If you’ve been married more than a few years, you already know the secret nobody tells you at the wedding: the butterflies don’t last. Some mornings, you look at your spouse across the kitchen table and feel nothing but caffeine-deprived irritation.

So, was it all a lie? Were you wrong about “the one”?

Showing Up Matters More Than Butterflies

Pope Leo XIV doesn’t think so. In a message released this month for a new book on love and marriage aimed at young people, he wrote that real love is “a profound ‘yes’ to the other, a decision, a journey, and a lifelong covenant” — not a feeling that either shows up or doesn’t.

He compared it to the kind of love that shows up for someone even when it costs something, the way a person shows up for a friend in crisis, or a parent shows up for a sick child at 3 a.m. Not because they feel like it in that moment, but because they decided, a long time ago, that this is who they are to that person.

That’s a strange thing to hear in a culture that treats feelings as the final word on everything — if it doesn’t feel right anymore, the story goes, it probably isn’t right. But anyone who has stayed married through a hard season knows the opposite is often true. The feelings come back because you kept showing up, not the other way around.

You don’t wait to feel loving in order to act loving. You act loving, and — more often than not — the feeling follows.

This isn’t a call to grit your teeth and white-knuckle your way through misery. It’s something more hopeful: it means the strength of your marriage was never actually resting on how you happened to feel on any given day. It’s resting on a decision you keep making — sometimes easily, sometimes with difficulty, but a decision, nonetheless.

That’s not a lesser kind of love than the butterfly kind. It’s a sturdier one. It’s the kind that’s still there twenty, forty, sixty years later, when the butterflies are a distant memory and something much deeper has taken their place.

When Love Feels Quiet, Keep Choosing Each Other

If you’re in a season where the “in love” feeling has gone quiet — after a new baby, after a job loss, after just the ordinary wear of years — that doesn’t mean something has gone wrong. It might just mean you’re at the part of the story where love asks to be chosen on purpose.

We wrote more about what that looks like in practice, especially when it feels genuinely hard, in “When Love Feels Impossible: Choose It Anyway“. And if you and your partner are earlier in the journey and want to build habits of choosing each other before the ruts set in, the SmartLoving Discern Course is designed exactly for that stage.

Your marriage doesn’t need better feelings. It needs what it’s probably already had all along: two people who keep deciding to show up.

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Republished with thanks to SmartLoving. Image courtesy of Pexels.