Nurturing your Marriage

Marriages are fragile.  They take a lot of work and nurturing on our parts to keep them healthy and strong.  Making your spouse your best friend is crucial in keeping a marriage strong.  We need to talk to and confide in our spouse.  As we talk to our spouse and as we listen to our spouse we are building Love Maps. Having a strong love map means that you know your spouse well.  You know their thoughts, likes, dislikes, fears, hopes and dreams.   John Gottman in his book says that “couples who have detailed love maps of each other’s worlds are far better prepared to cope with stressful events and conflict.”  Knowing each other intimately brings a closeness in a marriage and helps us weather the storms that life brings us.  The better we know our spouse the more will grow together and not grow apart.  As humans we are always evolving and changing.  It is vital that we know and understand how our spouse is changing and what is going in their lives.

Along with detailed love maps another way that we nurture our marriages is through fondness and admiration.  We need to look for the positive in our spouses and look past the bad.  If we choose to focus on the positive that is what we are going to notice more.  We need to point out the positive things that we notice to our spouse and push the criticism away.  Criticizing someone rarely does any good.  Elder Joe Christiansen told us to avoid ceaseless pin pricking he said “‘Ceaseless pin pricking,’ as President Spencer W. Kimball called it, can deflate almost any marriage. … Generally, each of us is painfully aware of our weaknesses, and we don’t need frequent reminders. Few people have ever changed for the better as a result of constant criticism or nagging. If we are not careful, some of what we offer as constructive criticism is actually destructive”.  

We need to find the little things that we love about our spouse and then share it with them. We should never just assume that someone knows what we are feeling and thinking.   I think that it is important that we tell our spouse we love them often, daily even.  It crucial to a marriage that we let our spouse know what we love about them and that we appreciate them.   I have been making great efforts this week to notice all the little things that my husband has been doing all week. This has been eye opening for me and I have felt an outpouring of love for him as I have focused on all the things he is does for me and for my family on a daily basis.   

Spouse and Best Friend

  No vote

In Gottman’s book “The Seven Principles for Making a Marriage work” he talks about the importance of friendship in a marriage.  He says, “ …happy marriages are based on a deep friendship.  By this I mean a mutual respect for and enjoyment of each other’s company.   These couples tend to know each other intimately- they are well versed in each other’s likes, dislikes, personality quirks, hopes and dreams.  They have an abiding regard for each other and express this fondness not just in the big ways but through small gestures day in and day out.”  These things that Gottman mentions in this paragraph are what really make a marriage work.  When we get married we are essentially saying that we chose that person to be the one person that we want to share our entire lives with.  In order for this to work this person has to your best friend.  The person you marry should be the person you want to be with the most.  You should enjoy being together. You should have fun together and you need to respect each other.   When you are dating that is the time to really get to know the person.  When you are dating someone do it with your eyes wide open.  Dating is the time to decide if the persons odd quirks are something you love or if they just drive you crazy.  Do you guys agree on the important things like having children, being a stay at home mom, or both of you working?  Dating is the time to find all this out.    Being in love with someone is important but we also need to like the person. There has to more than just physical attraction in a relationship.  A friendship must be developed.  The deeper the friendship the deeper the bond between the couple will be.  Through friendship is how our love and respect for our spouse will grow.  When we genuinely love and respect our spouse we will want to serve them, and care for them.  When disagreements come along you are able to talk them through and listen and try to understand each other’s perspective.  If we are married to our best friend then we will be happy to put their happiness over your own and they will do the same.  Make your spouse your best friend and have fun together.  Marriage should be enjoyed and celebrated!    How do you make your marriage more enjoyable?

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3 Wolves

In Bruce C Hafens talk “Covenant Marriage” he speaks of three wolves that are detrimental to marriages.  The three wolves were natural adversity, our own imperfections, and excessive individualism.  I believe that the  third wolf that he spoke of excessive individualism is particularly detrimental to our society.  There is such a cry for people to find out who they are and to not let anyone or anything define who you are.  We cannot belong to anything because then we lose our individual identity.  This line of thinking goes against everything that marriage should be about.  When two people get married they are forming a union.  They are becoming one.  Elder Hafen states “The adversary has long cultivated this overemphasis on personal autonomy, and now he feverishly exploits it. Our deepest God-given instinct is to run to the arms of those who need us and sustain us. But he drives us away from each other today with wedges of distrust and suspicion. He exaggerates the need for having space, getting out, and being left alone.” Satan has convinced us as a society that needing or wanting to be with a person means that you are a weak individual.  He wants people to think that marriage is for weak minded people and that if marry you give up yourself and this can’t actually make anyone happy.  We must constantly be seeking out what we need and focus on ourselves.  This kind of thinking can break a marriage and keeps people from even entering into marriage.  We need to fight against this wolf in our marriages. 

We need to nurture our marriages and keep the Lord and the center of our marriages.  When we serve our spouse as Christ served others then we can have much in our marriage

Are Your Religious Liberties at Risk?

 If a bare majority of Justices can invent a new right and impose that right on the rest of the country, the only real limit on what future majorities will be able to do is their own sense of what those with political power and cultural influence are willing to tolerate- Justice Alito

The Supreme Court Justice Thomas in his dissenting argument for the case OBERGEFELL v. HODGES, in which, in a vote of 5-4 voted  legalizing same sex marriage, gives a compelling argument of why he dissented. He say's  “Aside from undermining the political processes that protect our liberty, the majority’s decision threatens the religious liberty our Nation has long sought to protect. The history of religious liberty in our country is familiar: Many of the earliest immigrants to America came seeking freedom to practice their religion without restraint” He goes on to say, “Today’s decision might change the former, but it cannot change the latter. It appears all but inevitable that the two will come into conflict, particularly as individuals and churches are confronted with demands to participate in and endorse civil marriages between same-sex couples.”    Marriage is a religious matter for many people.  Many have strong religious beliefs that marriage is to be between a man and a woman.  This ruling may take away the right to practice this religious view.  Churches may be forced to allow same sex marriage or be penalized for it.  We cannot allow our religious liberties to be taken away from us. After this ruling it is only a matter of time before some same sex couples insist on being allowed to be married anywhere. whether it goes against another’s religious belief or not.  We must fight this and be allowed to practice our 1^st amendment rights and have religious freedom.

What Matters Most

“Many of the social restraints which in the past have helped to reinforce and to shore up the family are dissolving and disappearing. The time will come when only those who believe deeply and actively in the family will be able to preserve their families in the midst of the gathering evil around us.”

-President Spencer W. Kimball

 We live in a world today where marriage does not seem to have a great importance to people anymore.  You hear about celebrities getting married and divorced shortly after.  It almost seems to be some kind of game to people.  There does not seem to be a high level of commitment to many marriages anymore.  Once the fun and "honeymoon" stage is over and the real work begins more and more people want to bail.  I can't help but think that Satan has worked really hard to deteriorate the concept of marriage in our society today.He knows if he can rip apart our Families he has won a huge battle. We need to safe guard our marriages and our families.  For me that means putting my relationship with my husband as a priority in my life.  It means spending time together as a family.  Family time most be made a priority.  We need to eat meals together, read scriptures and say prayers as a family and as a couple. We also need to remember to have fun together.  Whether its spending time at the beach or playing games at your dining room table create a lifetime of memories and create a family that wants loves each other and enjoys being together.