What Does the Bible Say About a Future Spouse? — de Sales on Devout Love
⏱ 13 min read
You have a small notebook somewhere — in the drawer beside the bed, or at the back of a bookshelf, or tucked inside an older Bible — in which, at some point in your twenties, you started to write prayers for the man you had not yet met. You wrote them for a while. You stopped writing them when the writing started to feel either embarrassing or false — the embarrassment of praying for a person whose face you could not picture, the falseness of asking God for a specific kind of man you had constructed mostly from books and the internet. The notebook is still in the drawer. You do not know whether to start again. You do not know how to pray for a marriage that is not yet a person. You do not know what the Bible actually says about any of this.
What the older Christian tradition said about it is gentler and slower than the contemporary scripts you have probably read. The tradition did not write future husband prayer journals in the contemporary mould — those are recent. The tradition taught the unmarried Christian woman to address her devout love to God, first, and to entrust the future marriage — whether it ever arrived or not — to the same address. The future spouse, in the older framing, was held inside the slow daily love of God, not addressed as a separate project that ran in parallel to the spiritual life. The Couples Prayer Journal carries this kind of slow address into a 140-day companion you can keep on the shelf for whenever the marriage actually arrives — but the practice the article walks below begins now, in the present-tense singleness, with the prayers that are honest because they are not pretending the person is already there. For now — let the framing be re-set.
The article that follows is a slow read of two passages from Francis de Sales — the seventeenth-century bishop who wrote pastoral letters to unmarried Christian women throughout his diocese. He understood the longing. He did not pretend the longing was not there. He taught a kind of prayer that did not require the future husband to be a person yet — and that prayer is what you may have been looking for when you put the older notebook back in the drawer. Read slowly.
What the older tradition actually said about this
The modern Christian conversation about praying for a future spouse tends to fall into one of two scripts. The first is the list-and-pray script, in which the unmarried Christian woman is encouraged to write a list of the qualities she wants in a future husband and pray for him by those attributes — godly, kind, leads spiritually, loves Jesus, and so on. The list is sincere. The list is also, often, the longing rendered in shopping-cart form, and after some years of writing it most women quietly find that the list is not where the actual love of their soul lives. The second script is the trust-the-timing script, in which the woman is encouraged to stop praying specifically for a husband and simply trust that the right person will be brought along. That script too is sincere. It also, often, leaves the longing nowhere to go.
The older tradition offered something neither script can. It said: the longing for a future marriage is real, it is not to be suppressed, and it is also not to be addressed at a person who does not yet exist. The longing is addressed to God. The future marriage, if it comes, is held inside that address. The marriage that may or may not come is entrusted, daily, to the One who knows the whole shape of a life and who has been the Beloved of every devout soul since long before any Christian dating advice was ever written down. The prayer for a future spouse, in this older framing, is a prayer to God about a marriage He may or may not give — not a prayer at a phantom husband who exists only in the imagination.
This is the difference between the contemporary scripts and the older tradition. The scripts ask the soul to address a non-existent person. The tradition asks the soul to address God about a possible future. The latter is honest. The latter is sustainable across years. The latter does not leave the soul stranded when the years stretch.
(If marriage has begun to feel like a category you would only enter alongside the right kind of slow daily Christian companionship, couples devotionals that don’t embarrass one of you is the cousin article for the season after the wait, and a husband’s devotional for the man who reads slowly walks alongside it. If you are already inside a Christian marriage and the wait was for a deeper version of it, Bible study for married women — when the faith you married into becomes yours walks that ground. If your husband is the kind who reads slowly or not at all, a Christian marriage book for men who don’t read marriage books is the companion he might actually open.)
The first passage: the Bridegroom address that schools the future address
“But when you pray let your words and affections, whether interior or exterior, all tend to love and trust in God. ‘O God of Mercy, most Loving Lord, Sweet Saviour, Lord of my heart, my Joy, my Hope, my Beloved, my Bridegroom.’ Vigorously resist all tendencies to melancholy, and although all you do may seem to be done coldly, wearily and indifferently, do not give in. The Enemy strives to make us languid in doing good by depression, but when he sees that we do not cease our efforts to work, and that those efforts become all the more earnest by reason of their being made in resistance to him, he leaves off troubling us.”
