Editor’s note: Love Begins, a prequel to the Love Comes Softly film series, releases to DVD today. We asked CT editorial resident Morgan Feddes for her thoughts on the movie.
Linda Dillow is the co-founder and spiritual director of Authentic Intimacy as well as the author of several books including What's It Like to Be Married to Me? We spoke about the provocative question posed by the book's title, exploring how courageous self-evaluation can lead to deepened connection in marriage.
What's it like to be married to me? That is both a scary and a powerful question! It requires such honesty and self-awareness.
The question "What's it like to be married to me?" is based on two passages of Scripture: Psalm 139 and Psalm 19, which both say that we are to let God search our hearts. It's the idea of honestly considering if there's anything in me that I need to take and lay before the Lord. Asking God to search us is a critical biblical concept.
Asking God to search us is a critical biblical concept.
Many of us women do that regularly when it comes to our jobs or our role as mothers, but often it just gets too tender and too close to consider, How am I coming across to my husband? Am I really being who God wants me to be and who I want to be? What is it like to be married to me? That's just really hard.
Yet if we don't ask ourselves that question, we'll get in a rut and we won't be honest about our marriages—we'll just go into neutral. Rather than have the closeness and excitement and wonderful communication that we wanted, we'll just settle for talking about surface things and we'll miss out on that intimacy.
If we take this question seriously—especially in our areas of weakness or in negative marriage patterns—it requires brutal and possibly painful honesty. What good can come out of a wife really considering what it's like for her husband to be married to her?
Many of us today are scattered. We're constantly putting out fires in every area of our lives, and we're just hoping to get the fires out and be able to keep going and do a fairly good job in all the different areas of our lives. And yet I think many of us are so focused on other things that we've never formed the question in our mind: Who do I want to be as a wife in 10 years? Or, How do I want to grow in these next 5, 10, or 15 years? And what can I hope will be in my relationship with my husband because I've grown?
If we do stop and prayerfully ask God, What is it like to be married to me? and Who do I want to become as a wife?, then we'll have a goal to aim for. This kind of goal is so important. I want to live my marriage by design and not by default. If I'm not aiming at anything, I'm not going to hit anything and I'm not going to move forward.
So we've got to be still and ask the Lord, God search me as an individual and as a wife. Is there anything that's not right? Will you show me who you want me to become? Will you show me how to love this man today?
For me, it's not hard to live with that kind of purpose in marriage when I'm energetic, happy, and motivated to build up my husband. But when I'm tired, hurt, angry, discouraged, or resentful? That's when it's hard. In those times, I often don't even realize how I'm coming across to my husband. So how can we, as wives, overcome the power negative emotions can have over us at times?
The truth is that if you have children, if you have a job, if you have a house that keeps getting dirty and people who keep wanting to be fed and all of that—you are going to be scattered. And at times you're not going to feel like you have the emotional energy to really give to your husband or to think about how you're coming across.
I have a file of emails that I've gotten from men and women, and sometimes I take out the file and read through it. It gives me perspective and I think, Oh God, I don't want to come across that way.
For example, I have one email from a man whose statement just blew me away. He wrote, "I haven't kissed my wife in two years because I can't stand to kiss the mouth that, every day, spews out negative and disrespectful words at me." That's a huge statement. He hasn't kissed his wife in two years because of the impact of her words.
The way we come across, especially when we are emotionally spent, is critical.
The way we come across, especially when we are emotionally spent, is critical. Sadly, I know that I'm often much more careful with my words when I'm out ministering to others or when I'm with friends than I am with my own husband. For me, this all comes back to my relationship with the Lord. I have memorized a whole lot of Scripture that speak about words and their power. I often talk through these passages with God, whether it's or about how our words have the power of death or life. I'll pray, God, today I want to give life-giving words. I want my words to be healing, and not just with people "out there" but in my home and my words to my husband.
I have to revisit these passages and prayers all the time. I've been working on this for 50 years! But I still need to continually revisit it and say to my husband things like this, "Honey, what I said to you 10 minutes ago? I really didn't say it in a nice way. Will you forgive me?" I try to keep short accounts and ask God to continually search my heart.
