June is a popular month in the United States for getting married. Yet for many people here and around the globe, the longing for companionship remains on the wish list of unfulfilled desires.
Sometimes the yearning focuses on forming a family. At other times it may be about simply finding a right companion, as in the biblical story of Adam partnering with Eve. As Genesis 2:18 states, “The Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him.”
While a good marriage is a wonderful way to experience companionship, it is one of many ways that this need can be met. We don’t have to feel anxious if we are not coupled up in this way or ever feel incomplete.
Why? Because the spiritual fact is that each of us is always united to the source of all love, divine Love, as God’s spiritual image or idea. Divine Love, or Principle, has an inseparable, indestructible relationship with God’s beloved spiritual expression, man, which is the generic term for all of us in our true spiritual nature. Because we are God’s ideas, each of us inherently has all that we need in our all-loving God’s continuous, freely given goodness.
As divine Love’s spiritual offspring, each of us is created to experience and express God’s lovingkindness. By understanding that our primary relationship is with infinite Love, we can feel God’s love in our lives and be happy, good, and satisfied. The true sense of divine Love assures us that God desires only the best for each of us. So, no matter what our present marital situation, we can prove the unbroken harmony of God’s love and be blessed.
Our eternal oneness with divine Love inspires the idea of “spiritual wedlock,” mentioned in “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures” by Mary Baker Eddy, who discovered Christian Science. In a paragraph related to that term, she explains that divine Love is “wedded to its own spiritual idea” (p. 575). This points to the fact that we are already, in the highest sense, wedded to God, inseparably united to divine Principle.
Therefore, no one can be deprived of comfort, because divine Love is infinitely loving. With one God, one Love, all humanity has the love of Love, and when we recognize that this is our reality, we can see this substantiated in right companionship in our everyday life.
As an example, after a failed marriage, I was single for 17 years. One day I mentioned my desire for companionship to fellow coworkers, and one replied that the chance of my remarrying was as remote as a bomb falling on our small mountain town. While my colleagues laughed good-naturedly, that comment stung.
At home, desiring to find lasting peace about this situation, I doubled down on my prayers. As Science and Health says, “Desire is prayer; and no loss can occur from trusting God with our desires, that they may be moulded and exalted before they take form in words and in deeds” (p. 1).
With this deeper prayer, I gained the insight that I didn’t have to be humanly wed or even find a special friend to be satisfied, because I was forever undivorced from God and fully loved by divine Love. With fresh confidence and a higher hope, I stopped trying to initiate my own path and opened up to being a willing recipient of divine Love’s gentle guidance. I abandoned dating websites, asked friends to stop fixing me up with prospective partners, and decided to accept only dates that I felt divinely inspired to accept.
The next day, I was invited to an art show, and when I got there, a man I’d met years before in a dance class turned to me and said, “Where have you been for the last three years?” We struck up a conversation that brought out the fact that we had many commonalities. This man became my husband. And now nearly two decades later, we’re still happily married and best friends.
God says in the Bible, “I will betroth thee unto me for ever” (Hosea 2:19). We can always trust our deepest desires to all-embracing Love, in whom we have eternal wedded bliss.
