Week 10 ROW ROW ROW

Goddard’s book “Drawing Heaven into Your Marriage” is a tough read for me.  I honestly struggle to get through the gospel centered marriage type books. However, I did have some big take-aways from this book.  The overall theme of this book to me is this: In order to have a strong marriage, you need to look inward and improve yourself first.  Have Christ like love for your spouse, and be able to work out the kinks in our own life before you put all the blame and ‘change’ on the spouses plate. 

            Being married is a lot like being on a rowing team.  If one person is doing all the work, all the compromise, and all the brunt of the relationship, and it will go nowhere.  It takes two people, rowing in time, communicating and being consistent in their efforts to be effective.  One can’t make up for the other’s lack.  The marriage will just go in circles! Marriage is 100% effort from both to make progress in your ‘marriage shell’ to make it to the finish line.

           

WEEK 9 Some realness

This week has been particularly busy for me.  The kids are home from summer, and my husband started an amazing new job two weeks ago.  This was unexpected, and a huge blessing, but it has caused us to quickly revamp our summer plans.  While the new job is a blessing, it is requiring him to be gone a lot more than usual.  Couple that with taking eleven credits over the summer with four kids at home, things are getting a lot more stressful.  The lessons that were taught in chapters eight and nine of ‘The Seven Principles for Making a Marriage Work’ could not have come at a better time.  There are some major things happening that I need help with, like hiring a nanny for three hours a day on the days he is traveling so I can get school done.  I can say from practicing the soft start-up, and adding a sense of humor and lightness to the topics that I needed to discuss with my husband, we were able to reach an outcome that was favorable to both of us.  As an added bonus we both left the discussion feeling great and even deepening our friendship and love for each other. 

If you read the book, the exercise can seem super cheesy.  However, they work like a charm.  The first exercise is the soft start up.  I think that it actually helped in getting my husbands attention more because it was different than how I usually start a conversation.  I realize now that it started with a complaint about how tired or stressed I am, instead of saying, “Hey babe, I am feeling very stressed about getting everything done with school.  I would really like to figure out a way to have some help.  Can we look at the budget and see if we can move some things around?”  I was anticipating some resistance, but he got right on it and we made it happen!  It works!  The second exercise was in making repair attempts, and receiving repair attempts.  I like the humor aspect of this strategy.  Things are lighter when you laugh.  This one might not work all the time, but it works for us.  It also helps us avoid gridlock, as it kinda yanks us out of our current situation and helps us separate from the topic and gain some perspective on what we are talking about. 

My favorite exercise this week was learning to soothe yourself and each other.  I am a yoga teacher, and all the exercise Dr. Gottman suggested you practice with yourself and with each other was straight out of my yoga nidra training.  It was a much simpler form of yoga nidra, but I can say from personal and professional experience that these simple practices will be a game changer in how you regulate your reactions to life situations.  One of the classes I teach is at a drug rehabilitation facility.  They request yoga nidra because you are training your mind and body to not react to stressors, as well as internal and external stimuli.  You can see how valuable this skill would be if you are learning how to maintain sobriety.   In a marriage using these techniques you can training yourself to not react to emotional stress.  Instead, you will take a moment to look at the situation from a calm place instead of a flooded emotional place.  What a powerful tool, right?  Try it.  It works.  Steps four, compromise, and step five, dealing with emotional injuries, are far more likely to happen if you can calmly look at the situation and realize what you are actually fighting about, and where it may be coming from.  Little things can trigger deep emotional wounds, and knowing what those are for yourself personally, as what those are for your spouse make it much easier to realize that some hot button issues have nothing to do with you or your spouse at all, and everything to do with an emotional injury that may have happened before you even met them. 

  (Sidebar- if you need help relaxing, find a yoga nidra class.  You are welcome.)

