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How Do You Relate? As Friends, Partners, Lovers, or All Three?

ID-100138616On our last post How Are You Two Related, I started talking about how in every marriage we have different and unique ways of connecting with our spouse. And that the important thing was to find your connection points and work from your place of strength as you work to improve other ways to connect with each other.

On this post I want to start taking a look at how we relate to our spouse in three major categories; friendship, partnership, and lovers. As far as I can tell, any connection we have with our spouse will always fit into one or more of these areas. But the challenge we face is understanding how to move in and out of each area and how to find good balance of all three ways of connection.

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When is it Okay to Talk About Past Hurts?

“The past should be left in the past.” I’m sure many of us have heard this at some point in our marriage. And, I’m sure many of us have said this ourselves at some point.

But the question is: is it ever possible to talk about the past and the hurts from our past? And if it is, when is it okay to talk about it and when is it not okay and how do you know the difference?

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6 Truths About Monitoring Your Spouse’s Behavior

733427_57979631I remember when I was a kid the first time I was appointed to be the class monitor. It was first grade and I was the new kid in school after my parents moved us to a new city half way through that first year. The teacher had to leave the classroom and so as she named me the classroom monitor she gave me the instructions of keeping a watch on the rest of my classmates and report back to her any bad behavior such as talking or getting out of their seats. I didn’t like the job. I wanted all of the other kids in class to like me and I thought for sure that being a classroom monitor would be held against me.

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Does Your Spouse Pay For Your Past?

We have seen the scenario time after time. Two people come together in marriage with some type of baggage from past relationships. Be it from an ex spouse, a parent, siblings, or a bad teacher, many people have some old wombs from the past that is brought into their marriage. And it has been rightly said many times, “you shouldn’t make your spouse pay for what someone else did.”

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But recently when a couple in our marriage class was talking about some stuff they have to deal with from their past and how their past experiences cause them to react the way they do today, a new idea on this issue struck me.

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Is Your Patience Running Thin?

For many years I struggled with loving my wife. I could always say it and most of the time I felt it, but the challenge for me was knowing how to show it in a consistent way that made sense. Even when I thought I was showing love in one way, my other actions would contradict me and cause Janet to question if I really loved her or not.

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One of the problems I had with loving my wife and my children was the way I would lose my patience with them. They just never knew when my patience would run out and I would turn on them in some sort of harsh demanding way. I didn’t want to treat them badly and I had no excuse for it. So I just blamed it on my lack of patience.

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Love Is More Than A Feeling, It’s Also A Choice

On a previous post, I Want To Know What Love Is, I talked about love as a feeling and how difficult it is to describe that feeling. In that post, I said, “not one time does the Bible refer to love as being something you feel.”

But after saying that and reading in the word this week I had to go back and edited that line. It now reads, “Not one time does the Bible refer to love as something you only feel.” The important change I made was adding only.

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I had to make that change because to be honest love has to also be a feeling. It is that thing inside causing us to say, “I love you and I want to marry you.”

And when we do something that shows our love we explain, “I did it because I love you.” Read more

Prophetic Eyes for Your Spouse

I remember the day we married like it was yesterday. We said our vows and the next thing you know the man pronounced us husband and wife. We knew the pronouncement made our marriage official. But we had no idea how much we needed prophetic eyes to understand what had just happened.

I was a wide-eyed Nineteen year old who thought he knew everything there was to know about being a husband. After all, my only dream in life for the previous six years was to be a husband.

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Now looking back on that day thirty years later, I see a clueless young man and woman that knew very little about being husband and wife. We had the titles; by name, we did become husband and wife with those few spoken words. But we had no idea how much we would have to grow into the shoes we just put on. Read more

I’ll Admit it; I’m Selfish, You Should Be Too.

Every time our marriage looked like it was over. I found myself fighting to hang on and I began to examine myself for what I did wrong. I would remember the things I did to hurt my wife. And whether it was in some small ways or in something major I had done, it all came back to one thing. I was selfish.

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My selfish ways were toxic to our marriage. I hurt my wife with stupid things just because I was so selfish. I neglected our marriage and caused her to feel lonely and desperate. Simply because I was too selfish to give her and our marriage the best of me. Read more

Tips to Keep Your Marriage from Drifting Apart

Couples sometimes need some help to keep their love from fading and their relationship from drifting apart. Drifting apart is all too real for so many couples and I would go so far to say, it is something that happens to all couples at one time or another.

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The key is knowing why it happens and what you can do to change it.

Why do we drift?

The bible teaches us, (Gen.2:24) that marriage requires for a man and a woman to be joined together, and they become one flesh.  The KJV bible uses the word cleave for joined together. Other translations use the words embraces, united, and cling. The picture here is that the covenant marriage relationship is to create a bond of oneness that is so tight there can be no separating what used to be two.

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