Friendship is the well of marriage.  You drink from it when times are hard and celebrate from it when times are great.   If you have a deep emotional connection that is created through friendship you can make it through anything.  Always keep friendship alive with shared experiences together.

“It is when we are doing things together that friendship springs up — painting, sailing ships, praying, philosophizing, and fighting shoulder to shoulder. Friends look in the same direction.” C.S. Lewis

Marriage without friendship won’t work in our hectic culture.  Friendship has to be nourished and nurtured regularly or it faces the danger of becoming two opposite lives that never connect. Couples that don’t develop and nurture their friendship often drift apart.

A weakened friendship can create an opening for marital infidelity.  If a couple drifts apart and fails to nurture the friendship it can lead a spouse to seek intimacy in other places. You have to share your hopes, dreams, successes and struggles with your spouse, if you don’t you are vulnerable to sharing them with someone else of the opposite sex.  When couples let their friendship take a back seat, friendships outside the marriage can result in emotional, and even physical, adultery. Sometimes these kinds of friendships outside the marriage are obviously easier. The problem is we are comparing a relationship outside the marriage that has the luxury of no responsibility and is hidden in the dark to all the struggles of cleaning toilets, paying bills and raising kids together, that happens in a real marriage.  It is easy to see that deep emotional intimacy between a spouse and another of the opposite sex wrong, however, if you’re investing emotional capital in a same-sex relationship at the peril of the marriage, then that is also dangerous.

In marriage the question is am I investing more time and emotional energy into my spouse than I am in a friend or child? Or, where is it that I’m investing most of my times and emotional energy?

A struggling friendship in marriage can be restored with intentional time together, sacrifice, perseverance, and especially prayer. A good first step is to find activities that you like to do together – and then make the time do it. Learn to make the priority of regular shared experiences that nurture friendship.