Something Borrowed: The Faithful Friendship a Marriage Needs

Of the many roles a woman takes on in her life, there’s one I’ve never seen listed on LinkedIn, but maybe it’s time. It frequently combines the skills of a personal assistant, an event planner, a coach, a quarterback, and, occasionally, a crisis manager. It asks you to be part teammate, part cheerleader, part problem-solver—all while walking on high heels and never dropping a bouquet. 

Being a bridesmaid is a rite of passage: standing beside a childhood best friend, sorority sister, coworker, or a woman whom God sent later in life—just when you needed her friendship. Over the years, I’ve watched wedding seasons come in waves. In my twenties, save-the-dates covered my fridge, filling spring and summer weekends. Now in my thirties, it feels especially meaningful to watch women I’ve served alongside fall in love with the men they’ll spend the rest of their lives with.

Many a joke has been made about the plight of the perennial bridesmaid—and the back of my closet is filled with dresses I’ll never wear again. But for all the teasing that comes with the growing collection of monogrammed getting-ready robes, to be invited to stand close to a dear friend as she makes one of the most consequential promises of her life is still an honor. It’s always an easy yes. 

If you’ve walked down the aisle as a bridesmaid or maid of honor before, you may assume you know all you’re signing up for. You’ve come to learn that on the wedding day, “something borrowed” takes on a more practical meaning. One bridesmaid will need stain remover. Another will have forgotten deodorant. The bride will look around for a lipstick touch-up and, a few minutes later, for Kleenex to be slipped discretely into her hand. 

But as Christian bridesmaids, what we really agree to carry for a friend on her special day isn’t just an emergency kit or her purse. The more meaningful responsibility begins after the music fades and our “official” duties are done. 

What are we committing to when we agree to stand beside a friend as she enters marriage? We’re not the ones making a covenant; she and her husband are. But we’re given the opportunity to make another kind of promise: to be a lifelong, faithful friend of her marriage. 

What Will You Hand Her?

Some wedding receptions take a moment to honor the longest-married couples in the room. They ask those who have been married a certain amount of years to stand, and then they have couples sit as the number of years rises—five, ten, twenty-five, fifty—until only one couple remains. The pair is often invited to take a picture with the bride and groom, a fitting image of those beginning marriage alongside those who have endured decades together.

Perseverance—in both marriage and life—is not an individual endeavor. While the newly married couple will ride off into the sunset to begin their honeymoon alone, their marriage won’t flourish in isolation. They need those who have gone before them and those who will walk alongside them, strengthening their resolve when they grow weary and rejoicing with them in the sweetest seasons.

Not all of us have decades of marital faithfulness to offer a newly married couple, but we have something even more certain than our own experience to give: the testimony of the unfailing Word of God. In order to help a friend hold fast in her marriage, we have to begin and end there.

1. When the realities of marriage begin to replace some of its romance, lend her a gospel lens. 

There will be mornings your friend will text you about how the thoughtful man she married seems thoughtless, or how a habit that was once endearing has become irritating. She’ll discover things about him she didn’t notice while dating, and marriage will reveal things about her too. The reality will become inescapable: she married a sinner, and so did he, and their relationship is impacted every day by the brokenness of this world and the sin that still lives within them.

In those moments, she’ll be tempted to base her hope for resolution in the if-we-justs: If he would just change. If I could just be less reactive. If we could just get back to the way things used to be. Some of those desires may be good, but neither his improvement nor hers can bear the weight of rescuing their marriage. After all, neither of them came to Christ on the basis of their good behavior (Eph. 2:7–9). Christ alone is their righteousness (1 Cor. 1:30). 

Marriage won’t change the terms of her dependence on Jesus. As often as we need to remember to apply the gospel to the ordinary moments of our lives, our friend will need reminders that the grace of Jesus is where she must keep returning. Christ has always been the only remedy for sin, and resentments in marriage, strained communication, and costly apologies are not beyond the reach of His grace.

That’s part of the confidence Hebrews 10 gives us. While it wasn’t written specifically about marriage, it speaks to wavering believers in the midst of mounting pressure. Before calling believers to persevere, the author begins by reminding them that they can enter the presence of God boldly because of the blood of Jesus (Heb. 10:19–21). 

For the Christian husband and wife, this means they stand before God not on the basis of their own marital performance or their spouse’s improvement, but on Christ’s finished work. When sin is exposed, they can draw near to God together. They are free to acknowledge their own sin without being crushed by it and to see their spouse’s sin through the lens of mercy rather than condemnation. 

So when she calls with an update, help her draw near to God with a true heart and full assurance of faith (Heb. 10:22). Listen without feeding her resentment or assuming the worst of her husband. Ask questions that turn her attention toward what Christ may be inviting her to confess, forgive, or do. Remind her of what’s true when shame makes her want to hide. And help her remember the mercy she’s received so that grace, not scorekeeping, shapes the way she responds. 

Ultimately, the same grace that saved her is sufficient for the slow, sometimes painful work of sanctifying her too. Help her stand fully assured that He who started a good work in her will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus (Phil. 1:6).

2. When the hardships of life make God’s promises harder to see, lend her your prayers and your hope. 

Before your friend ever knew her husband’s name, perhaps you prayed with her in hope for the man God might one day bring into her life. Maybe you prayed for wisdom and discernment as they dated, and then with gratitude and anticipation when her boyfriend became her fiancé. Her wedding ceremony might mark the fulfillment of one season of prayer, but it also opens the door for a lifetime of new prayer needs.

Not every hard season in marriage is caused by marital conflict. There may be illness, infertility, financial pressure, disappointment, aging parents, a difficult diagnosis, or dreams that unfold differently than she imagined. The details will be different for every couple, but eventually the wedding-day promises to remain faithful “for better or for worse” will meet an actual worse. 

Of course, many of these trials don’t begin at the altar. Your friend likely already knows something of disappointment, grief, and prayers that go unanswered—circumstances that have already tested her belief in God’s goodness. But marriage means she’ll experience some of those burdens in a new way, and she and her husband will learn to carry sorrows neither of them chose.

Loving your friend well doesn’t mean you take her husband’s place or are brought into every private burden they carry. You can strengthen their marriage without stepping inside it. Encourage her to move toward her husband when hardship tempts her to withdraw. Pray for them, not only for her. Ask God to use the trial to draw them nearer to Christ and closer to one another. When she is weary or struggling to make sense of what God has allowed, help her hold fast to what has always been true: “He who promised is faithful” (Heb. 10:23). 

3. When marriage changes the shape of your friendship, lend her your presence.

If you’ve been a bridesmaid before, you’ve watched what happens when a friend gets married. The woman who was once the roommate you saw every single day, or the best friend you FaceTimed with every bit of news, or the small-group member who was always free for a last-minute coffee suddenly isn’t quite as available. That’s not necessarily something to mourn. Marriage should rearrange her relationships. Her husband now occupies a place in her life that you don’t, and being a good friend means graciously and gladly making room for that. 

But that doesn’t mean disappearing from her life or letting her disappear from yours. Her husband may rightly become her closest companion and confidant, but he was never meant to be the whole body of Christ to his wife. She still needs older mentors and younger mentees, friends who know her well, and the ordinary rhythms of family life within the local church body. 

Hebrews 10 offers this invitation to believers, both married and single:

Let us consider one another in order to provoke love and good works, not neglecting to gather together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging each other, and all the more as you see the day approaching. (Hebrews 10:24–25)

Christian friendship doesn’t exhort us to stay close simply for closeness’ sake. Your continued presence in her life has a bigger purpose than preserving the friendship you once had. Hebrews 10 encourages us to consider one another: to encourage and spur one another toward faithfulness to Christ. 

So make it easier for her to love her husband, not harder. Be the friend who doesn’t make her feel guilty when date night means she can’t come, who welcomes her husband rather than resenting his presence, and who doesn’t expect the same access to her time you once had. Invite them over. Keep the group text going even when she’s slow to respond. Ask questions that draw her heart toward gratitude for what God has given her, rather than comparison with her single years. Stay close enough to notice when she’s withdrawing from Christian community, and love her enough to pull her back toward it.

Something Worth Lending

Lord willing, fifty years from now, your friend and her husband will be the oldest couple left standing on the dance floor. They’ll take a picture with the newlyweds and add it to their collection, beside the faded photographs of their own wedding and the images of you beside them. 

What a gift it would be to know that, in some small way, your friendship helped them make it to that milestone.

Over the course of fifty years, there will be plenty of moments when your friend needs to borrow something from you. What you lend to her will merely be what God has given you. Even the desire to remain a faithful friend is grace borrowed, in a sense, from the One whose resources never run out. 

So as you watch your friend say, “I do,” ask the Lord to help you be a faithful friend of her marriage for all the years ahead. And when she needs something borrowed, ask Him to give you something worth lending.