The Proposal

When proposing to his girlfriend, one young man said, “I’m not wealthy, and I don’t have a yacht and a convertible like Jerome Green, but, my darling, I love you.” The girl replied, “I love you too; but tell me a little more about Jerome Green.”
The painful reality is that love is sometimes a fickle thing. How often have you heard divorcing couples say, “We just don’t love each other any more.”
Love is very important to marriage, but it’s not all there is. Millions of couples have thought that all that was necessary for a successful marriage was love – only to discover that their love wore thin in the daily realities of two people living together. Love is as much a product of marriage as a producer of marriage.
Charleen and I have known each other all our lives. But it was in high school that I began to see her in a new way. My heart was captured by this vivacious, blond cheerleader and we started dating. Soon we began saying “I love you” to each other.
By contrast, the love we share today is so much more. It’s a commitment we’ve made to each other for life. Love is the product of years of shared joys and struggles, laughter and tears. It’s forged by praying together through problems and debts; through sharing the joy of welcoming each of our children into our family.When we now put our arms around each other and say “I love you,” it means something quite different – and so much more – than those words spoken as teenagers years ago.