cutting or jamming the net and limiting or destroying its efficiency. Ongoing work to clean and repair these nets was essential to continuing your livelihood as a fisherman. Likewise, going through life, people tend to accumulate junk in their relationships, like irritations, slights, and frustrations. And like the junk in nets, these pieces of conflict must be manually cleaned and repaired. This is time-consuming at first and some couples never really learn how to do it well. With work, couples get more efficient at working through the junk and eventually have to clean the nets less and less. But it never fully stops.

The core of any family, homeschooling or otherwise, is the marriage relationship. Its stability or the lack thereof will affect everything in the household, right on down to the children’s studies. If we can’t offer stability in our homes, our decision to homeschool sours. A stable marriage relationship makes for a stable family. A stable family makes for a stable homeschool. A stable homeschool makes for a bright future for your children and grandchildren.

And you thought Valentines Day was all about romance and passion. Well, maybe it is. That’s what the card shop, the candy store, and the flower shop would all have you believe. But to go back to the fire picture, all the wood (and cards, chocolates, and flowers) in the world won’t thaw a heart that’s gone cold. It needs the heat of intimacy and the light of committed love to roar back to life. It isn’t the passions that keep love going strong; it’s the promises.

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