Romantic dinner for two. Check.
Nice Jewelry. Check.
Beautiful flowers. Check.
A box of chocolate. Check.
Sexy lingerie. Check.
A thoughtful card. Always.
A surprise weekend getaway for just us. With a candlelit room, rose pedals everywhere and Kenny G music playing softly. Yea, I’ve done that too.
Our anniversary is coming up this week. It’s not our wedding anniversary, it is the anniversary of our first date. This Valentines Day will be 32 years since the beginning of our relationship. We didn’t purposely start our relationship on Valentines Day, it just happened that way.
There were a lot of memorable moments about that first date, some good and some not so good. But the one thing that still stands out to me today is the way we thought of each other as being the best person we had ever had a date with. I still remember the way I felt getting ready for our date that night. I felt like I was about to go on my first date with the one I would want to spend the rest of my life with.
How does your spouse measure up? Is there something about your spouse you wish you could change? Is there something about them that drives you mad? Or have you reached a point where you find it hard to see anything good about them at all?
If this is you and you find yourself feeling disappointed because your spouse is not everything you expected them to be, you could be heading down a dangerous road right now. There are many reasons for a marriage to fall apart. But one of the most subtle ways that goes unnoticed is when a wedge is driven between husband and wife over lingering disappointments in each other.
On our last post Getting That Stubborn Stain Out, I introduced the idea of using COFHE to deal with those STUBBORN MARRIAGE
PROBLEMS. With each letter representing an important step to dealing with marriage conflict; C – commitment, O – ownership, F – forgiveness, H – hope, and E – empathy. On this post I will focus on commitment. There is a lot to say, so let’s jump in.
Commitment in marriage is an absolute essential for a marriage to last. It’s the promise we make to each other, “until death do us part,” that gives us the hope of going the distance of being married for life. And even if we are challenged with very difficult circumstances, it is this promise of commitment that sees us through. In Life decisions, I talked about my own hopes for a lifelong marriage and how commitment seen me through some difficult times. All marriages start out with this vision of going the distance of being married for life. Continue reading
“We just keep drifting more and more apart.
If things continue like this, I don’t see how our marriage can survive.”
It is a tragic thing when love fades. When two people who once had all the love and hope for a beautiful life together, to one day look at each other and wonder where their love and admiration for each other has gone.
It didn’t fade overnight, it didn’t happen over a one time event. They just slowly drifted away from each other until one day their feelings for each other are so drastically different from what they once had, they feel there is no hope of getting it back. Continue reading
“
It takes two to make a marriage,” was the words I heard that were meant to ridicule me for the way I had treated my marriage. And in fact, those words did strike a nerve with me. Those words did remind me of how much I had failed my marriage. I was the one who still wanted to be married, but I really had no idea what it took to “make a marriage.” Continue reading