Top 5 Marriage Advice for Women

Top 5 Marriage Advice | Lisa Bevere

First and foremost love fearlessly. This is what we're talking about. We're talking about love fearlessly. This is the overarching theme. What do you mean love fearlessly? Well, perfected love has no fear, so I'm asking you to actually look at your life and begin to separate love and fear.

I'm just going to tell you in my own life, John and I have been married 37 years, and there's one thing I regret: I wish I would have loved my husband more fearlessly early on. I wish I wouldn't have held back. And you think, what do you mean? Well, see, I came from a very broken family.

My parents were divorced, not once but twice. And so I didn't know what family looked like. I had never seen it modeled. And so I felt like, kind of in the back of my mind, I always thought, all men will one day leave, all men will one day disappoint.

Don't give all of your heart, because if you give all of your heart and they leave, you'll have nothing left. Your life will be empty, it'll be devastated, it'll be utterly broken. So you know what I did with my husband? I loved him just a portion.

I wasn't all in. I was like, you know what, I love you 70%. Now, that didn't mean I wasn't nice to him, but somehow he knew that I wasn't giving my all to him.

And so I reserved some, pushed back a little bit, was always the first one to start patting him when we hugged, to push him away. And he said to me, 'You know, Lisa, I'm not your dad. I'm not going to leave. I don't know how long we are going to have to be married before you actually believe me that I'm not looking for a reason to leave you.' And I looked at him, and I thought, that is so unfair. But I also knew he was right.

He said, 'Lisa, if we need to wait until we're 70, and you turn around and you look at me and say, 'Oh, you're still here? I expected you to leave 20 years ago,' he's like, 'I'm okay with that. But we are going to miss an awful lot of great times in the interim.'

So I said, 'All right, you're completely correct.' And I got on my knees, and I said, 'God, I don't know how to love fearlessly. I don't know how to do this. I need you to help me.' And you know what? God wants me to love fearlessly. And God wants you to love fearlessly. And so I'm going to unpack that a little deeper in the next section.

Next thing, so first love fearlessly and Forgive Quickly."