Healthy, lasting love is not the couple who never seems to struggle. According to BJ Thompson, it is two people who decided on commitment before the feeling arrived and who keep choosing it when the feeling leaves. He also argues that most people learn this by watching it up close, and that many in the Black church have had too few chances to watch. That second point explains why the first one is so hard to believe.
Thompson, married fifteen years and director of Build a Better Us, an organization that works with singles and couples, does not describe marriage from a distance. He openly says his own first five years were hard, an impossible-feeling fight against selfishness and lack of information that began after the wedding.
What picture of love did people actually inherit?
The problem begins with a specific passage. Paul ties marriage to the relationship between Christ and his people, and then says, “This is a great mystery: but I speak concerning Christ and the church” (Ephesians 5:32). Lisa Fields observed that many people have not seen enough healthy marriages to have any point of reference for that comparison. The text assumes a picture the reader may not have.
Thompson starts from a claim about where love is first learned. People first experience love inside a family, he says, not inside a romance. Marriage and family are, in his words, “one of the first institutions that we see God using to communicate to the world his presence and how he’s going to ultimately redeem it.” If that is true, then a person’s sense of God’s faithfulness is shaped partly by whether anyone around them kept a promise to anyone else.
This needs care, because it can slide into a stereotype. Fields spoke of “a lot of broken families” in Black communities, and Thompson agreed. Neither claimed that every Black Christian grew up without a model. Many grew up beside parents or grandparents married for decades, in churches full of long marriages. The more exact claim is about a gap: not enough people have had close, honest access to a marriage that works, and the reasons for that gap are not random.
Symptoms and systems
Thompson refuses to talk about rebuilding families while skipping the history. He draws a line between two words. “Symptomatic would be single parent homes,” he says, and he adds mass incarceration and children cycling through foster care. The other word carries the weight: “systematic is, as a society, we created those things.”
He names what he means. Slavery treated people as property for centuries. Laws later produced what he calls disproportionate mass incarceration for people of color, which also removes many Black men from the pool of potential husbands. Thompson points to the Moynihan Report, a federal report on the Black family, which he reads as recognizing that the nation had broken Black families apart and recommending that the family be restored. His use of it is clear: the damage had causes, and the causes were public.
Why does a marriage conversation need this? If churches push people toward the altar while avoiding the history, they treat symptoms as character flaws. “Until you deal with what’s behind you, you can’t actually move forward in a healthy way,” Thompson says. The trauma people carry can make them hesitant to pursue marriage at all, especially men who never had someone show them what it looks like.
The obvious objection is that this sounds like an excuse. If the system broke families, why should any one person be responsible for building one? Thompson’s position does not work that way. He asks people to name the weight honestly so that the work of building can be real rather than performed. A church that only names the history leaves people with no path. A church that only preaches marriage leaves them ashamed of struggling. He wants both.
Why feeling cannot carry the weight
Asked whether love is enough to keep a marriage together, Thompson said no. Mature love can, and commitment is what makes love mature. “You have to be committed first before you feel a feeling of love,” he says. The order is the point.
His reason is plain and a little uncomfortable. “The problem with what I feel is what I feel changes from day to day, it changes from moment to moment,” Thompson says. Some days he is taken with his wife. Other days, he admits, he does not like her and does not want to be around her. If he followed the feeling, it would pull him away and shrink the intimacy between them.
Then he makes a claim that runs against the way romance is usually sold. Many people treat commitment as the response to love: you fall in love, so you commit. Thompson reverses it, saying that “the commitment dictates to intimacy and the intimacy of what we call love.” Closeness grows in the soil of commitment. Love that is always one bad week from leaving has no time to deepen.
He uses his children to explain it. They are funny and wonderful, and sometimes they break things and cause him grief. What lets him endure the hard days is that he is committed to them and they are not going anywhere. In marriage, the commitment is chosen. Two adults voluntarily make the promise a parent already lives under.
Fields adds a distinction of her own: “unconditional love is on the other side of forgiveness and reconciliation.” Until a couple has passed through a real offense and real repair, their love is still conditional. Read alongside Thompson, this explains why commitment comes first. Without it, no one stays long enough to reach the other side of a wrong.
What the money fight is really about
Couples often hear that finances are the leading reason marriages end. Thompson disagrees. “I think it’s pride that breaks up couples,” he says. Money is the symptom, and the root is trust. When a spouse is not sure the other person is committed, every financial strain carries a second question underneath it: are you going to stay?
He goes further and makes it a question about God. Do I believe God wants us married? Do I believe he is good and will help us endure this? Thompson’s reading of covenant draws on John Piper’s book This Momentary Marriage, and he states it this way: “it’s you and I plus the Lord in this marriage.” A dating relationship involves two people. A covenant, as Thompson describes it, involves three, and the third party is the one who makes endurance more than willpower.
