Real Love Is The Difference Between A Contract And A Covenant

Photo by Theodor Vasile on Unsplash

Have you ever noticed that whenever someone gets married, they typically end up saying a lot of unconditional words to one another in front of a lot of people?

There’s a moment that happens at most weddings in the western world where the two people getting married either read or recite what we call vows to each other.

Sometimes people will write their own vows. That’s what my wife and I did. But most people will end up quoting some version of the traditional vow that goes like this:

In the name of God, I, ______, take you, ______, to be my (husband/wife), to have and to hold from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, until we are parted by death. This is my solemn vow.

Sounds great. But here’s the issue. These words are meant to be unconditional. Said another way, covenantal. This isn’t contract language.

Many people looking to get married ask, “How do you know what real love is?” I typically respond back saying: real love is the willingness to align your actions with your words.

Contract vs. covenant

There are two ways to look at a relationship. Option A is “what I get from this person?” Option B is “what can I give to this person?”

Option A is a contract. Option B is a covenant.

Option A is infused with thoughts and questions that are self-focused. The person who is in a contract relationship is constantly qualifying their behavior and explaining their point of view. I hear things like this all the time:

“I'll be nice if you are nice.”

“She didn’t hold up her side of the bargain, so I don’t need to hold up mine.”

“I didn’t expect for this (random circumstance) to happen and I didn’t sign up for that.”

When you are in a contract relationship, you are effectually saying, “I’ll love you to the degree that I believe you deserve to be loved.” It means that your commitment to love your partner is conditional upon a made-up set of parameters and metrics, that you alone are the sole-determiner of.

This is not real love.

When you are in a contract relationship, you tend to give or show love when it is easy or convenient for you. You begin to selectively distribute your affection based on your circumstance, or worse, your feelings.

If you notice, the traditional vows said at many weddings have nothing to say about your feelings. It would be pretty odd to stand before your partner and say, “In the name of God, I, ______, take you, ______, to be my (husband/wife), to have and to hold from this day forward, when I feel like it.”

When I first got married, I didn’t always understand the difference between a contract and a covenant love. I knew I had signed on for a covenant, but I also held pretty high standards, and if I didn’t feel like my wife was meeting my expectations, I would start to get frustrated or nit-picky. Even though we were early into marriage, I could tell that we couldn’t build a good relationship if I kept heading in that direction.

The bottom line is — a contract love is conditional. It’s something that lacks the foundational aspects of commitment because there is always a small voice in the back of the mind that says, “If you don’t measure up, he’s gone.”

Real Love

No one hopes and dreams of being in a contract relationship. But more people find themselves there than they’d care to admit because real love, covenant love, is hard work.

It also goes against everything society and your own selfish desires seem to tell you.

Real love is not comparative. It doesn’t use a ruler to constantly measure what the other person is giving you or what you are giving them in return.

It doesn’t keep a list of right or wrongs. In fact, it rarely keeps lists at all because real love is in it for the long-haul, and it knows that over-time, most things end up mostly balancing out.

Real love is not out to save its own skin. It doesn’t try to win at all costs. It isn’t egotistical; it doesn’t love it’s name up in lights.

Real love epitomizes the words in the traditional vow. It loves no matter what. A covenant relationship is one that is strong enough to endure times of good and bad, times of sickness and times of health, times of abundance and times of scarcity. It is steadfast, sturdy, rooted in something far deeper than a circumstance or a feeling.

A covenant relationship offers love no matter what the other person does because that person has dignity, worth, and you have committed your entire being to give that person your love.

It’s being willing to embrace your mistakes, say sorry, and then actually change your behavior. Covenant love is the willingness to look beyond something that might offend you, to bear your partner’s burdens, and to believe for the best in that person.

The longer I’ve been married, the more I’ve realized that letting the small things go is a crucial skill for practicing covenant love. My wife does this well. There are a handful of small quirks that I have yet to shake that drive her crazy. I constantly fidget with my wedding ring, I clean up her water glass basically before she is finished drinking, and I pick weeds in our garden and leave them on the stone pavers rather than throwing them out in a yard waste bag.

On a more serious note, I can be totally inflexible when my pre-determined plan is messed up, I can talk way too much and listen far too little, and I can easily jump into coaching mode rather than teammate and life partner.

But I’m grateful that my wife works hard to not just push me away when I’m doing yet another thing that annoys her. She has committed to real love, so she works to look past the frustration and chooses to extend love even when I don’t deserve it.

Real love is epitomized by the phrase “no matter what.”

How do you know?

Real love is being willing to put someone else’s life above your own, in the big and the little ways.

That doesn’t mean that you can’t have an opinion or that your hopes and dreams don’t matter. It simply means that the greatest expression of love that we can ever give to another person is to be willing to lay aside our good desires in favor of their good desires. That is what it means to be selfless.

You know you are in a covenant relationship when you stay even though it’s not easy. When a complication comes up and you don’t take the lazy way out. When you choose to move on from a hurt or a wound and you forgive, then forget.

It doesn’t mean there aren’t ever consequences. It doesn’t mean that hard circumstances won’t arise. It doesn’t even mean that you can guarantee that your partner will choose the same covenantal love that you show to them.

In the end, you can’t fully control the outcome of a relationship, but you can control what you contribute. If you want to experience real love, you have to be willing to give it, first.

So how do you know if you have real love? To me, the best and most simple way to put it is.

Real love doesn’t mean you think less of yourself, but that you think of yourself less.

You have real love, a covenant relationship, when you are able to think about your partner more than you think about yourself without self-depreciating your inherent value and worthiness.

You aren’t sacrificing your life completely on the altar of love. Real love allows you to leverage all that you are for loving your partner so that they can thrive and live their best life.