On praying for a future spouse without turning prayer into a list of requirements.
I want to talk about praying for a future spouse. For the record, I have never really done it myself—not in the way people usually mean when they talk about a “spouse prayer.” I have always been somewhat skeptical of it because it so often becomes a prayer built around conditions. But I think the phrase itself tells us something important. There are two words in it:
spouse and prayer.
And both matter.
First, a Spouse Is Someone Other Than Me
A spouse is not me.
So perhaps praying for a future spouse should be, before anything else, a kind of intercessory prayer for another person—someone I may not even have met yet. I may have no idea who that person is today.
But I can still pray that they are living well with God.
That they are safe.
That even when life knocks them down, they find the strength to get back up.
That good people come into their life.
That they have ordinary, happy days.
That they are cared for.
That they are becoming whole.
Not:
Please let this person be tall enough.
Successful enough.
Funny enough.
Stable enough.
Exactly the kind of person I already have in mind.
But simply:
Wherever this person is, please take care of them.
There is something very different about praying for who I want them to be and praying for them. The first can easily become a list of specifications. The second asks me to love someone before I can receive anything from them.
Second, Prayer Is About God’s Will
The other word is prayer. And prayer, at least as I understand it, is not ultimately about persuading God to carry out my plans. It is about discovering His. So if I call something a “prayer for a spouse” while spending the entire time asking God to give me exactly what I want, I have to wonder how much of it is actually prayer.
There is a difference between bringing my desires honestly before God and asking Him to rubber-stamp a life I have already designed. Sometimes people ask:
But what if God gives me someone I really don’t like?
I have many thoughts about that question. Probably enough for another essay. So I will leave it there for now. The point is not that practical considerations do not matter.
Of course they do.
Marriage is real life.
Character matters. Faith matters. Compatibility matters.
The way two people communicate, handle money, approach family, and imagine their future together matters.
But if I am going to call what I am doing prayer, then at some point I also have to be willing to ask:
Not only:
God, will You give me what I want?
Prayer Is Not a Shopping List
So perhaps praying for a future spouse has two directions at once.
It is intercession for another person.
And it is surrender before God.
If all I want is a list of conditions—
the right job,
the right appearance,
the right personality,
the right family,
the right income—
then frankly, I might be better off spending that prayer time signing up for a dating app. At least then I would be honest about what I was doing.
But prayer asks something different of me. It asks whether I can care about this unknown person before they ever become mine. And whether I can hold my own expectations loosely enough to recognize God’s will when it does not arrive in the packaging I imagined.
A Love That Does Not Ask the Other Person to Fill Everything
I do not think the most beautiful relationship is one in which two people spend their lives trying to fill every empty place in each other.
No person can carry that weight.
What I hope for instead is a relationship in which two people continually pass along to one another the love they have first received from God. A relationship where I am not asking:
Can you be everything I lack?
but learning to say:
Can I let God’s love reach you through me?
And receiving that same love through the other person in return. To experience, again and again, the love of God through one another— I think that may be one of the most beautiful forms a relationship can take.
