There is one thing of most importance in a healthy marriage and that is friendship.

I recently had a conversation with a young single man contemplating how to pursue a healthy relationship with hopes for marriage. I told him foremost he should seek to be her friend and not just an acquaintance, but a best friend.

A true friend will make you feel comfortable with who you are right now. There is a quality of acceptance that is hard to describe, but easy to recognize when you experience it.

A true friend will offer empathy when you are facing a hard times. They will make you feel heard, noticed and cared for without trying to fix you. In his book, Instruments In The Redeemer’s Hands, Paul David Tripp shares an easy way to practice true empathy; Love, Know, Speak, Do.

Let’s talk about each of these more specifically:

1. Love. A person feels your love when you listen not only with your ears but with your heart. You let them talk without interrupting them and without planning ahead what you’re going to say in response. A person can tell when you are just trying to fix them. This isn’t empathy.
2. Know. Most often when someone is sharing what is weighing on their heart and mind, they won’t tell you everything at first. They are testing the waters to see if you’re safe. The best way to know them is to not assume you know what motivates their response to the situation. Ask more questions. A safe one we’ve found is simple, “Tell me more.” Then listen and keep asking.
3. Speak. Only after doing the first two steps are you somewhat ready to speak into their lives. If you have experience with what they’re facing, this is a good time to share it. If you know of resources that would help this is good too. Most of all share your heartfelt empathy as if this difficulty were happening to you.
4. Do. Now is when you’re ready to do something to help. Most of us are wired to skip to this step first, which cheats us in our friendships. We don’t take the time to care for them. We want only to fix the problem and move on to something more interesting to us.

We can’t emphasize enough the importance of cultivating a genuine friendship with your spouse. Marriages set on auto-pilot will eventually run out of gas and crash.

Friendship is the refueling of the plane to keep going the distance.

Finally, we would be remiss if we didn’t share several detriments to friendships forming in a marriage. Kind of like ignoring holes in your fuel tank. Here are three for starters…

Selfishness – You don’t really care about the other person, but only what they do for you or how they make you feel. Jesus demonstrated genuine love for us by laying down His life for us. This is servant leadership, the opposite of selfishnes.

Pride – You are your number one concern. As long as your spouse caters to your opinion of yourself all is good. You aren’t looking to grow or mature, because you see yourself as having already arrived. You are your own best friend.

Competition – A spouse who is always trying to out-do the other–whatever the accomplishment–will never feel you’ve got their back. In fact they won’t feel safe with you. The Bible says to “Rejoice with those who rejoice, and to weep with those who weep.” Jesus paused and wept with Mary over the death of her brother, even though He knew He was going to bring him back. Talk about One who is able to fix the problem we’re facing, yet He wept.

No couple does friendship in marriage perfectly, but a healthy marriage seeks their spouse’s opinion to learn more about themselves. We all have blind spots. This is why the Bible clearly commands us to take the log out of our own eye before going after the speck in theirs. But without friendship, there is no trust. And without trust the relationship will crash.

How can we regain trust that’s been broken?

When you realize you’ve sinned against your spouse–humbly repent. It is only by the grace of God at work in your heart that you will truly be able to repent. Without His grace, we tend to make excuses and look at our spouse’s faults as worse than our own. It is the grace of God that leads us to repentance. Don’t ignore the still small voice.

Marriage is hard work. To ignore cultivating a genuine friendship with your spouse is to miss out on one of God’s greatest blessings in this life. To lean in and pursue each other faithfully in all seasons is to receive the good design God had in mind all along for you.