During all the different seasons of marriage, it can be a challenge to keep romance alive. Here are some ideas!
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Is your marriage struggling around trauma, grief, PTSD, depression, betrayal, or other serious challenge? For those of you staying together through it, here are some tips for working on marriage with difficulties such as these in the picture.
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What did you think the empty nest or retirement would be like? Was it what you expected? For many of us, it wasn't! What about navigating marriage during these seasons?
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Sharing beliefs is communication at its deepest. To get here, we're likely already doing well talking about almost everything else and feeling a good bit of trust to share.
Can you unite on needs and goals? These are deeper topics of communication. Sharing on this level deepens intimacy.
As a couple, can we come up with joint vision and goals for the upcoming year together? When we make the time to dream and seek God's direction, we can unite our efforts toward shared goals.
Can you share your feelings without a verbal and emotional explosion? This is a deeper level of communication. To get here, we first want to get better at more surface levels of small talk, facts, and opinions.
Sharing opinions goes deeper than our usual surface level of communication. Here, we can learn to respect each other's differences, which sets us up to go deeper.
A lot of us easily communicate on the surface. It's in this zone we can work through going deeper.
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Do you long to talk on a deeper level? Here's a good starting point. _______
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While some of us excitedly plan for the holidays, others are dreading it. As a couple, what can we do to improve the holiday scene and make precious memories for our family?
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Communication happens on different levels. In marriage, the hope is that we will learn to share our deepest self to each other, and that we would receive such communication with gentle interest and curiosity with a goal to know and be known.
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We're always investing via our time, energy, and focus. We receive a harvest from the direction of our investment. The question is, what are we investing in? If it isn't our marriage, we shouldn't be surprised if it is no longer fulfilling. To enjoy what God intended, we should invest as God intended.
Have you felt disillusioned in your marriage as you notice his and her imperfections? So, what do we do with that?
How do you maintain a healthy marriage while parenting? Here are some ideas.
Parenting together well requires husband and wife coming together, blending very different ideas about parenting. Here are some thoughts to get you started.
Here’s an overview of resolving conflict in various relationships.
Have you been married long enough to realize your spouse isn't perfect? Once the honeymoon is over, reality of day-to-day life sets in when everything isn't as perfect as we'd imagined. So how do we adjust?
Returning to our first love and doing the first works (Revelation 2) maintains our walk with the Lord and also applies to our marriage.
What do we do with negative thoughts about our family? We can control our thoughts and avoid assuming.
Here's a brief overview of some male-female differences. How might these affect the way we find "we" in marriage?
When we over-address, it can seem everything's wrong and push the spouse toward losing hope, but when we pretend nothing's wrong, we neglect cleaning out the relationship and allow walls to build.
When we over-address, it can seem everything's wrong and push the spouse toward losing hope, but when we pretend nothing's wrong, we neglect cleaning out the relationship and allow walls to build.
If we address issues too frequently, we create the feeling we are unhappy and dissatisfied, but if we address them infrequently, we come across as not caring. How can you land on somewhere in the middle?
Temper your sharing frequency toward your spouse's to avoid overwhelming an under-sharer and to meet the conversational needs of the over-sharer.
When we talk more easily, we can come across as aggressive, and when we don't talk as much, we can come across as withdrawing. This can send a message we didn't intend.
Tone of voice can twist a well-intentioned message. Anytime we express negative feelings via tone of voice, it's likely to return a negative response.
Is your wife withdrawing from you or becoming increasingly intense toward you? Let's talk about how you can help.
We are shaped and prepared for ministry via our relationships at home.
Our marriages speak to others and are a testimony of what we believe - especially about how we see God. How might we pattern our marriages after God's heart to share a better message?
To make a marriage plan to walk out of distress, you first need to see where you are and decide where you want to grow. Too many times we're living as if the marriage were where we wish, rather than in the reality of where we actually are.
We can learn how to grow deeper in our marriage relationship by understanding how we grow deeper in our relationship with the Lord.
When married, do we serve individually, together, a mix of both? How might this look and how do we serve together?
Our relationships are living and functioning. As such, they produce waste. In marriage, resolving conflict removes waste and prevents its buildup between husband and wife.
Can we go into each other's holy place? What does it look like there, and what are the rules of your holy place?
