Buyers Guide to Marriage
There’s a pretty standard list of things that someone getting married should consider before they give a heart-felt “I do”. If you get clear on them, then so many other things will fall into place. When we’re blind to the facts and base our relationship potential on whether they smell good, look good, or have good manners, we can set ourselves up for buyer’s remorse in the future. The thing with marriage is that it doesn’t come with a receipt and it wasn’t designed by God to be returned like a shopping item. Here are some things to consider before you buy into whether your partner is marriage ready:
Do you share the same values in faith, family, finances, and conflict resolution? When you’re both on the same page, you will have harmony in your marriage. Having some candid conversations about these areas will eliminate the shock that comes later on when you find out what the other really believes about these things.
Do you share a complementary vision for the future? Knowing where each other’s ambitions lie influences the strategy you take and sacrifices you make to ensure you both get to where you’re going together.
Do you both know how to engage in healthy processes to get better? Another surprise can be eliminated by discovering whether the other person has a record of doing things right when they don’t agree with something or someone. Nothing is more exhausting than being with an emotional infant.
Are there strong, healthy support systems in your life that have been battle-tested and proven for getting to the other side of things? Learning this is a way of finding out if this person has friends that keep them accountable. A bonus would be if they happen to be a strong source of support for their friends when they are in need.
Has all the baggage of the past been unpacked so that there are no surprises? Trust me—everyone has baggage. What you want to know is if they still are carrying that baggage around. If they are, you will know pretty soon into the marriage and wonder to yourself, “is this the person I married?”. If they’ve received wise counseling or have personally worked through a healing process with the Lord that includes forgiveness, you’ll know they are ready for Matrimony.
That wasn’t so difficult, was it? The work that goes into making things work will not be as challenging if you do it in the beginning. If you follow this buyer’s guide, you’ll never have buyer’s remorse in your marriage.
Why do people “fall out of love”?
“I just don’t love them no more,” is the saddest phrase I hear people say when they no longer want to be married. It’s one of the greatest tragedies when love has left the building. But here’s the thing: love is not just a feeling. It might start that way, but that is love at its baby stage. When love grows up it shows through its actions and decisions that it is love. The most mature and godly version of love is one that doesn’t need to be reciprocated in order to stick around. That being said, I don’t believe that couples who are truly in love can fall out of it. I would propose that your love is being “blocked”. Let me share some LOVE BLOCKERS that affect your decision to love that person or not.
LOVE BLOCKER #1: You have some secret sin you haven’t addressed. When someone is struggling with some shameful sin, they do everything they can to keep it covered up. What they don’t understand is that this sin doesn’t stay in that one area of their lives. It begins to take over. You would think fantasizing over explicit photos of other people on Instagram is innocent enough. While the Bible would call it lust, coveting, or adultery, and consider it sin, you might call it “browsing a feed.” Feeding off sin of any type seeps its way into your heart and begins to attack your relationships. Exposing that sin is the only sure way to root it out before it can take over and block real intimacy.
LOVE BLOCKER #2: Unwillingness to do the work that would make the marriage work. I know the last thing we need is another project. We wonder, “Why can’t marriage just work?” Marriage, just like every other worthwhile thing in your life, is going to take work. Whatever we choose not to work on will degrade into chaos and decay. Our houses get dusty if we don’t clean them. Our hair gets nappy if we don’t wash it. Our bodies shrivel up if we don’t feed them. We work on what we deem to be worth our time, and in time we will see the benefits of that work carried over into marriage.
LOVER BLOCKER #3: You start to believe you need to be freed up to pursue something more attractive or attentive to your needs. The selfishness of a person who feels neglected is a powerful thing. They feel entitled to certain needs being met. They are convinced they are too attractive to be settling for someone who can’t appreciate their looks. They are too smart to settle for someone who treats them like they are ignorant. They work too hard for someone who doesn’t do anything all day. Bottom line, they think love should work like an amusement park. The selfish person is the amusement park that gets all the attention, wanting people to go out of their way to be there. They don’t go anywhere or do anything; they are there to be marveled at and touted over.
