1. Commitment

Wedding vows are not a declaration of present love but a mutually binding promise of future love. A wedding should not be primarily a celebration of how loving you feel now – that can safely be assumed. Rather, in a wedding you stand up before God, your family, and all the main institutions of society, and you promise to be loving, faithful, and true to the other person in the future, regardless of undulating internal feelings or external circumstances. – Tim Keller

It is an illusion that if we find our one true soul mate, everything wrong with us will be healed; but that makes the lover into God, and no human being can live up to that. – Tim Keller

2. Intimacy

Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.” – Genesis 2:18 (ESV)

“This at last is bone of my Bones and flesh of my flesh! She shall be called Woman because she was taken out of Man.” Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife and they shall become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed. – Genesis 2:23 (ESV)

It is not your love the sustains the marriage, but from now on, the marriage that sustains your love. – Bonhoeffer