I Want My Future Husband to Love Someone Else More Than Me

Did anyone else grow up making lists of what they wanted in a future spouse?

Growing up in youth group, I was no stranger to girls Bible study and youth retreats. I remember at girls bible study we would discuss what traits were most important in a future husband. We were encouraged to write out a list of what we wanted, and then we would share it with each other.

We would always start out with the important ones… “He’s a Christian, he has a great family, he’s funny, respectful, he protects me, and my family likes him…”

And then some girls would trail off and include super specific things like hair color, eye color, height, and income.

We would make this super detailed list of what “The One” looks like, forming the perfect guy in our minds. But then we began dating, and realized that it’s not as cut-and-dry as carrying around a checklist and assessing each guy you meet.

The guys that we created on those checklists aren’t real people.

Real people are messy, sinful and beautiful. They struggle, laugh and cry. Marshall Segal wrote, “The search for a spouse isn’t a pursuit of perfection, but a mutually flawed pursuit of Jesus.”

With this in mind, what should we look for in a spouse?

I want my future husband to love someone else more than me.

I want him to be so in love with Jesus that his joy, hope and satisfaction is found in Christ alone. It will be my frequent prayer that he loves Jesus more than me.

In our culture today, we have created this idea of  “The One”. It raises our expectations for our spouse, and turns them into an idol. As talked about in a previous post, God created us to worship. And when we worship anything that isn’t God, it becomes an idol.

“A problem with worshiping these other things is that they never truly satisfy us, because we were created to only be satisfied by God Himself. So we worship those other things in hopes that they’ll make us happy. We place all of our worth, value and hope in something, and then it lets us down. It doesn’t satisfy, so then we just try to get more of that thing, hoping it actually satisfies the next time. And it becomes a viscous cycle of more.”

I don’t want my future husband to love me more than Christ, because I can’t fully satisfy him; only Christ can. His greatest joy is found in Christ, and so is mine.

So what are you looking for in a future spouse? Do they have to be 5’7’’, play guitar, make $100,000 salary and have blue eyes? Or are you looking for a mutually flawed person pursuing Jesus above everything else in their life?