LOVE BLOCKER #4: You don’t love yourself. When you are insecure or dislike yourself, it will sabotage your relationships before they have a chance to grow. The love you may not receive in return for your own stems from a failure to open the door of your heart. You may feel that door has been taped off for reconstruction, but how often do you get to it? You have come to believe you are damaged goods. On top of that, you are too ashamed to consider how wonderfully you’ve been made. When hardship shows up in your marriage, it reinforces the internal story you’ve been telling yourself about being unworthy of love.This handicap will begin to dismantle the relationship as you perceive your spouse to be turning on you. It is just your way of controlling things. Usually, the spouse is looking to come to an understanding. But to the person who feels unlovable, they don’t recognize the opportunities they have for love to be reinforced. They actually refuse to open up when it’s knocking at the door.
So how do you get the love back into your marriage? You deal with the blockers of love. These are real conversations to be had and actions to take to aggressively remove these blockers. After these mature actions are taken, the feelings will come crawling back. When people say they have fallen out of love, they are really just experiencing things that block love. Love is not something you fall in and out of it. Love is a decision. Being wise in how you enter marriage shows you are ready to be on the journey of love for the long haul. I hope these have been helpful things to think of before you open up your heart to the greatest decision of your life.
A Marriage Tune up
Marriage is neither an art nor a science. It’s a journey. Having a pleasant experience driving somewhere depends on many factors: the company in the car, the directions to the location, enough money to make it, the kind of vehicle to get there, and whether you remembered everything you needed to bring. In my marriage journey, we have 24 years of mileage accumulated. If we don’t get a tune-up every once in a while, it will make the journey more laborious than it needs to be. Here are my top 3 things that keep our marriage tuned up.
Rev your engines…
Learn to speak in their heart language:
What I mean by this is that you rewire your brain to consider their heart before yours. I know it is most of our natural propensity to want to be understood. If we are not feeling good vibes from our spouse, we start to shut the doors of our hearts. That is the coward’s way out. To understand the other makes it so the other will want to understand you on a deeper level. But learning a new language isn’t easy. In fact, the older you get the more challenging it is to learn a new language because the neural pathways in your brain have been set. To start blazing new ones for an additional language means work. This is the same dilemma we face when learning the heart language of our spouse. It’s not a different tongue, but more of a different tone, words, and body language. When we have been set in our ways for so long, we think our spouse should find out how we got there. I can’t stress enough that learning how to communicate with them at the heart level is one of the most intimate investments you can make in order to secure your marriage. There will be a learning curve as you try different topics. You’ll learn that, depending on the timing, certain things might stress them out or bore them. You will learn that some things are stimulating and fun and can turn their day around. When you are fluent with their heart language, they will keep their heart protected from those who would take advantage of them. All of us desire to communicate at the heart level and marriage is the place to learn it.
Out-serve your spouse:
Another nail in the coffin for our natural selfish tendencies is found in service. The greatest and most powerful leadership is demonstrated through service. Imagine if the unspoken contest in your marriage was that both of you have made silent commitments to out-serve the other. We often have exhausting jobs; on top of having children, we have to respond to their beck and call. What is so appealing about serving one more person? Our jobs compensate our service with money. Our children are usually costly and take the money our jobs compensated us with. Now when it comes to our spouses, the service we render them results in feeling love and respect. The service to our spouse – if done right – will feel more like a dance than a chore. I am talking about a hot and heavy dance, not an awkward dance where you look like you’re being attacked by bees. The harmony of one spouse elevating the other after a day of work is beautiful. This harmony can be achieved through making them coffee (or in my case hot tea), getting them into a warm pair of slippers with soft classical music in the background while the food is cooking, or preparing a warm bath with candles and a nice love note left there for them to read. Are you telling me that if you serve your spouse in this way from time to time that you will go unrewarded? Even simple acts of service such as a sweet text to remind them that you still say, “I do,” or cleaning up a long-neglected refrigerator or laundry room. When you look to out-serve the other no one will ever feel neglected or taken advantage of. This is another intimacy builder that guarantees you’ll have a lot of children (if that is something you want).
Have healthy marriages around you to learn from:
“I like how she did that.”
“Did you see how he responded to her?”
