Healthy Support is Key to a Healthy Marriage

Song of Songs 1:4 (NIV) – [She] Take me away with you—let us hurry! Let the king bring me into his chambers. [Friends] We rejoice and delight in you; we will praise your love more than wine.

When a gal has been single for a little bit and then starts smiling more, acting giddy, and telling her family and friends about a new guy in her life, there’s a symbiotic relationship between the man and her friends and family. In the beginning, those she trusts must make sure he’s a good guy, not a bad guy.

A good guy is one who safely enters the gal’s world and wants to get to know and love the people who know and love this woman. He wants to be overt, not covert. He wants to get to know her parents, siblings, best friends, and it’s important to him to ask her parents for their blessing to marry her.

On the other hand, a bad guy isolates the woman, dangerously removing her from this world of people she knows and loves and where she is safe. Of course, as a couple moves towards marriage and gets married, relationships do shift and change as their marriage relationship becomes the most important. As an aside, some unhealthy family and friends do use this eventual shift as a reason to demonize the man (or woman) who their friend or child is marrying, but the natural shift of relationships is healthy as a couple moves on towards marriage.

Relationally, once two people get married, this relationship can become damaged when one spouse betrays the other spouse’s privacy or vents about them online or to anyone who will listen, especially when it’s to an immediate family member. It’s very important to determine who you will go to for wise counsel because, if you vent to someone about your spouse, it’s easy for them to have a jaded view of your spouse once you “kiss and make up”.

Once a couple is married, the importance of healthy relationships continues, just in a different way. It’s important for the couple to have godly, safe wise counsel they can turn to during trials but this person or couple must be mutually agreed upon. Though someone may have been a confidant for one or the other while they were single, it may not be the healthiest relationship now that they’re married.

Friends who celebrate your relationship and are trustworthy but aren’t afraid to speak truth in love are a gift to your marriage and are something that most married couples don’t make priority. If you don’t have a couple like this in your life, generally someone who is older and is in a future life stage from you, I would encourage you to pray together about who you could ask to fill this role in your lives.

If you’re married, do you and your spouse have healthy family and friends? If not, do you need to draw boundary lines with certain people who aren’t life-giving for your relationship? If you’re not yet married, it’s still incredibly important to have good, godly friends to speak into your life.