What Does Love Look Like When Life Is Wearing You Down?

This is the final part of a four-part blog series about loving people well in marriage, parenting, friendship, or any other relationship, based on the challenge and encouragement of 1 Corinthians 13:7. You can read part one here, part two here, and part three here.

Have you ever noticed how much easier it is to be loving when you’re not exhausted?

When you’ve gotten enough sleep, work is manageable, and nobody in your family urgently needs something from you, you may be amazingly patient! But add a sick parent, a slammed work schedule, a child who hasn’t slept through the night in six months, or financial stress that just won’t go away, and suddenly the smallest things can get under your skin.

The person you love asks an innocent question, and you snap. Your mother-in-law calls, and you see her name on your phone and think, I just cannot handle one more thing today.

This is where the final phrase of 1 Corinthians 13:7 gets incredibly practical.

Over the last few weeks in our series called What Does Love Really Look Like?, we’ve been looking at the 1 Corinthians 13:7 description of love: “Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance” (NLT). We’ve talked about what it means to never give up, to never lose faith, and to remain hopeful. If you missed any of those blogs, I highly encourage you to go back and read them.

But today, we come to that final phrase: Love endures through every circumstance.

We need to ask: what does it look like to keep loving well in a season when relational strain may be less about the relationship itself, and a lot about our circumstances? After two decades of research into how we handle our relationships and how we handle our circumstances, there’s a lot I could say. But I want to focus on three steps that are easy to miss.

Step 1. Protect the little things that keep you connected.

When life gets overwhelming, some of our normal rhythms naturally fall away. We have less time, less energy, less margin—and, let’s face it, maybe less inclination. Combine that with the fact that in any difficult or chaotic season, it is easy to lose the little routines and moments that keep us connected to the people we love. Like sitting on the porch drinking coffee with our spouse in the morning before work. Or making an afternoon snack for our teenagers while they debrief their day with us.

When life gets demanding, and routines are disrupted, it’s easy to let those “minor” things fall by the wayside. But those connective practices are usually far from minor. In fact, they are often immensely important—and letting them go can be much more costly than we realize.

We saw something fascinating about this in the research for The Surprising Secrets of Highly Happy Marriages. 83% of highly happy couples we studied intentionally spent time together at least weekly. And that time was often very ordinary.

That practice matters even more during a stressful season. You may not have the energy for a big date night with your spouse when you’ve spent hours caring for an ailing parent that week. But perhaps you can sit together for a few minutes after the kids go to bed and just catch up on the week. That small point of connection can remind both of you that underneath everything you’re managing, we’re still us.

Or let’s look beyond marriage. It may seem absolutely impossible to arrange your usual supper-club group at your house when you’re navigating months of crazy work travel. But maybe you can text a friend to grab coffee one morning next week just to see a friendly face.

2. Pay attention to what stress is pulling out of you.

One of the things I learned while doing the research for The Kindness Challenge was pretty convicting: we are often far less kind than we think we are! And that blind spot gets even bigger when our circumstances are stressful. 

How’s this for irony: We can be working incredibly hard to take care of the people we love…while also becoming increasingly impatient with them! We’re so focused on getting everyone through the difficult season that we don’t notice the edge creeping into our voice. (Please tell me that is not just me!)

So if we’re wondering if our love is indeed (in the words of 1 Corinthians 13:7) “enduring through every circumstance,” here’s a more modern way of determining that—ask yourself this slightly uncomfortable question: What is it like to live with me right now?

One of my friends described a really stressful season with her husband a few years back, and how her prayer life had essentially become a laundry list of complaints about all the problems going on with her husband and their marriage. Those problems were very real, and pretty overwhelming. But one day, she felt like God gently interrupted her prayers about her husband’s issues with a message that went something like this: You know, child, you’re not exactly a beacon of light to be around right now either.

Yikes! She knew God was not downplaying the chaos in her life and marriage. But she suddenly realized that at least some of the trouble she faced was because of how she was allowing that chaos to bring out lots of complaints and very little grace.

So, if you realize that stress has changed the way you’ve been speaking to your spouse or responding to your kids, choose one small adjustment. For example, if you and your teenager have both been insanely stressed and disconnected because of the hours spent on extra STEM projects and college applications, perhaps you simply decide that when your teenager walks into the kitchen tonight, you’ll stop what you’re doing, look up, smile, and give them your full attention. And you won’t let yourself rise to the bait if an attitude shows up.

We have very little control over the pressure surrounding us. But we have total control over what the people we love experience from us in the middle of it.

3. Repair quickly when the pressure gets the best of you.

We’re not going to handle ourselves perfectly during the stressful seasons of life. So we must learn how to repair quickly whenever we do fall short.

In the research for The Surprising Secrets of Highly Happy Marriages, we found that everyone had conflict. But among the most highly happy couples, seven in ten had some way of signaling “we’re okay” after it. Even if the issue itself was still “out there,” they had learned how to come back together instead of allowing a difficult moment to linger between them.

And moving toward repair of the relationship is a very practical step any of us can take when our stress gets the better of us—regardless of the type of relationship.

So, if you snapped at your son this morning because he didn’t allow enough time for creating the last few slides on his presentation, go back and acknowledge it. “I’m sorry I took my stress out on you this morning. You have worked so hard, and you didn’t deserve that.”

It may only take 30 seconds. And the person will need to decide whether to accept the apology or hold a grudge. But the more you try to repair what you can, the greater the likely impact.

Those little repairs become especially important during prolonged stress because there may be a lot more opportunities to need them! We can extend grace to ourselves for being human while also taking responsibility when our stress spills onto someone else.

Love through the hard seasons.

Some circumstances simply take a long time to walk through. And when they do, we may not have an enormous amount of energy to give. But we can still love with endurance. And ultimately, that effort shows the people closest to us that we love them, no matter what life throws at us.

If you are interested in having Shaunti bring research-based strategies, practical wisdom and biblical principles to your next event, please contact Amy Masaschi at [email protected]/.

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