Loving the Person in Front of You

In this Sunday's Gospel, Jesus meets a Samaritan woman at a well and offers her "living water." She takes him literally, thinking of her own thirst, her own daily burden of drawing water. When the disciples return, Jesus tells them he has "food to eat that you do not know about," and they too take him literally, wondering who brought him lunch. Both the woman and the disciples hear Jesus through the filter of their own needs and desires, and so they miss what he is actually saying.

It's a pattern worth recognizing, because most of us do something similar in our marriages.

We say we love our spouses. But when we examine what we mean by "love," we often find something closer to "I value what you do for me" or "I appreciate how you make me feel." This is natural.

It is also incomplete.

The Christian definition of love, coming to us from St. Thomas Aquinas, is to will the good of the other as other. This asks something hard. It asks us to work for what is genuinely good for our spouse, even when that good has nothing to do with our own comfort or preferences. Even when it has nothing to do with how they make us feel.

Even when it means making a sacrifice of our time, energy, or money to support their needs.

And it requires us to see our spouse as a real, separate person rather than as a character in the story we are telling about our own life.

Research confirms how difficult this is. 

Psychologists Simine Vazire and Erika Carlson found that even in close relationships, we often have significant blind spots about our partners. Their work on "self-other knowledge asymmetry" shows that while partners can be accurate judges of each other's observable traits, they may miss or misread internal experiences, motivations, and struggles. We tend to fill in those gaps with assumptions shaped by our own perspective.

In other words, we often see our spouse through the lens of our own needs and desires, rather than seeing them as they are.

This is the same mistake made at the well. The woman heard "water" and thought about her bucket. We hear "love" and think about what makes us feel loved.

One practice that can help is called "selfless noticing," the act of directing attention outward to observe, understand, and appreciate others without the bias of personal ego or immediate self-interest. Here's an exercise based on this concept:

For one week, each spouse pays close attention to the other's daily life and quietly does one small thing each day that serves the other's actual needs and desires, not what you would want in their place. Maybe your husband has been putting off an errand that weighs on him. Maybe your wife keeps adjusting the thermostat because she is cold in the evenings. The key is to observe closely enough to identify what your spouse genuinely needs, rather than defaulting to what you would appreciate.

At the end of the week, share what you noticed and what you did. Couples who try this often discover how many of their "loving" gestures have been filtered through their own preferences, and they begin building the habit of seeing their spouse as someone with distinct needs.

Over time, this practice builds the habit of seeing your spouse as a person in their own right rather than as an extension of your own experience, just as our Christian faith demands.

In John's Gospel, Jesus does something remarkable with the woman at the well. He sees her fully, knows her history, and speaks to who she actually is. He also invites her to see him as he truly is. That mutual seeing, that willingness to be known and to know the other, is the foundation of real love.

In our marriages, we are invited to do the same: to set down our own bucket, stop filtering everything through our own thirst, look at the person standing in front of us, and really see them.