I’m on my Christmas holidays and I’ve ended up watching more YouTube videos than normal – yes, I know I should be more productive, but don’t judge me!

One thing I have noticed is more and more videos about relationships, choosing a partner, how to have a great marriage, etc. Some of them helpful, some horrific! But there was one thing I noticed that wasn’t mentioned in any video. I don’t have a fancy title for it; it’s more of a concept, I guess.

For any successful relationship to flourish, the relationship itself must become the priority.

 A reminder – I am a follower of Jesus, and I believe that our relationships are lived out in accordance with God’s word – that’s a given for me. I also believe marriages are even more important than a ‘relationship’ because they are covenantal promises with God.

Most of us have a desire to find a healthy, loving relationship. I know very few people who wouldn’t want to find that special someone whom they love deeply, who lives out life’s adventures with them, and who they can grow old with. We have a deep desire to be loved and cherished and to return those emotions to another.

Think about the odds. We will meet thousands and thousands of people over our adolescent and adult lives in different situations, different places, and at different times. We will meet different people over the years who ‘could’ be someone we see ourselves spending the years with, but the road is challenging.

Sometimes it’s the right person at the wrong time.

Sometimes it’s the right time but the wrong person.

Sometimes it’s the right person, at the right time, but in the wrong place.

Sometimes the feelings are only one way.

Even if we find the right someone, with the right feelings, at the right time and the right place, the journey to partnership will have challenges.

We are two different people.

From two different families.

We have different values, expectations, and interests.

In the early days, weeks, and months of any serious relationship, we learn about how to choose, or prefer, the other person – the food we eat, movies we watch, places we go, how we talk, who we hang out with, etc. This can be tricky – we get quite attached to our own ways.

At the centre of this process is the exchange and tension of the personal vs the other.

What things should we change or alter to prefer the other?

What things should we keep so we don’t lose who we are?

There is a danger in the tension – if we don’t alter on certain things, the relationship is unlikely to work. If we alter on everything, we might experience short-term peace, but in the long term the relationship will crack.

One of the key principles in a relationship, even at the beginning, is the idea of a shared or equal partnership. In the Bible they would use the language of ‘yoking’. This comes from a farming idea where they would use animals to pull ploughs in the field.

To stop the animals from doing two different things, a heavy wooden bar, called a yoke, was put on the shoulders. This kept them in step with each other, meaning they pulled in the same direction, at the same pace, and allowed the farmer to control their movement together. The problems with this approach came if you had unequal animals, in size, age, species, etc. This was an unequal yoke and resulted in one animal pulling too much to one side, or too fast, meaning the ploughing was far from effective.

When we apply this to relationships, we see the same challenge. When one person invests more than the other, when one wants to run faster than the other, the relationship ends up askew.

Relationships require equal exchanges, even though both parties’ investment will look different. When this occurs, the relationship itself becomes the goal. It moves from a tug of war between the two to a tug of war where both are on the same side pulling for the victory of the partnership. This will result in altering and changing individually, as well as a cementing of certain things that were already present in each individual.

However, when the relationship becomes the focus, it isn’t a case of winning or keeping score – who had given up the most. No one cares who gave up or added what if the relationship and true partnership are the goal.

I’ve been married for 19 years and together with my wife for 21 years. There are core parts of my personality that haven’t shifted that much in those years. That’s because those aspects were helpful to our relationship and my wife and I valued them. The same goes for her. But there are other things that have shifted dramatically because they were incompatible with her and with what we desired our marriage to look like before God. The people we both are today are better versions of who they were 21 years ago, not because we ‘worked on ourselves’ but because we focus on building a healthy relationship.

If you are in a relationship today that is ‘serious’ and you are wrestling with your partner on who changes and when, I ask you both to stop and ask yourselves some deeper questions:

What do we want our relationship to look like?

What principles do we need to cement?

What behaviours do we need to change?

Without point scoring, name calling, and blame attributing, begin to write them out and allow those desires to shape the way forward. It’s vital that both commit to this process. It won’t always be perfect, of course, but it will go a long way to helping us experience long-term healthy relationships.