While listening to a Barbara Streisand CD recently, her duet with Neil Diamond, “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers,” began to play. You remember the song. The wife laments that her husband no longer brings her flowers or sings her love songs. The husband says she no longer talks to him when he arrives home from work.
Here is a couple in the classic throes of disillusionment. The romance stage of their relationship has faded with time. The niceties of flowers, love songs and intimate conversations between them have long since disappeared. They’ve been replaced with an unwillingness to sacrifice their individual pride to bridge the gap between them. 
All marriages reach the stage of their relationship when the day-to-day challenges of raising a family, working two jobs to pay for a mortgage or saving for the future takes priority over their relationship. Romance is gone and now comes the difficult task of making the relationship work. It’s not so easy anymore especially in a culture that promotes the idea that easy is better.
What makes this song particularly poignant is that rather than making the demanding effort it takes to salvage the relationship, the husband considers taking the easy way out as he laments, “ ... so you think I could learn how to tell you goodbye.” The flame has died and so, too, the passion to reignite it.
While society will tell us the only way to reignite that flame is with flowers, chocolates, or expensive candlelight dinners or trips to romantic destinations, committed lovers know that it takes sacrificial love—making daily choices for the good of the other and the good of the relationship.
We are in the season of Lent, a time when the Church calls us to forsake the self-centered habits and behaviors that prevent us from loving others and God more fully. It is a perfect time for couples to practice sacrificial love for each other.
What does that look like? I think of my 100-year-old father-in-law who has had to brush aside some of his own health concerns and lovingly tend to his wife of 77 years in a totally selfless manner. Because of Mom’s limited mobility, Dad does more of the chores around their apartment and gets up several times during the night to assist her.
I think of our friend Frank who lovingly supports and shares with Margie in the care of her elderly mom who lives with them. Doing so means sacrificing their privacy and the freedom and independence to come and go as they please. Yet, they embrace this as an opportunity to rely on one another and deepen the commitment they made to each other in their wedding vows.
Both of these couples are an example of a love that never gives up—a love that has grown and matured because of the presence of Christ in their sacrament. On their wedding day, both couples invited God into their relationship. They took to heart the commitment that Christ made to them—to stand beside them through the good times and the bad, just as they made the same commitment to each other.
Their sacrifices and the sacrifices many ordinary couples make every day to live and love for the good of their spouse have led them to find greater joy in their relationship and a deeper connection to one another. Isn’t that what Jesus Christ did on the Cross? He sacrificed his life so that each of us could have new life with Him in the Resurrection.
These couples and many more like them remember something that Streisand and Diamond’s couple seem to have forgotten—that when the flowers stop coming and the love songs are silenced, it is relying on the presence of Christ in their union that gives them the strength to forgive one another, to make sacrifices for and recommit to one another and, in doing so, make their marriage flourish.
By Mary-Jo McLaughlin