We grow up told to search for “the one,” the person who will complete us, calm us, and make everything make sense. But no human heart was built to bear that kind of weight. No person can complete what only God can make whole.

Jesus is your One. He is the steady ground beneath your feet, the still point in the turning. When your life is built around Him, your marriage finds its balance. Every act of patience, forgiveness, and grace flows from what He first pours into you. Without that divine connection, even love starts to feel like striving.

When you seek Him first, love becomes less about being fulfilled and more about being faithful. The kind of love that endures is born in surrender. It is the same love that knelt to wash feet and the same love that laid itself down so another could rise.

Only when your heart is full of Him can it overflow toward another. Seek the One, and everything else finds its place.

Then pursue your spouse, who is your two. Marriage is not something you find once and then coast through; it is something you choose again and again. You pursue your partner on ordinary Tuesdays when exhaustion lingers and the day feels too heavy. You pursue them after hard conversations, when silence feels safer than speaking. You pursue them in the quiet corners of life that no one sees, where love looks more like service than sentiment.

Marriage changes with the seasons. In the early days, pursuit may look like stolen moments and soft laughter. Later, it may look like teamwork in the chaos of raising children or quiet companionship after the house grows still. Each stage carries its own kind of grace, but the call remains the same: to keep showing up, to keep choosing love when it is easy and when it is not.

For me, that pursuit looks like showing up for my husband when life has stretched us thin. Sometimes it means meeting him for lunch in the middle of a long workday, sitting across from each other at a small table with the noise of the world spinning around us. The smell of his coffee mingles with mine as his laughter cuts through the hum of conversation. We talk about ordinary things like dinner plans and how the morning went, but it feels sacred, a pause in the chaos. Love lives quietly in those moments, in the warmth of shared space and the rhythm of two lives trying to move in grace. It is our reminder that love does not always need grand gestures; sometimes it just needs presence.

It is praying for him in the dark before the alarm clock rings. It is listening without fixing, holding without words, and choosing tenderness when frustration comes easier.

And he pursues me too, in the small, steady ways that matter most. The way he reaches for my hand on long drives. The way he waits for me to calm before he speaks. The quiet steadiness that tells me I am safe to be fully myself, even when I do not have it all together. Sometimes love does not shout. Sometimes it just stays. And that presence says everything.

Love also learns to forgive. Not once, but continually. Forgiveness is not forgetting; it is remembering grace. It is the decision to rebuild trust, to hold hands across the gap that pride would widen. Every apology and every act of mercy becomes a fresh layer of strength beneath the surface.

I still remember the early days, when everything felt new and we were learning how to love one another well. There were nights when we spoke too sharply and mornings when forgiveness had to come before coffee. Yet even then, God was teaching us what covenant love looks like, not flawless, but faithful.

Marriage is the greatest instrument of sanctification. It is where love stops being an idea and becomes a practice. It is where the vows you whispered on your wedding day are tested in the middle of ordinary life: sharp words, slow forgiveness, and the daily decision to stay soft when the world has hardened you.

How would we ever learn unconditional love if we were married to someone who met all the conditions? How would we ever learn mercy, patience, or long-suffering if we were joined to someone who never failed us? How would we ever learn to forgive from the depths of our souls if we were never wounded?

God uses marriage to reveal what still needs refining. In the moments when pride rises, when tempers flare, when we want to be right more than we want to be kind, He is chiseling away at the parts of us that do not look like Him. Each disagreement becomes an invitation to die to self, to love beyond comfort, to grow in the likeness of Christ.

If your spouse never sinned against you, you would never learn what it means to extend grace that costs you something. If they never disappointed you, you would never know what it means to forgive as you have been forgiven. And if they never needed mercy, you might never understand the weight of your own need for it.

The purpose of marriage is not happiness alone. Happiness comes and goes like sunlight through a passing cloud. The deeper purpose is holiness. It is through marriage that we are shaped, stretched, and conformed to the image of Jesus Christ. God does His deepest work not in moments of ease, but in the quiet persistence of love that chooses to stay.

A great marriage is not built on perfection. It is built on pursuit, two imperfect people chasing the heart of God and choosing one another daily. It is a rhythm of grace that turns keeping score into keeping faith.

When two hearts keep seeking the One, their love becomes more than emotion; it becomes ministry. A cord of three strands is not quickly broken. When others see a marriage rooted in grace, they see a glimpse of God’s faithfulness. They see how love endures not because it is easy, but because it is eternal. A Christ-centered marriage becomes a quiet testimony, a living parable of what redemption looks like between two hearts learning to love like Him.

In the quiet spaces of marriage, love often hides in the ordinary. It lives in folded laundry, shared meals, forgiveness spoken softly in the dark. When you seek Jesus first, He steadies what the world tries to shake. He softens hearts that might otherwise harden. And when you keep pursuing the one beside you, your love begins to mirror His, steady, patient, eternal.

There is nothing quite like marriage to reveal who we really are, and nothing like grace to remind us whose we are.

Keep seeking the One. Keep pursuing the two. That is where holy love is found.