Twelve Rules for Marriage
Reflecting on Love, Commitment, and Becoming
This weekend, my wife and I celebrate twelve years of marriage. Twelve years of laughter, tears, arguments over things neither of us can remember, quiet evenings that felt like grace, and hard seasons that tested everything we thought we knew about love.
I don’t write this as a man who has figured it out. I write as a man still being refined by the covenant, by the woman God gave me, and by the daily decision to show up again. Here are twelve rules, one for each year, that I’m learning to live by.
1. Remember That Marriage Is a Covenant, Not a Contract
A contract is about protecting interests. A covenant is about binding souls. Modern culture treats marriage like a negotiation between two autonomous consumers. But Scripture presents it as something far more profound, a living icon of Christ’s sacrificial love for His Church (Ephesians 5:25). You don’t negotiate with a covenant. You die to yourself inside of it.
The moment you begin treating your marriage as a transaction, keeping score, measuring inputs and outputs, you’ve already lost the plot. Covenants aren’t transactional. They’re transformational.
2. Choose Your Spouse Again Every Morning
The romantic myth says you “find” the right person and then coast. The truth is far more demanding and far more beautiful. Love is not a feeling you fall into. It is a daily act of the will.
C.S. Lewis understood this: “Love is not merely a feeling. It is a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit.” The mornings when you least feel like being generous, patient, or kind are precisely the mornings your marriage needs you most. The love that matters isn’t the love that comes easily. It’s the love you choose when every fiber of your fallen nature wants to choose yourself.
3. Be the Spouse You Want to Have
Aristotle taught that virtue is not a theory but a practice. We become what we repeatedly do. If you want a faithful spouse, practice faithfulness. If you want a generous spouse, practice generosity. If you want a spouse who listens, put down your phone and listen.
Too many of us build elaborate scorecards for our spouse while granting ourselves infinite grace. Jesus had something pointed to say about examining the plank in our own eye before addressing the speck in another’s (Matthew 7:3-5). Marriage is the daily laboratory where that teaching gets tested
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4. Fight For Each Other, Not Against Each Other
You will fight. Let’s dispense with the sentimental fiction that healthy couples don’t argue. They do. The question is never whether you fight, but how you fight and what you’re fighting for.
When conflict arises, and it will because you are two sinners sharing a bathroom, remember that your spouse is not your adversary. The moment you begin trying to win an argument against your spouse, you’ve already lost something far more valuable than the argument. Fight the problem. Fight your own pride. But never, ever fight to defeat the person you vowed to cherish.
5. Protect the Sacred Ordinary
We celebrate anniversaries and vacations, and we should. But marriage is mostly built in the ordinary: the way you greet each other after work, the conversation over dishes, the small act of making coffee for someone before they ask. Tolkien understood the profound dignity of the ordinary. The Shire matters. Sam Gamgee’s faithful, steady love is the hidden strength that carries the whole quest.
Don’t wait for grand gestures. The holiness of marriage lives in the Tuesday evenings, in the unremarkable kindnesses that no one else will ever see.
6. Guard Your Words Like They’re Irreversible, Because They Are
Proverbs tells us that the tongue has the power of life and death (Proverbs 18:21). Nowhere is that more devastatingly true than in marriage. You know your spouse’s deepest vulnerabilities. You know exactly where to strike if you want to wound. That knowledge is a sacred trust, not ammunition.
Words spoken in anger leave marks that apologies can cover but rarely erase completely. Speak to your spouse the way you want your children to speak to theirs someday. The grammar of your marriage will become the grammar of your household for generations.
7. Suffer Well Together
Nobody tells you this at the wedding, but some of the deepest intimacy in marriage is forged in seasons of suffering. Financial hardship. Loss. Illness. Parenting crises that bring you to your knees. Augustine wrote that God is always doing two things in our lives: giving us good things and making us good through difficulty. Marriage is no exception.
The valleys don’t disqualify your marriage. They define it. Any two people can love each other on a beach in Maui. The real question is whether you can love each other in the wreckage of a hard year and come out holding hands on the other side. That is the love that lasts.
