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.