Worshipping in Your Relationship

Love doesn’t begin with worship. It becomes it.

If the word worship makes you a little uncomfortable, congratulations. You’re almost certainly a psychologically healthy human being.

Most people hear the word and immediately imagine one of three things:

1. Someone wearing flowing robes while a choir sings in the background.
2. A hopelessly codependent relationship where one person loses themselves trying to please the other.
3. Or—if you’ve spent much time on my website—you’ve probably assumed this article is somehow going to end with oral sex. To be fair, that has happened before.

But not today. Today we’re talking about something much more radical.

Ordinary Tuesday afternoons. Because I’ve become convinced that the happiest couples I’ve ever known weren’t simply in love. They worshipped one another. Not perfectly. Not constantly. Not because either of them was flawless. But because somewhere along the way they stopped merely loving each other and started treating one another as precious. That’s an entirely different thing.

Worship Is Not Idolatry

Let’s clear up one important misunderstanding before you get a bug up your ass and send me a strongly worded email. When I say worship, I’m not talking about pretending your husband never leaves wet towels on the bathroom floor, or that your wife has never become irrationally angry because you loaded the dishwasher incorrectly.

That’s not worship. That’s selective blindness. And selective blindness usually lasts until the first major argument.

Real worship doesn’t require believing someone is perfect. It requires believing they are precious. Those are not the same thing. Perfect people don’t exist. Precious people do.

Your partner doesn’t become sacred because they never disappoint you. They become sacred because, of all the billions of people on this planet, this is the person whose heart has been entrusted to your care. That’s a breathtaking responsibility. And an even greater privilege.

Extraordinary Love Doesn’t Happen All at Once

Nobody meets someone at Starbucks and thinks, “I’d like a grande latte…and I shall now worship you forever.”

That’s not romance. That’s caffeine poisoning. Extraordinary love grows. It deepens. It matures. It becomes something neither person could have imagined during those awkward first conversations when both were pretending not to be nervous.

Over many years of thinking about extraordinary relationships, I began noticing something fascinating. The couples who still looked at one another with tenderness after twenty, thirty, or forty years weren’t simply lucky. They had quietly climbed the same staircase.

Eventually I gave that staircase a name:

The Five Steps of Worship in Your Relationship

Here are The Five Steps of Worship in Your Relationship™ each of which give birth to the next:

1. Seeing. Love Witnessed. I see you.
2. Admiring. Love appreciated. I celebrate you.
3. Cherishing. Love Treasured. I adore you.
4. Revering. Love Sanctified. I hold you as sacred.
5. Worshipping. Love Chosen Again and Again. I choose you every day.

Every extraordinary relationship begins with Seeing. Not glancing. Not assuming. Actually seeing another human being. Witnessing their effort. Their fears. Their dreams. Their quiet sacrifices.

Then comes Admiring. You begin celebrating what is beautiful about them—not merely how they look, but who they are. Their courage. Their kindness. Their integrity. Their ridiculous ability to remember where they parked. Or not.

Admiration gradually becomes Cherishing. Now you’re no longer simply impressed by them. You treasure them. You protect their heart. You remember how they take their coffee. You speak well of them when they aren’t in the room. You begin making them feel precious.

Over time, cherishing grows into Reverence. This is where something profound happens. You stop asking, “How do I win this argument?” and begin asking, “How do I protect the dignity of the person I love while we solve this problem together?” That’s reverence. It’s not weakness. It’s character.

Eventually—almost without noticing—those four practices become something larger than themselves. hey become Worship. Not because someone told you to. Because after years of seeing, admiring, cherishing, and revering another person, that’s simply what love has become.

Love Is a Direction, Not a Performance

One of the greatest misunderstandings about worship is believing there must be one worshipper and one worshipped. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Healthy love doesn’t resemble one person kneeling while the other stands on a pedestal. It looks like two people continually stepping down from their own pedestals to lift the other onto theirs. Then laughing because neither one wants to stay there very long.

The most beautiful relationships are wonderfully reciprocal. Sometimes your partner is carrying you. Sometimes you’re carrying them. Sometimes you’re both carrying each other while simultaneously trying to figure out why the smoke detector won’t stop beeping.

Sometime, romance is surprisingly practical.

Why This Matters

Our culture has become remarkably skilled at noticing flaws. We’re experts at criticism. Professionals at disappointment. Olympic-level competitors in taking one another for granted.

Worship moves in the opposite direction. It asks:

What if I became an expert in noticing what is magnificent about the person I love?
What if I learned to delight in them? Celebrate them? Protect them?
What if I remain fascinated by them long after familiarity tempted me to stop looking?

Because here’s the beautiful secret. People tend to flourish under admiration. They become more courageous when someone believes in them. Kinder when kindness is noticed. Gentler when gentleness is cherished. More alive when someone delights in who they are instead of merely tolerating who they’ve become.

Perhaps that’s why extraordinary relationships seem almost magical from the outside. They aren’t. They’re simply built by two people who keep choosing to see magnificence where everyone else has started seeing familiarity.

Again. And again. And again.

The Love You’ve Been Looking For

The goal has never been worship for its own sake. The goal is what worship eventually creates.

When two people faithfully see, admire, cherish, revere, and continually choose one another over many years, something extraordinary begins to emerge.

Safety deepens. Desire grows. Friendship strengthens. Laughter becomes easier. Even ordinary Tuesday afternoons become quietly sacred. Love stops being something you occasionally feel.

It becomes the atmosphere you live in.

This is why I created The Five Steps of Worship in Your Relationship. Not because I believe extraordinary love should remain mysterious. But because I believe the most beautiful relationships in the world leave clues.

The staircase has always been there. Now it has a name. And when two people climb it together, something remarkable begins to happen.

Love becomes both hotter…
…and holier.

The Five Steps of Worship in Your Relationship™ is a trademark of Randi Fredricks, Ph.D.

 

Song Recommendation:
— Faithfully, Journey, 1983

This page is from Randi Fredricks, Ph.D.’s forthcoming book Magnificent Men: How Men Are Undervalued and How Worshipping and Being Worshipped Can Bring You The Hot and Holy Love You Desire, exploring the restoration of men’s dignity and worth, the sacred and sensual dimensions of intimacy, and hot and holy love.