What Single Ladies Should Know About Marriage by Pastor Kingsley Okonkwo: MP3 Download & Sermon Notes

Don't Build on Love

There's nowhere in the Bible that says you should marry who you love. Scripture only says you should love who you marry. Those are two different loves: the first is emotional love — the butterflies, the confusion, the feeling people chase. The second is love as action and commitment, something you're commanded to do after you marry, not something you wait to feel before you commit. Trying to marry based on the first, and only then trying to love the person once you're already married, is what quietly produces high divorce rates.

We are likely the only species that marries for love in this romantic sense. Every other species pairs off for survival, sustainability, and suitability — can this partner protect, can we reproduce, are we actually the same kind of creature. Human beings, chasing the feeling instead, have ended up more educated about love than any generation before, and yet more single and more lonely than any generation before.

Marriage Is a Practical Decision, Not Only an Emotional One

In earlier generations, it was rare to see a woman still single in her thirties — not because love mattered less, but because people understood something we've since lost: real compatibility, not the search for "the one," was the actual foundation. Genesis 2 — God said it was not good for man to be alone, and made him a helper — not a romantic conquest, but someone "meet" for him: suitable and adaptable. That adaptability is one of the strongest things God built into women, though culture increasingly trains women to build rigid checklists instead of remaining flexible — and a rigid checklist, more than anything else, is what keeps otherwise-ready people single far longer than they need to be.

Feelings Are Real, But They Aren't Always Right

Emotion is simply a strong feeling produced by a stimulus — it is real, but it is not always an accurate interpreter of truth, and it does not last. A feeling that is genuinely present today can be completely gone by evening. Whoever makes a permanent decision based on a temporary feeling will eventually be stuck with the decision long after the feeling that produced it has disappeared. That gap — a feeling from the wedding day that quietly evaporates two years later — is what most people actually mean when they say "I don't love him anymore."

What should replace that feeling as your basis for a decision is measurable action: can he provide, can he protect, can he lead well and make sound decisions, is he caring, faithful, loyal, kind, accountable, does he have people he answers to in his life, does he fear God, is he generous, is he hardworking, is he honest. Those are all things you can actually observe and verify — unlike whether someone "really" loves you, which is easy to stay confused about for years when you're only reading feelings instead of actions.

Lay the Right Foundation Before the Wedding

Whatever foundation you lay in courtship is the foundation your marriage will stand on. If two people build the relationship on premarital sex or ongoing dishonesty — lying to parents about where you are, breaking rules together — you have taught each other, in practice, that rules and integrity are negotiable. If both of you cheated God together on the way into the marriage, don't be shocked when he cheats on you once you're in it. Premarital counseling matters for the same reason: couples who go through it have measurably lower divorce rates, because it surfaces things love alone will never think to ask about.

Managing Your Emotions

Your biggest vulnerability as a woman tends to be your emotions, the way a man's tends to be his sexuality — and managing that vulnerability is learnable, not just a matter of willpower.

• Grow in knowledge. An object you know nothing about won't catch your attention; the moment you understand its worth, your emotional response to it changes. The same applies to people — understanding real relational qualities, rather than surface preferences, changes who you find yourself drawn to.
• Control your thoughts. James 1:13-14 — no one is tempted by God; each person is drawn away by their own desire. Whatever you've trained your mind to value — money, appearance, a particular "type" — is exactly what will keep pulling at your emotions, whether or not it reflects anything of actual substance. Feed your mind on what you actually want to become attracted to.

Begging for love is not love — it is the height of selfishness. No one ends a relationship in the heat of a single moment; by the time someone tells you it's over, they've usually already been thinking about it for a while. Manage your emotions, hold to real, measurable qualities, and don't build the most important decision of your life on a feeling that was never designed to be permanent.