In marriage, we are to grow to a place of being spiritually and emotionally naked and unashamed.
Let's talk about Proverbs 16:24 and what it means for our words to be sweet for another person to receive them.
Let's look at Proverbs 22:17-18 to understand how to listen to someone we want to blend with.
What's a man to do with a crying, wounded woman? (Yes, the idea for the title came from the movie, "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.")
His and her brains respond differently to anger. Let's talk about info on this topic we found in Dr. Carolyn Leaf's book, Who Switched Off My Brain?
How does processing internally or externally affect relationships? Let's talk about info from Dr. Carolyn Leaf's book, Who Switched Off My Brain?
Males & females interact with their emotions very differently. Let's talk about it. We're referencing Dr. Carolyn Leaf's book, Who Switched Off My Brain?
Male and female read and interpret non-verbal cues differently, but how does this affect relationship? Let's talk about some info from Dr. Carolyn Leaf's book, Who Switched Off My Brain?
What's different about his and her communication? Lots! Join us as we talk about those differences and their impact on relationships. Some of this info came from Dr. Carolyn Leaf's book, Who Switched Off My Brain?
Male and female are different in the way our brains are wired. Let's look at what's different in the way we perceive, with info discussed from Dr. Carolyn Leaf's book, Who Switched Off My Brain.
Merging families is a challenge, and there are many pieces to this picture. Here are some conversation starters to help.
Our day-to-day routines can include or exclude our spouse and family. Working as a team around routines contributes toward marriage & family closeness.
Because we are male and female, we process information differently, and this affects the marriage.
Let's talk about how male and female viewpoints are different and how we can complement each other with these differences.
Our brains are wired differently, and it affects the way we communicate. Let's look at how men and women are different and how knowing this can improve communication in marriage.
As a couple, we need to be on the same page about our budget, but it's helpful to position ourselves to even go there. Here are some ideas about getting ready to talk about the budget.
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As individuals, we place different meanings and values on things, like holidays, the way we believe about different things, and... everything! It's important for us to come up with "We" meanings.
Sharing and supporting dreams helps us thrive as individuals and as a couple.
How do we juggle all our relationships? Let's talk about budgeting our time.
Dr. John Gottman recommends strengthening a marriage by adding these 6 hours per week.
What happens when disagreements don't turn out well? Couples in healthy marriages analyze them. Let's look at how to do that.
Have you ever apologized, but it wasn't well-received? Here are some tips to help you say your apology well.
How do we make decisions together when we have such different perspectives? We're supposed to have different perspectives! Let's look at how to blend.
When our spouse shares a problem, we need to be willing to adjust. How might we do that well?
How do we pray in faith for our family, and how do we get started as a couple?
Maintaining connectivity while your spouse is sharing is doing your part as listener.
Keeping our cool while sharing a challenging thought can be difficult, but it's the only way to talk things through.
If we're not careful, we can get in our own way when it comes to catching our spouse's heart message.
Prevent your presentation from blocking your heart message by being aware of how you may be coming across.
Did you know the way you start communication can determine how it goes?
We both have something to say, but we can only work through one topic at a time and must wait until it's our turn to share.
Before we can address issues well, we should create an environment of unconditional love and acceptance of our spouse as-is without trying to change him/her.
Are you feeding a negative cycle in your marriage? You bring up a topic that automatically escalates, and you don't know what happened? Couples contribute to the negative spiral, and it can worsen over time. What sets it up?
How did we get here? Understanding the set up for negativity can help us understand how to reverse it.
As a couple, we've developed a history together. Now, our spouse expects conversation to go a certain way based on our responses. We need to create new expectations.
We expect so much in marriage! Regardless of what we think our spouse SHOULD do, we need to be Ok with what our spouse CHOOSES to do. (We're not talking about destructive choices here)
If you’re the listener, you’d want to be listening…. If you’re the speaker, you’d want to share your message in a way the listener can hear.
If you're struggling with getting your spouse to hear you when you present a problem to resolve, maybe you could improve your set up.
What can you do to improve the chance your spouse may really listen when you share?
How might you help your spouse become aware of your challenging preferences or triggers?
Repairing and soothing can help us stay calm during conflict and keep it healthy.