— Francis de Sales, Introduction to the Devout Life
Read it once. Then read it again, slowly.
What de Sales is doing in this passage is teaching a particular sequence. Let your words and affections, whether interior or exterior, all tend to love and trust in God. The first move of the unmarried Christian woman’s prayer life is not the prayer for the future husband. It is the prayer to God — direct, unmediated, addressed by all the names of the heart’s love. Lord of my heart, my Joy, my Hope, my Beloved, my Bridegroom. The names accumulate. Each name is a different facet of the same address. The address is rehearsed daily, until the soul has learned, by long practice, to direct the love it carries toward the One who is its proper recipient.
This is the part the contemporary future-husband prayer scripts cannot quite reach. The scripts ask the unmarried woman to pray for a future man. De Sales teaches her, first, to pray to God in the language of the most intimate love she has — my Beloved, my Bridegroom — and only out of that prayer to consider, eventually, the future marriage as one possibility within His larger care. The address comes first. The future marriage is held inside the address. The order matters. A future marriage prayed for outside the address becomes a project. A future marriage entrusted inside the address becomes a prayer.
What does this mean for what the Bible says about a future spouse? It means that the most lasting Christian prayer for a future marriage is, paradoxically, a prayer that does not begin with the future marriage. It begins with God. It rehearses the names of His love over your heart. It rests the heart in His care. It then — without urgency, often without words — entrusts the question of marriage to the One whose love your heart has just rehearsed itself in. The future husband, if he comes, comes into a heart that has been schooled in addressing God first. The future husband, if he does not come, does not come, and the heart has still been schooled in the address that mattered most.
Vigorously resist all tendencies to melancholy. Notice — again — that de Sales does not pretend the melancholy will not come. The unmarried Christian woman praying about a future spouse will, on some days, be undone by the prayer. The notebook will sit open on the lap and the tears will come without warning. De Sales does not tell you the tears are wrong. He tells you not to give in to the melancholy itself — the slow giving-up of the practice that the melancholy invites. The tears can come. The prayer keeps being prayed. The cold prayers count. The wearily-indifferent prayers count. The practice is not the feeling. The practice is the showing-up.
Mid-page: a small note
The Couples Prayer Journal is the companion for the season after the wait — the journal you keep on the shelf for whenever the marriage arrives, when the slow daily address to God learns to be done together rather than alone. The article walks the practice that comes before it. The journal carries it forward into the shared evening practice of a Christian household, if and when the household exists.
The somatic that goes with praying about the not-yet
Pause here. The teaching has a body to it.
Sit somewhere quiet, with the notebook closed in your lap if you have one nearby. Notice where the prayer for a future spouse has been sitting in the body. Most unmarried Christian women carry it across the upper back and shoulders — the place that holds the weight of the imagined future the body keeps preparing for, the place that braces against the day-after-day non-arrival, the place that holds the small chronic posture of looking-ahead. Put one hand on the back of the neck, lightly, where the head meets the spine. Take one slow inhale. On the exhale, let the shoulders drop by half an inch — not by relaxing them but by stopping the small ongoing effort to brace them toward the imagined future.
The body of the woman who has been praying for a future husband for some years has often, without knowing it, started to live forward of the present. The shoulders carry the lean. The chest carries the held breath. The neck carries the small forward-tilt of looking. The somatic of de Sales’s prayer is the slow re-settling of the body into the actual present — the actual chair, the actual notebook, the actual evening light — because the One the prayer is addressed to is in the present, not in the imagined future, and the body learning to sit in the present is the body learning to receive Him.
Three slow breaths. Then take the hand away and continue reading.