Authentic Intimacy, your ministry with Dr. Juli Slattery, really zeroes in on the question "what's it like to be married to me?" in the arena of sexual intimacy. How can a woman's choice to honestly consider things from her husband's point of view help their sexual relationship?
Many years ago, I asked my husband, "Honey, what is your picture of your dream lover? Because that's who I want to become. I know it's not going to happen over night, and maybe you'd like to pray for me and be patient with me, but I want to learn and I want to grow to love you so that you feel like you're just the most blessed man."
In a sense, I see marriage as a circle with several aspects of intimacy: emotional intimacy and spiritual intimacy can lead to physical intimacy. Likewise, physical intimacy can lead to emotional and spiritual intimacy. That's the way God created it. So I believe that when we really are willing to prayerfully ask that hard question—what's it like to make love with me?—and when we ask God, Would you show me how to love this man? Not only emotionally and spiritually but also physically?, it is a huge blessing to both spouses and to the marriage.
The email from the man who hasn't kissed his wife for years illustrates how marriage struggles can be cyclical. I imagine, from her perspective, she might think her negative words express her own feelings of hurt and abandonment. The truth is, sometimes someone just needs to be the one with the courage to break the cycle. Honestly asking "What's it like to be married to me?" is one way to do that, isn't it?
It became very clear to me early in marriage, and it still rings true today, that there is only one person I can make choices for.
That's a good way to put it. It became very clear to me early in marriage, and it still rings true today, that there is only one person I can make choices for. (Laughing), I've tried to make them for my husband and my kids and it never works!
I'm the only one that I can make choices for. Sometimes it is the choice to say, Okay, God, I can focus on loving this man. Even if today he's just pretty hard to live with and what I want to do is just avoid him. Even if he just isn't very lovable today and I don't feel like being a blessing today, I will try. Please help me.
And the truth is, there are also lots of times when I don't deserve my husband's love. Really, we're both just basically selfish people who Christ has been knocking the selfishness out of for years.
I was just reading in the that the Lord said, "If you love me, you will keep my commandments." Jesus made it clear that we show him our love by obeying him—and that includes scriptural commands to forgive, to be kind, to respond gently, and so on. So sometimes as wives, we need to do the right thing even if we don't really want to or even if it seems our husbands don't deserve it. We do it anyway as a means of showing our love to God.
Set in the American West, Love Begins is a stereotypical romantic film that describes how Clark Davis, one of the main characters in Janette Oke’s Love Comes Softly series, first meets Ellen Barlow. Ellen and her sister Cassie are trying to keep their family farm going after their father’s death the previous winter. They’re in need of a hired hand, but all the able-bodied young men have been hit with gold fever and have headed off to California, including Ellen’s childhood sweetheart.
Clark is a wanderer in both body and soul who’s passing through town on the way to California himself. When he gets involved in a fight at the local restaurant, he’s forced to stick around until he can pay off the damages. The sheriff convinces Ellen to hire Clark on as a way to pay his debt and give the Barlow farm some much-needed assistance. Clark gets along easily with Cassie, but his initial relationship with Ellen is much rockier.
The film, which originally aired as part of the Hallmark Channel’s “Love Saga,” has a number of weaknesses. Though this particular prequel isn’t based off a specific book, fans of the Love Comes Softly series—and most anyone who’s read more than a handful of romance novels—will be able to predict how the plot progresses. On top of that, the most interesting, tension-filled points of the plot happen in the last twenty minutes, making for a slow second act. The actors show signs of skill, but the weak dialogue hampers their performances. And though there are elements of faith woven in throughout, the subtle moments often prove to be stronger than outright mentions of God and church, which feel trite and forced.
Still, even with its weaknesses, Love Begins has a certain charm to it. Its Old West setting is largely responsible, I suspect (being a personal fan of westerns), but the quiet love story that unfolds, while predictable, is still enjoyable, particularly to fans of the Christian romance genre.
Love Begins is available for purchase at ChristianBook.com, and the trailer can be seen here:
