For some the weekend was likely chock-full of good reminders. Others may have come needing extreme and immediate help and left the conference with renewed hope.

Either way, we spent the weekend focusing on biblical and practical ways to strengthen our marriage, understand each other better, and model Christ’s love to the world through our union.

So it’s not a surprise that when I returned to work Monday morning, I immediately noticed a Star Tribune story titled “Divorce: Women who walk.” The piece described a recent trend in America, and around the world, in which more women than men are walking out of marriages.

The article cited a 2004 study by the AARP that showed that nationwide, women in their 40s, 50s and older now initiate 66 percent of divorces. The study also pointed out that a full one-fourth of their husbands never saw it coming.

One woman quoted in the story suggested she “loved” her husband but was not “in love with him like you should be in love.” So she left the marriage believing “it’s OK to move forward.”

She was later quoted in the story as saying, “I sure hope that if [my children] are in a relationship or marriage that is not loving and joyful, they will have the courage to move on in a respectful way.”

Another husband whose wife chose to leave him and the couple’s children explained that his ex-wife left because he “was boring” and “spent too much time with the kids.” She moved away and does not keep in touch.

The story drove home the point that although abuse, infidelity and substance abuse remain highly stated factors for divorce, a growing number of women seeking divorce cite reasons of unhappiness, loneliness and poor communication.

A friend who now lives in Washington, D.C., and had also caught the story that day, wrote me an e-mail asking, “Is it just me, or do these women need more hobbies than divorce?”

My friend was at least half right. People do need something more worthy to focus on in their marriage than their own levels of contentment, entertainment, boredom or anything else. That’s not to say that taking care of oneself is wrong; it’s just that mutual selflessness is the real quality that can bring about fulfillment for husband and wife.

According to the Bible, marriage must ultimately be a selfless, giving relationship for husband and wife—a relationship modeled after Christ’s love for the body of believers.

Ephesians 5:25-27 says, “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless.”

The world’s way of looking at the marriage relationship is that it’s fine for a time, but if you ever get bored with it, feel free to change the channel. Marriage becomes a consumer relationship that can be dropped at any time if the going gets tough, or even if a spouse is bored.

Christian marriage, on the other hand, should be based on Christ’s sacrificial model of oneness. It takes mutual commitment, selflessness, understanding and a reliance on God to lead the relationship. In fact, that very verse in Ephesians commands that husbands follow this model of love.

I suspect that the more we commit our families to this type of selfless love, the fewer problems we’ll have with boredom, loneliness and poor communication. Funny how that works.