How to show your spouse how extraordinarily valuable they are …

Most married people would probably say their spouse is one of the most valuable people in their life. Ecclesiastes invites them to consider something much greater. It gives husbands and wives a perspective that can radically change how they see the familiar person with whom they share their everyday lives.

Ecclesiastes 9:9 says, “Live happily with the woman you love through all the meaningless days of life that God has given you under the sun. The wife God gives you is your reward for all your earthly toil.”

That is an extraordinary description of a wife. In the midst of a book that repeatedly faces the brevity and difficulty of earthly life, Solomon tells a man to enjoy life with the woman he loves and describes her as his God-given reward. Christians also generally understand that married people are to love their spouses second only to God. Taken seriously, that gives a husband or wife tremendous value. The person who has become wonderfully familiar through years of marriage is God’s greatest earthly reward to that spouse and is to be loved second only to Him.

How can someone express that kind of value?

1. Make your spouse the first person you want to share life with. When something wonderful happens, make your spouse the first person you want to tell. When something hurts, turn toward them. When you discover something fascinating, want to share it with them. When there is an experience to enjoy, want them there. Your choices can repeatedly tell your spouse, “Of everyone God has placed in my life, you are the person with whom I most want to experience my life.”

2. Give your spouse things that are genuinely precious to you. Give some of the time you could have spent elsewhere, the opportunity you wanted for yourself, the scarce resource, the treasured possession, or the experience you could have enjoyed personally. Sometimes love deliberately chooses, “I want you to have this more than I want to have it myself.” Giving carries special meaning when your spouse knows that what you gave actually cost you something you valued.

3. Spend yourself for your spouse’s good. Get up at 2:00 a.m. when your spouse is sick. Make the three-hour drive when they need help. Sit beside them through the frightening appointment. Work extra to provide something genuinely important to them, carry more than your normal share when they are exhausted, and surrender convenience when their welfare requires it. Research on couples has found that perceived sacrifice can produce gratitude and respect because the recipient recognizes that a partner willingly accepted a personal cost for their good. Your actions can say, “Your well-being is valuable enough to me that I will sometimes pay a price for it.”

4. Know what your spouse treasures and help them have more of it. Learn what gives your spouse deep joy instead of assuming that what delights you will delight them. If your wife has dreamed for fifteen years of seeing a particular place, work toward taking her there. If your husband has always wanted to learn something, make room in the budget and schedule for him to pursue it. Paying attention to what your spouse loves and using some of your own life to help make it possible says, “Your happiness is sufficiently valuable to me that I care about what produces it.”

5. Invest substantially in the person your spouse longs to become. Know your spouse’s aspirations, abilities, unrealized dreams, and God-given potential, and put tangible resources behind them. Buy the equipment, take over responsibilities so they can study, encourage the attempt when they doubt themselves, create opportunities when you can, and recognize their progress. Relationship researchers call this partner affirmation: spouses can help one another move toward the person each genuinely aspires to become. Such investment tells your spouse, “I value you enough to invest in what you can become, even when the immediate benefit is yours rather than mine.”

6. Make your spouse’s deepest joys personally significant to you. When something wonderful happens to your spouse, enter into their happiness. Celebrate the promotion, make the achievement special, take the photograph, and let the children know why their mother or father deserves to be honored. If your spouse worked toward something for years, respond in a way that recognizes what the accomplishment means to them. Let your response communicate, “What happens to you is significant to me because you are significant to me.”

7. Make your spouse’s deepest pain personally significant too. When your spouse is grieving, frightened, humiliated, overwhelmed, or devastated, allow their suffering to affect how you use your own life. Cancel something when appropriate, sit through the night, handle what they cannot handle, remember the difficult anniversary months later, and keep asking how they are doing after everyone else has stopped asking. When someone is extraordinarily valuable to you, their suffering deserves more than acknowledgment from a comfortable distance.

8. Use your personal strengths generously for your spouse’s benefit. Whatever God has placed in you in unusual measure — knowledge, skill, money, influence, strength, creativity, organization, mechanical ability, professional expertise, useful relationships, etc. — make sure your spouse benefits richly from it. An accountant should not give strangers his finest financial thinking while leaving his wife financially confused, and a highly organized wife should not spend all her organizational ability helping everyone except her husband. Let your strengths tell your spouse, “Of all the people who benefit from what God has put in me, I want you to benefit richly.”

9. Protect what is precious to your spouse because it is precious to them. Handle cherished possessions carefully, protect time they have reserved for something important, remember the people they love, and preserve sentimental objects that may mean little to you but a great deal to them. Something does not have to carry the same value for you before you treat it carefully. Your care can communicate, “I care about this because I care so deeply about you.”

10. Create things for your spouse that could only have been created for them. Write something filled with memories nobody else shares with you. Build something specifically for them, assemble photographs from the life you have built together, re-create your first date twenty-five years later, restore something they treasure, or plan an experience around something they mentioned years ago. A deeply personal expression carries value because the knowledge, memory, thought, effort, and intentionality behind it could not simply be transferred to someone else.

11. Honor your spouse in front of people whose opinions are important to them. Tell your children what you admire about their mother or father. At an anniversary dinner, tell the family what your spouse has meant through the years. When friends praise an accomplishment, tell them something about the sacrifice behind it that they may never have seen. Protect your spouse’s private weaknesses rather than using them to entertain other people. Let the way you speak about your spouse publicly reveal how extraordinarily valuable that person is to you.

12. Sometimes do something so substantial that there can be no question what your spouse is worth to you. Save for two years for the trip. Fly across the country to be present for an important event. Spend months secretly restoring something your spouse treasures. Give significant time away from something personally important when your spouse truly needs you. Plan an anniversary experience that requires months of preparation. Extraordinary value should occasionally produce an extraordinary expression of value — something large enough to make the depth of that value unmistakable.

Perhaps the simplest expression may also be one of the most important. Tell your spouse plainly how greatly you value them, and then live in a way that gives those words credibility: “Of everything God has given me in this earthly life, I treasure you most. I want the way I use my time, strength, money, abilities, opportunities, and remaining years to show you that.” Then give those words a history of evidence.

There will eventually be a last opportunity to make a sacrifice for a spouse, celebrate an accomplishment, fulfill a dream, create a memory, or simply share another ordinary day together. No husband or wife knows which opportunity will be the last. A person God has given such extraordinary earthly value is worth treasuring while there is still time for them to experience it.

Scotty