The second passage: the prayer that gives all
“As for example, the soul having long dwelt in the feeling of the union whereby she sweetly tastes how happy she is to belong to God, in fine, augmenting this union by an amorous pressing and moving forwards: Yea, Lord, will she say, I am thine, all, all, all, without reserve; or: Ah Lord! I am so indeed, and will be daily ever more; or, by way of prayer: O sweet Jesus! Ah! draw me still more deeply into thy heart, that thy love may devour me, and that I may be swallowed up in its sweetness.”
— Francis de Sales, Treatise on the Love of God
Read it twice. The phrase to keep is I am thine, all, all, all, without reserve.
This is the prayer that the older tradition would have offered the unmarried Christian woman praying for a future spouse — not in place of the prayer for the marriage, but as the deeper address inside which the prayer for the marriage lives. I am thine, all, all, all, without reserve. The without reserve is the key. The soul that has learned to pray this prayer — slowly, over years, in the small daily evening practice — has learned to hold the future marriage with open hands. The marriage is not the reserve. The marriage is not the part of the heart she is keeping back. The marriage is held inside the all, all, all, entrusted to Him whose love has been the Beloved of her soul from the beginning.
What does this do to the prayer for a future spouse? It changes its register. The prayer is no longer please, God, send me this kind of man. The prayer becomes Lord, I am thine, all, all, all, without reserve — and the part of me that longs for a husband is part of the all I am giving you, and I trust you with the longing, and I trust you with the marriage if it comes, and I trust you with the no-marriage if it does not, and I trust you with the years of the wait, and I am yours. The prayer is no less honest. It is more honest. The longing is named. The reserve is set down. The marriage is entrusted. The address is to God.
This is what de Sales meant by devout love. Not the love of a future spouse — though that love, if it comes, will be the gift of a long preparation. The love of God, primary, total, daily addressed, and the future marriage carried inside that love rather than running in parallel to it. The future husband, in this older framing, is not the destination of the unmarried Christian woman’s prayer life. He is, if God gives him, one good gift inside a life whose primary love was God all along — and the primary love is what makes the future marriage, when and if it arrives, capable of bearing the weight a Christian marriage is meant to bear.
For the modern Christian woman praying about a future spouse, this is the line worth keeping near the page. I am thine, all, all, all, without reserve. Pray it slowly. Pray it in the evenings. Pray it the day after a hard week. Pray it before you write a single word about the future husband whose face you cannot picture. The prayer is the foundation. The prayer for the future marriage rests on the prayer of all, all, all. Without the foundation, the future-husband prayer becomes a project. With the foundation, the future-husband prayer becomes one quiet sentence inside the larger address that has already given everything to God.
What the practice will actually feel like over a year
The slow daily address de Sales is teaching will not, in the first weeks, replace the older notebook in the drawer. The longing for the future spouse will still arrive — sometimes in the small clear early mornings, sometimes in the long evenings of weddings season, sometimes in the unexpected middle of a Wednesday afternoon. De Sales would not have promised the longing would go. He would have told you that the address — daily rehearsed, slowly built — would, over months, become the wider container the longing lands inside.
A year in, the notebook may still be in the drawer. You may write in it again, less often, with less urgency. The prayers about the future spouse will have changed register. They will be shorter. They will be quieter. They will be held inside the larger prayer that says I am thine, all, all, all, and the all will include the future marriage as one item among many, no longer the centre of the prayer, held with a hand that has slowly learned to be open rather than closed around the hoped-for arrival.
That is what the older tradition meant by praying for a future spouse. Not a project. A sub-prayer inside the larger address. The address comes first. The marriage, if it comes, comes into a soul that has been schooled in the love that matters most. What the Bible says about a future spouse, in this older reading, is what the Bible says about everything else — seek ye first, and the rest is held inside that seeking, and the seeking itself is the life.
(The sibling articles in this series sit at what does the Bible say about singleness — Augustine and de Sales and what does the Bible say about waiting — Murray on Waiting on God.)
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A daily home for the practice
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Couples Prayer Journal.
The Everspring Couples Prayer Journal carries de Sales’s slow vocabulary — Bridegroom, all, all, all without reserve, the long-dwelt union — into a daily companion to keep on the shelf for the season after the wait, when the love that has been schooled in addressing God learns to be addressed together.
