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LEADERSHIP Masterworks

How to Better Love Your Wife

Love Your Wife by Serving Someone Together

Sometimes one of the best ways to grow closer is to turn outward together.

How to Better Love Your Wife Series · Episode 6 of many!

Royce White September 9, 2026 5-minute read

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Marriage can become surprisingly inward-looking.

There are bills to pay, schedules to coordinate, children to raise, groceries to buy, things around the house that need fixing, conversations that need to happen, and a thousand other responsibilities competing for your attention. Even when a husband and wife genuinely love one another, much of married life can become focused on managing married life.

So occasionally, turn outward.

Find someone the two of you can serve—together.

Visit someone in a nursing home. Take a meal to a widow. Help an elderly neighbor with something around the house. Serve at a ministry. Invite someone lonely to dinner. Find a family that is struggling and quietly meet a need.

It doesn’t have to be elaborate. It doesn’t have to consume an entire weekend. And please don’t turn this into one more enormous project that exhausts your wife in the name of loving her.

The point is simply to step outside yourselves and love somebody else side by side.

Serving Together Changes Where You’re Looking

There is something wonderfully healthy about a husband and wife temporarily taking their eyes off themselves.

When we’re discouraged, frustrated, or preoccupied with our own problems, our world can become very small. We think about what I need, what I’m feeling, what isn’t going my way, or what you aren’t doing for me.

Serving someone else interrupts that cycle.

Suddenly there is a widow sitting across from you who hasn’t had a visitor all week. There is an elderly man who needs someone to listen to the story you’ve already heard three times. There is a struggling family for whom the meal you’re delivering means considerably more than food.

Your problems may still be waiting when you get home. Serving doesn’t magically erase them.

But something has changed.

You have stopped staring at yourselves.

Paul writes, “Do nothing out of selfish ambition or empty pride, but in humility consider others more important than yourselves. Each of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others” (Philippians 2:3–4, BSB).

That’s not merely good marriage advice.

That’s Christianity.

You Get to See Something Beautiful in Each Other

There is another benefit that we husbands can easily miss.

When you serve alongside your wife, you get to watch her love people.

You may see tenderness you don’t normally see at home. You may watch her notice someone everyone else overlooked. You may hear the compassion in her voice as she talks with someone who is hurting. You may discover that she remembers the little things that make another person feel important.

And she gets to watch you.

Your wife gets to see that the man who tells her he loves Christ actually cares about the people Christ loves.

That matters.

We sometimes think intimacy grows primarily by looking deeply at each other. Certainly it does. But there is another kind of intimacy that grows when two people stand shoulder to shoulder, looking in the same direction.

Take the Kids

And sometimes, take the whole family.

Your children need to see that Christianity is not merely something your family talks about, studies, or attends on Sunday.

They need to watch Mom and Dad live it.

This may be especially important for families in vocational ministry. A pastor’s children can easily begin to associate ministry with Dad’s job—the thing that takes him away at night, makes the phone ring during dinner, and causes people to need him constantly.

Let them see something different.

Let them see Mom and Dad serving someone simply because they love Jesus and love people.

No paycheck. No platform. No church program requiring it.

Just love.

James describes pure and undefiled religion as including the care of “orphans and widows in their distress” (James 1:27, BSB). There are people all around us whom the world easily overlooks.

Go notice one of them.

Together.

Maybe Once a Month

You don’t need to reorganize your entire life around this.

Start with once a month.

Put something on the calendar that gets the two of you—or your family—outside yourselves and into somebody else’s life.

And husbands, don’t miss the smaller opportunities while you’re planning the bigger ones.

Bring your wife a card for absolutely no reason. Better yet, make one. Write three sentences telling her why you love her and hide it somewhere she’ll find it after you’ve left for work.

Call her in the middle of the day for no reason other than to say, “I love you.”

Love doesn’t always need a program.

Sometimes it just needs intentionality.

And whether you’re sitting beside your wife visiting a lonely widow or leaving a handwritten note where she’ll discover it later, the principle is the same:

Get outside yourself.

Love radically today.

Die to self. Live for others.

And let your wife see Jesus in you.

Much love and blessings In Christ alone,

Royce

Scripture referenced: Philippians 2:3–4; James 1:27

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