The Secret To Stronger Relationships | Steven Furtick

Happiness isn’t about finding the right person—it’s about becoming the right person. If you meet the right person but haven’t worked on yourself, what do you think will happen? I’m not saying that if you’re not married, it’s because you’re not ready. That’s a flawed assumption.

All we need to do to challenge that idea is look at some married couples. Marriage doesn’t automatically mean readiness. I could share plenty of examples, starting with myself. What truly matters to God is that you surround yourself with the right people, but the only way to attract them is by becoming the right person in your heart. That’s the only thing you can control. You may not always have power over who enters your life, but you can control the kind of person you are.

We all have random childhood memories that somehow stick with us, even when we wish we could forget them to make room for more important things—like remembering our children’s names. One of mine is from sixth grade, during the Berkeley County writing test. I still remember the prompt almost word for word:

“Imagine you are on an adventure with your friends, and during this journey, you discover a valuable and unusual object. Describe the object.”

A few weeks later, our teacher returned with our graded tests and made an unexpected announcement:

“In all my years of teaching, I’ve never seen this happen before, but every single one of you failed the test.”

We laughed, thinking it was a joke. She continued:

“You wrote beautiful essays, filled with vivid details about your journey with your friends. But that wasn’t the assignment. The prompt wasn’t to describe the journey—it was to describe the object.”

Many of us wrote about exploring the woods, sailing across the sea, or even flying through space. But none of us described the object.

This perfectly illustrates a common misunderstanding about love and relationships. The goal of love isn’t for someone else to complete you. Sorry, Renee Zellweger—your famous line in Jerry Maguire was touching, but it wasn’t true. No one can complete you.

We often teach relationships as if life hasn’t truly begun until marriage. But if that were true, how could we worship Jesus? He remained single His entire life. I’m not saying everyone has to stay single like Jesus—I’d be a hypocrite to suggest that. But if Paul had waited for someone to “complete” him, we wouldn’t have 23% of the New Testament.

We’ve been teaching this all wrong.

In Genesis, when God speaks about marriage, He says:

“A man shall leave his father and mother and be united with his wife, and the two will become one.”

Notice what He doesn’t say. He doesn’t say, “The halves will become whole.” Yet, that’s often how we treat relationships. The truth is, if you enter a marriage as half a person, two halves won’t make a whole—they’ll make a mess.

The enemy wants nothing more than to divide relationships. Every argument over the dishes, every misunderstanding—the devil’s agenda is destruction, and his strategy is division. He comes to steal, kill, and destroy. This is his tactic.

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