These are statements that come from my wife and I after we leave the company of some great married couples we have the privilege of knowing. We learn what we might not do as well from what they do well. Having healthy marriages around us is like holding a mirror up to our own marriage—we are able to give ourselves honest assessments of where we are with things. It also takes away from the story we tell ourselves that good, loving, happily-ever-after marriages don’t exist. We can read books or go to conferences that give us information, but for implementation’s sake, we will need to be at arm’s length from those people who carry the goods of a healthy marriage. They are either around us or need to be sought out. On the opposite side, if all we see are those who are barely making it, don’t like each other, or are superficial about themselves, then this will normalize for us what marriage isn’t supposed to look like. A healthy marriage doesn’t mean they don’t get mad at each other in front of you or say something that makes everyone uncomfortable once in a while. It means even in their uncommon moments of marital tension they love each other and will remain respectful by not going overboard. If you are not around marriages that challenge your marriage to get better in one area or another, then you are robbing yourself of the richness found in those relationships.
Those are my three pieces of advice. I hope you do something with them if you are married.
Her meekness, my weakness
My wife hit me with this question: “Why don’t you do a blog talking about our marriage?” Inside of me, I was like, “Uhhhh, because I don’t know if it will come off right?” The scrutiny around blogs I’ve posted on concepts is one thing, but if I got that personal and I didn’t get a favorable response I don’t know how I would respond. Mostly likely I’d be tucking my heartstrings between my heart and running away. But I haven’t been known to shrink from a worthy challenge. If my friends were to challenge me to jump from a rock cliff into the murky water below, it’s on! So here I am jumping in due to the instigation of my wife who wanted me to write a piece on our marriage.
You should know that we were married at the ripe young age of 20 years old (she was 19). We were only saplings. What can I say? I was impatient to start my career in marriage. We had children in the picture immediately. It might or might not surprise you to know we also needed emergency marriage counseling immediately. This was because of the things we were unable to reconcile without mature, experienced adults to help us hear each other.
Today my wife and I have been happily married for years. That’s not to say we haven’t had tense moments, hard times, and strong disagreements that needed a couple of days to cool off from. But I can say it’s been happy because we are not living with a daunting belief that we might not belong together. Another contributor to our happy marriage is the knowledge that we are going to get to the other side of the hard stuff, and that we are going to get there with each other. There is no Plan B. That type of reassurance acts like a dropped anchor from a ship when the winds and waves are bringing choppy waters. I guess you can say we are now experienced sailors. Let me share with you one of the major things she had done to change how I responded early on in the tumultuous moments in our marriage.
Arguments or "intense fellowship" are a normal part of marriage. Big argument items can stem from money, children, failed expectations, extended family, and poor communication. For us, the normal cycle of arguments would go like this:
One of us would do something {ping}, the other would voice their displeasure {pong}. The other would respond with a sharp reply {ping} that would cause a reaction of one-upmanship from the other {pong}. The other would be like, “oh, no he or she didn’t,” {ping}. The escalation would include clapping hands to every syllable of what we wanted them to hear, a raised voice, loudly banging on tables, or a foot stomp or two {pong}. And eventually somebody’s parents would be blamed for how they were raised. Yup, that was our crazy cycle. Sound familiar to anybody?
Then one day my wife did something that totally undid me. She ruined our normal cycle by responding in a way that I had never encountered before in the heat of an exchange of words. I can’t recall what I was frustrated by. Whatever it was, our normal yet crazy cycle started to spin. I just know that I was upset and made some comments that weren’t kind to my wife. There was a pause before she spoke. When she spoke, she was looking to gather more information and asking questions to get a better understanding of what I was getting at. But I thought, “she isn’t going to use her Jedi mind tricks on me.” I wasn’t having it. So, I tested if she was for real by maintaining my frustrated tone with her. You’d think that that would have unsettled her from what she was attempting to do. It didn’t. Soon we were just talking and discussing what was going on. I am pretty sure she apologized, and I apologized for the part I played in the misunderstanding. I was weakened by her approach. She was meek, and her meekness was my weakness. It’s hard not to feel entitled to strongly reacting to things that come across mean-spirited.
I learned from my marriage that meekness has the strength to break cycles. It disarms our adversary. It quiets the yelling. It awakes our consciousness. It humanizes the exchange. It holds up a mirror to our ugly actions.
My marriage has had many good breakthrough moments that I can talk about, and if people are helped by this blog, I will attempt to share those other moments. I thought I should start by sharing one of the many areas that my lovely wife has impressed me in. If you know someone – or are that someone – who doesn’t want the arguments to continue to get out of hand, then try making the choice to be meek. You will be surprised at the power of what it can do for your relationships.