That theology shapes his advice to someone already looking for the exit, wondering how much is enough to justify leaving. Thompson does not answer with a list of grounds. He turns the person’s attention inward: deal with your own immaturity, stop cataloguing your spouse’s failings, grow with the Lord in this season, and bring that growth back to the marriage. When neither spouse changes, he says, the marriage suffers.
Does commitment mean staying no matter what?
This is the strongest objection to Thompson’s case, and it deserves a direct answer. A message that says commitment outranks feeling can be heard as permission to trap someone, as if a person should stay quiet and endure whatever happens at home.
That is not what Thompson described, and it should not be read into him. His examples concern the ordinary swings of affection, selfishness, money stress and the urge to leave when marriage gets tiring. He was not addressing abuse, and nothing he said asks anyone to remain in danger. Covenant commitment is a promise to love another person, and abuse breaks that promise. A person who is being harmed should not be told to fix themselves first. If you are in that situation, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is available at 1-800-799-7233, and reaching out for safety is not a failure of faith.
For the far more common situation, where nothing is wrong except that love has become work, Thompson’s point holds. The feeling will come and go. A marriage built to last only while it runs high will not last.
Seeing it up close
If you cannot believe in what you have never seen, then the fix is not another sermon about marriage. Thompson recalls a line from a mentor: “You’ll only become what you behold.” Intellectual understanding of a relationship is not enough, he says. People imprint on what they have access to.
Social media seems to offer that access constantly. When the conversation turned to couples online, Thompson interrupted: “Not access, Lisa.” Feeds show hand-holding and vacations. They do not show a miscarriage, an infidelity crisis, or what Thompson calls the tunnel of chaos, the stretch where a couple has to humble themselves, talk it through and say they are sorry. He grants that seeing love online can stir a real desire for it. The trouble is that the picture is missing exactly the parts that teach the most.
So Build a Better Us tries to create real access through small groups, intimate dinners and couples who open their homes. “You want people who can model out both what’s ugly and pretty so that you can get a real good understanding of what that looks like,” Thompson says. This is where the earlier history becomes concrete. If many young adults lacked models, then the married couples in a congregation hold something the church needs, and keeping it private withholds it.
The habit that gets in the way is familiar: what happens in my house stays in my house. Thompson does not answer by telling everyone everything. He urges couples to find one or two others they trust enough to stop projecting an image. Projection, he says, means wanting to be perceived only the way you want to be known. Honest community lets a couple admit they are broken and need people they can trust, while also having something to give.
Where covenant love is practiced first
Thompson argues that the practice of covenant love starts long before marriage, and this matters most for anyone who never saw it modeled. “How we practice is how we play,” he says. Unresolved conflict with a roommate or friend does not disappear at the wedding. It comes along. He connects this to the parable of the talents in Matthew 25:14-30, where faithfulness with a smaller trust shows whether a larger one can be handled. Jesus states the principle elsewhere: “He that is faithful in that which is least is faithful also in much” (Luke 16:10).
Thompson also says the church has trained people poorly for this. In his words, “we’ve only taught one gear of love,” and that gear is romantic. He admits he once followed the Billy Graham rule so strictly that he did not know how to be around a woman except as a husband. Against that, he points to Paul’s instruction to Timothy: “Rebuke not an elder, but intreat him as a father; and the younger men as brethren; The elder women as mothers; the younger as sisters, with all purity” (1 Timothy 5:1-2). The text assumes men and women in the church relate as family, with purity, rather than as strangers held apart by fear. Thompson keeps appropriate boundaries, and he names his own covenant to the women he treats as sisters. What he rejects is the panic.
The cost of that panic is real. “We starve one another of healthy affirmation,” Thompson says. People who are starved, like someone breaking a long fast, can take the first compliment as far more than it is, and that leaves them open to predators and to relationships they never should have entered.
None of this makes single people a lesser class. Thompson tells them they are already enough, pointing to Jesus’ words to disciples excited about their success: “rejoice not, that the spirits are subject unto you; but rather rejoice, because your names are written in heaven” (Luke 10:20). Marriage and singleness are different kinds of sanctification, he says, yet the goal is shared. “The punchline is, do you look more like Jesus?” For someone who grew up without a model of marriage, the single years are where the missing practice gets built: resolving conflict with friends, honoring brothers and sisters without fear, keeping promises when they cost something.
Fields tied all of this to defending the faith. If you cannot love your friends or your family, she said, you may need to stop rehearsing the right arguments and “go actually practice it, because that’s gonna be a better defense for the Christian faith.” That is the weight of Thompson’s case. In communities where many never saw covenant love up close, every couple who stays honestly and every friendship that holds through repair supplies the missing reference point. The mystery in Ephesians becomes legible when someone in the room has lived it.
