Have you ever wondered why we so often fail in love relationships?
The reason we do poorly love?
We invest our time, effort, commitment, dedication, and in the end, for some reason, things don’t turn out.
This causes us to end up hurt and disappointed.
We don’t know if it’s us, if it’s the other, if it was both of us.
Maybe we blame the other.
His friends, his parents, an unexpected third party.
But are we really being honest with ourselves?
Today, as I was thinking about something related, I remembered a story in the Bible where Jesus talks to a person whose love life had been a disaster until then.
A person who was failing in love relationships.
I’m sure you know the story.
Personally, I had never seen it from this perspective specifically.
In fact, in previous days, I wrote a post where I address the same story and the same problem from a broader perspective.
But hey, hands-on the story:
Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired as he was from the journey, sat down by the well. (…)
When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, “Will you give me a drink?” (…) “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.”
(….)“Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst.
Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”
The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water (…).”
He told her, “Go, call your husband and come back.”
“I have no husband,” she replied.
Jesus said to her, “You are right when you say you have no husband.
The fact is, you have had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband.
What you have just said is quite true.”
| John 4:6-10; 13-19
Can you imagine what it’s like to have been through five divorces?
If going through one is one of the most exhausting experiences in life.
Imagine what it means to go through five.
For that same reason, the woman had decided not to marry in her sixth attempt to build a romantic relationship.
She had lived her whole life looking for something.
Something that will satiate her emotional needs.
And she had failed miserably to find that.
She had tried to find it in other people.
I can imagine how she wanted to build a solid romantic relationship, build a life with someone else, find affection, support, companionship, and motivation in that person.
And there is nothing unusual about this, deep down we all want it.
This is a desire that God put there in our hearts, which is perfectly natural and worth feeling.
But for some reason, all of this woman’s attempts up to then had ended in failure.
And if you’re reading this, I sense that something at least similar has happened to you.
You also may not be doing well in love relationships.
That day Jesus tells her the reason, and even though you already read it, I would like to share it with you.
Long before she could manage to build a healthy and solid romantic relationship with another person, it was necessary for her to properly build a fundamental relationship in her life, and it was not exactly another courtship or marriage.
This is why Jesus tells her before anything else:
“If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.”
First of all, she needed to build a relationship with Jesus.
She needed to learn that day that no one could give her what God could give her.
Because let us be honest.
If your heart is thirsty, all you’re going to end up doing is drying up those around you.
You don’t have water to share, you’re just thirsty.
You’re there hoping to find in others something you want, instead of offering something to share.
In this case, instead of giving, you can just receive, wait, claim.
It’s never going to work like that.
The reason you do fail in love relationships is that you first need to have a correct relationship with God.
Your thirst is never going to be quenched in other people with romantic relationships.
You’re just going to be thirsty and, sadly, the most you’ll get to live will be infatuations or generate emotional dependencies.
Your thirst can only be quenched in Jesus, and the beauty of this is that you will never be thirsty again.
But you know, not only that’s going to happen.
Jesus also said to her:
(…) whoever drinks from the water that I will give him (…) within him that water will become a spring from which eternal life will spring.
What’s going to happen is you’re going to become a spring of eternal life.
Your heart will not only be satiated, but you will have joy, emotional stability, all this in a healthy way to share with that special person.
We often think that what we need is someone’s company and affection to be happy.
What we really need above all is to be satiated in Jesus.
There is a fundamental relationship that we must build first, and then we will be able to build a healthy and solid romantic relationship.
It’s about a real relationship with Jesus.
One interesting thing the Bible mentions about singleness, is that it is a gift from God.
Yes.
Just like marriage of course.
The apostle Paul calls it a gift from God.
God in his love and wisdom determined that all human beings would be single for a time in our lives so that we could build a relationship with Him without distractions.
For this reason, if you will allow me to give you some advice about how to build that romantic relationship that you desire so much; I would give you exactly the same advice that Jesus gave to this woman.
Make that your number two priority.
Make it the first priority of your life to build a strong relationship with Jesus, to satiate yourself from the water of life.
When that foundation is solidly grounded, you can enjoy love for the purpose for which God truly created it.
Not in the selfish way that most of us have done for so long and that has brought us so many wounds.
If you’re not married, you might want to set aside some time to enjoy that gift from God, your singleness.
Set aside that time to build a real relationship with God.
Build a life project with Him and be useful to Him without the distractions and emotional conflicts that come with having a romantic relationship when you really are not ready for it.
I hope this post has been a blessing to you.
What do you think about this topic? Have you failed in love relationships? Leave us a comment.