Week 8 PRIDE has no place in a marriage.

n a marriage, even a strong stable marriage, your faults and weakness become glaringly apparent.  Very quickly.  Sometimes the way your upbringing has something to do with it.  Sometimes its just learning to live with and love you spouse now that you are under the same roof.  What I learned from this week’s readings is that marriage is either a fight to the literal death of the marriage, or learning to yield and change.  I could be very wrong in my assumption, but I don’t think that I am too far off. 

First of all, no one loves to be corrected.  No one relishes in being told that they are doing something wrong.  And no one loves a know it all.  This applies to marriage and yielding to one’s spouse.  There are times where doing certain things a certain way is important to the wife.  In Dr. Gottman’s book “The Seven Principles of Making Marriage Work”, principle four is called “Letting your spouse influence you”.  Dr. Gottman uses the proverbial example of the toilet seat up or down.  He writes, “So a man can score major points with his wife just by putting the seat down.  The wise husband smiles at how smart he is as he drops the lid.”  What struck me is that the husband in this example is still winning, even though he is giving in to what his wife wants.  Could she put the seat down?  Sure.  But knowing that her husband made the effort to yield to something that was important to her will score him major bonus points. At the same time the wife feels valued and validated that her husband loves her, and knows her needs and wants are important to him. 

In my own marriage, I have been very blessed to have a husband who is very aware of things.  More importantly, he is very open to suggestions and needs that I have, especially when I am struggling to get everything together.  Last night was a long one, and we were so tired that I didn’t get the dishes completely finished before going to bed.  I woke up to find that my husband had cleaned the rest of the kitchen this morning, because he knows I like waking up to a clean kitchen.  I didn’t ask him to, but he did that for me because he knew it would make me happy.  This is the win-win situation.  I win by having a clean kitchen and a huge smile on my face.  He wins by cleaning the kitchen and having a super happy and affectionate wife all day long (wink wink :P)  

Letting your partner influence you is in no way giving up your power to your wife or your husband.  I look at it like this:  You can listen and reflect what the person is saying.  You can validate and be there for them.  Then your partner has the opportunity to listen, reflect and validate you.  From that place of listening and understanding, and detaching pride from any of it, together the couple can work together to find that win-win situation like the toilet seat. 

Week 7 Turning towards each other

This week I loved the readings so much.  Turning towards each other in a marriage has a lot to do with building on the friendship and fondness that a couple has for each other.  If you aren't fond of your partner, you aren't going to want to turn towards them, and actively listen to their day.  The metaphor that really helped me conceptualize the idea of turning towards your spouse was the emotional bank account.  By turning towards each other, and prioritizing your spouse and the relationship, you are investing in long term and short term benefits.  Long term benefits are likened to a savings account, a safety net that a couple can pull from when times are tough.  Short term benefits of turning toward each other are the enhancement of the immediate relationship by strengthening trust.  I think that the hardest part of this is learning to read a bid for attention and connection when your spouse is frustrated or angry.  I think it is important in a marriage, and any relationship for that matter, that you never take anything personally when things are said in frustration or anger.  In stead, use that outburst as a little window into your partner's mind or past experiences.  Figure out what you can learn about your partner from this instead of taking it personally.  In the talk it out exercise it has a lot of questions that have to do with an individuals past experiences, as a way of helping a person learn more about themselves, as well as their partner's history.  I think that one can learn a lot about themselves by analyzing their reactions to situations, and where that reaction is rooted.  For me, I react very strongly when I feel like I am not being appreciated.  At the beginning of our marriage, I naively thought it was just that my husband was not good at husbanding.  After a while though, and some individual therapy, I realized it was because growing up I felt like I had to do everything for my younger brothers, and I felt that they did nothing.  I even had to clean the bathrooms that they used and it was so gross.  This was the real root cause, and thank heavens my husband had the good sense to know that there was something more going on than him forgetting to pick up his clothes.  

Marriage is a balancing act of knowing when it is something to do with you, your past, or if it really is an issue that needs to be resolved within the marriage.