My four secrets to saving your marriage and your family
My heart is breaking over some of the comments on my previous post. That post reviews and offers a giveaway of Leila Miller’s Impossible Marriages Redeemed: They Didn’t End the Story in the Middle. (Affiliate link) I can’t answer all the comments there, but I want everyone who left a note about a difficult marriage to know that we two Leilas are praying for you, your friends, and/or your parents!
As it happens, I am going over and editing (again!) the section of my forthcoming book in which I give you my four secrets to what I call “destruction-proofing” your marriage.
So I thought I’d go bring these four important points back up out of the archives — points without which a marriage is at great risk.
As I repeat here on the blog and in the book, there are no guarantees. We all have free will. The terrible truth is that anyone can destroy anything at any time. But the good news is that sacrificial love conquers all — if not in this life, then in the next. Christ’s cross triumphs!
Sacrificial love is lived out in certain particular ways. I love my husband dearly and he loves me — but you can imagine that during the 40 years of our marriage we’ve had our share of turmoil. We’re only human! We also have seen how others’ marriages endure over the years — or not. And all that is what I’m bringing to this post. I’m sure these ways I’ve identified are not sufficient, but they are necessary.
Here they are:
The first secret
Live your Sunday as a day of worship, rest, and celebration. If you, husband and wife, set clear standards for how this day will be, you will see your whole week — that is to say, your whole life! — orient itself rightly.
One super practical suggestion: Make up your mind that you will not shop on this day (excepting emergency trips for medicine or other necessities — even foregoing milk on this day is not going to kill anyone). I really cannot see how a Christian can schedule routine shopping on the Lord’s day. Just think about the peaceable justice that would settle on this land if even the poor could rest and not work on this day.
Everyone needs a day set apart, a day that not full of activity, commerce, work, and cares the way the others are. God gave as one of his 10 Commandments that we keep this day holy. Seems important. Read more about how to do this here.
The second secret
Eat dinner together as a family. I have a lot of strategies to accomplish this goal written out here on the blog. Let me just say that every family should prioritize Sunday dinner (supper, picnic, brunch, whatever works) — but this requires that they eat together at least four times a week. You can’t snap your fingers and have good habits and be pleasant company for each other — if you don’t practice, you will be frustrated.
Dinner together is family communion. Husband and wife have a chance to converse; children see how important this is to them. Here is where family life is solidified, around the dinner table. Guests benefit from the love that overflows. Children learn to listen and to talk.
The family that eats dinner together stays together. When your older children start to go off, turn your attention to the younger ones. Before you know it, grandchildren will be partakers in this banquet as well!
There is no way to have this blessing without making it a priority!
The third secret
Keep the marital embrace pure and be generous. Love each other when you want to and welcome the children God sends you. The truth that is obscured by our baby-averse society is that very few couples will have a lot of children, and those that do are just fine, especially where people accept that this is a normal outcome of married life.
Many couples will not have the number of children they envisioned when they worried about it at the start; some will have none and this will be a great suffering to them. Our resistance to babies prevents us from seeing how many people do suffer this way.
If you thought you could never have any children or very few, would you act differently? I find that it’s really only fear that drives couples to contraception.
Strangely, contraception doesn’t work the way people say it does. Far from being a magical solution to all life’s problems, it fails miserably. Contraceptive methods fall into two categories: the kind that don’t work in preventing conception (and must be backed up by abortion) and those that mostly (but not always) work, but in the process do real harm to the woman and/or kill her child.
Yes, there is natural family planning. I am not going to go into it here — in my experience, it’s best use is to help those who have difficulty conceiving.
What if there was another way? I suggest that we can avoid all the heartache of what I call Baby Resistance if we look at the marital embrace as a normal way of living out marriage and children as a gift. No one tells you this, but you need to know. For my full explanation, go here.
The fourth secret
The reason you need to know the third secret is that you can’t implement the fourth secret unless you have first removed the serious disorders brought on by Baby Resistance. These disorders include bitterness, lack of libido, feelings of being used, chemical/hormonal imbalance leading to poor health, excessive control, and lack of communication.
You see, the fourth secret is that husband and wife ought to be friends and admire each other! Naturally, you can’t even begin if you are not following the third secret… but if you are, you can be free to work on this area. What good does it do to know your respective temperaments, love languages, and so on, if you are thwarting your most basic form of communication, the conjugal one?
Most marriage advice is about romance and spontaneity, when the real issue is that spouses fall into bad habits of being indifferent or even contemptuous of each other, leading to sometimes serious betrayals. Husband and wife need to admire each other and really be friends. They need to put each other first in a joyful way.
Friends are courteous to each other, find each other’s company restful and charming, and are somewhat in awe of the gift of disinterested love that each brings to the other. Friends naturally strive to be more, not less, virtuous for the sake of the other.
Begin today with the first step, which is gratitude. We can only overcome contempt with gratitude! And I will warn you, if you don’t work to eradicate the evil weed of contemptuousness in your own heart, your marriage will not be safe from destruction. The good news is that admiration works wonders to heal even the saddest relationship! There are more particulars, especially about the different ways each sex needs to be admired, here in this post.
Of course, starting out well would be ideal. But even the most difficult marriage can be turned around — for proof, read Leila Miller’s book. Please be sure you have entered to win one of the copies we are giving away, by leaving a comment on the giveaway post. We will close the giveaway on Thursday.
The post My four secrets to saving your marriage and your family appeared first on Like Mother Like Daughter.