8. Maintain Two Separate Accounts, of Grace
Forgive quickly. Forgive completely. And then forgive again. Keeping a record of wrongs isn’t just a violation of 1 Corinthians 13. It’s a slow poison that will kill even the strongest marriage.
This doesn’t mean ignoring real harm or pretending problems don’t exist. It means that when forgiveness is offered, you don’t file the offense away for future use. You burn the ledger. As Lewis wrote, “To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable, because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.”
9. Date Your Spouse Like Your Marriage Depends on It, Because It Does
I’ll be honest. Somewhere around year two or three, we stopped dating. Not officially, of course. Nobody announces it. But the rhythm shifted. We went from pursuing each other to managing life together: schedules, kids, bills, responsibilities. And slowly, almost imperceptibly, the marriage started running on fumes. We were great roommates. Great co-managers of a household. But we had drifted from each other without realizing it.
The single greatest thing that pulled us out of that lull was making a monthly date night non-negotiable. Not occasional. Not “when we can find time.” Monthly. Scheduled. Protected like any other commitment that matters.
And here’s what I learned: it doesn’t have to be expensive. It doesn’t have to be elaborate. What it has to be is intentional. A walk together. A meal without screens. An evening where you sit across from the person you married and remember why you married them. The point is not the activity. The point is saying to your spouse, with your time and your presence, “You are still worth pursuing. You are not just my partner in logistics. You are the person I chose, and I choose you again tonight.”
We are not the same people we were at year three. That weekly rhythm of pursuit, of turning toward each other instead of just running alongside each other, changed the trajectory of our marriage. It was not a silver bullet. But it was the soil in which everything else began to grow again.
If your marriage feels like it’s coasting, this is where I’d start. Stop managing and start dating. Pursue your wife. Surprise her. Ask her a question you haven’t asked before. Write her a note she doesn’t expect. Marriage is not a destination you arrive at; it’s a garden you tend. Left unattended, even the most beautiful garden returns to wilderness.
10. Build Your House on Bedrock, Not on Feelings
Feelings are wonderful servants and terrible masters. Plato understood that the appetitive and spirited parts of the soul must be governed by reason, and for the Christian, reason itself must be governed by the wisdom of God.
There will be seasons when marriage doesn’t feel like anything in particular. Seasons of emotional drought. Seasons where the romance feels distant and the grind feels relentless. Those seasons are not evidence that something is wrong. They are invitations to root your marriage deeper, beneath the shifting soil of emotion and into the bedrock of vows made before God and witnesses. The feelings will return. The covenant holds while you wait.
11. Laugh Together, Often and Loudly
Chesterton once observed that the angels can fly because they take themselves lightly. Marriage needs that lightness. The couple that can laugh at themselves, laugh at the absurdity of life, and refuse to take every inconvenience as a personal offense has a resilience that the solemn and self-serious never will.
Twelve years in, some of our best memories are not the grand occasions but the moments of ridiculous, unplanned laughter. Laughter is not a trivial thing. It is the sound of two people who still enjoy each other’s company, and that is no small gift.
12. Point Each Other Toward Glory
The ultimate purpose of marriage is not personal happiness, though it often produces it. The ultimate purpose of marriage is sanctification: the slow, sometimes painful, always purposeful work of two people helping each other become who God made them to be.
Your spouse is not your project. But you are each other’s closest companion on the road to becoming fully human, fully alive, fully conformed to the image of Christ. The best marriages are not the ones where two people make each other comfortable. They are the ones where two people make each other better, where iron sharpens iron, where truth is spoken in love, and where two sinners walk together toward the same eternal city.
Twelve years. I’m a better man than I was when I said “I do,” not because I’ve achieved some mastery over marriage, but because this covenant, this woman, has been God’s instrument of grace in my life.
To my wife: Thank you for twelve years of patience, laughter, honesty, and love. Here’s to the next twelve, and every one after that.
Happy Anniversary.
If this resonated, share it with a couple you love. Marriage is under siege in our culture, and every household that stands is a quiet revolution.
Happy anniversary! 🌹🥂