This week I’m turning to marriage, and I want to start somewhere practical instead of somewhere lofty. For a long time I thought a good marriage was just two people getting good at being married to each other. Communicating better. Fighting less. Showing up more.

All of that matters, but Ecclesiastes puts something next to it that I kept skipping past: “two are better than one… a threefold cord is not quickly broken” (Ecclesiastes 4:9, 12). Two are strong. Three are stronger. And in a marriage, the third strand isn’t a technique. It’s God, actually brought in, not just assumed to be somewhere in the background.

So here’s what I’m doing today. At some point, with my wife, I’m going to say it out loud instead of just thinking it: let’s pray about this one together. Not a grace before dinner on autopilot. One specific thing, named honestly, brought to God by both of us at the same time, in the same room.

I don’t know yet if that becomes a habit or just today’s experiment. But I noticed how rarely I actually do it, and that felt like the place to start a month about building a marriage that can hold weight.

Today’s Bible Study

Marriage shows up before anything else does. Before the fall, before a single commandment is given, God says something simple about Adam and Eve: “a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh” (Genesis 2:24). Whatever else marriage carries now, raising kids, keeping a household running, it started as something older and simpler than all of that. It’s not an add-on to the family. It’s the ground the rest of it gets built on.

Recommended Reading

If today’s verse got you thinking, Fulton Sheen’s Three to Get Married is the book I’d actually hand you. It’s the same threefold cord idea worked out in full, the case for why a marriage with only two people in it eventually runs out of what it needs.