The Marriage Code – #102

Pardon me, today’s reflection is a little long but trust me I did my best to summarize.

Consider the fact that a lot of marriages are on edge and people who were so excited during their courting days and on the day of their marriage now want out, I would continue in this piece my discourse on marriage. It is a pity to note that a lot of families are breaking apart at an alarming rate. In effect, societies are standing on shaky ground, because if the family which is supposed to be the basic unit of society is threatened by unstable marriages, then society is in serious trouble. 

Today I would share with you (5) five ways to save a drowning marriage. I believe this write-up, will also be pragmatically useful to those of you considering marriage as a vocation.

1. Practice the “art of KNOWING”

Knowing is in two ways. Self-knowledge and knowledge about your partner. What makes you tick? How are you wired? What are your likes and dislikes? What are your weaknesses, and which vices do you gravitate towards easily?

1Peter 3:7, says men must live with their wives with the proper understanding…  It means that a man must dwell with a woman according to knowledge and vice versa. I have heard people say that “courtship was ‘sweeter’ and more fun than marriage”. 

The reason, I believe is this, in courtship you are getting to know each other, so you study the significant other with all seriousness. And because you don’t want to offend the significant other you do their likes and avoid their dislikes. 

However, after marriage, you think you have arrived, so you stop studying the other person and still hold on to your previous knowledge about the person and that’s when the problems begin. We got to understand that people evolve, people’s taste, life mantra’s, principles and world views can change depending on how they get hit by life. Circumstances and events can change people, married people therefore have to practice the art of knowing, which means studying the other person for the rest of your life.

You must forever be a student of the one you love. Immediately you think you have graduated in knowing them that’s when your problems will begin.  Never assume, be a student of your partner, seek to know them on daily basis; find out, who are they now and what is important to them now There must be an ongoing interchange, you got to watch and learn. However, the art of knowing doesn’t mean you should hide and go through the messages, mails, phone and stuff of your partner. If you do that you will find ghosts that will scare you.

2. You must practice ACTIVE LISTENING. 

Listening is one of the essential elements in a partnership like marriage. Listening goes beyond the ear and the tongue. You must as part of active listening pay attention to the nonverbal expressions. They are even more important. So, your wife says there is no problem,but her nonverbal cues suggest a cold attitude. It means her speech contradicts her actions. So, if you are wise, you will pause and get to the root of the issue before it builds up and blows into your face. Today everybody is talking, and nobody is listening.

Listening means you pay attention to communication, both verbal, nonverbal and micro expressions

You must also know how a man and a woman communicate, because they communicate differently.  

Never assume that what you heard is what the person means, always seek clarifications to make sure that you are on the same wavelength. Methods of communication must be learnt. Everybody has his own unique way of saying “I love you” or “I am pissed at you”. No two people are the same.  It must be noted that successful people owe a lot of their success to good communication. In the same way, the people with most problems are generally persons who lack communication skills. It is said that we spend 70% of our daylight hours in communication (speaking or listening, reading or writing) and 30% of this time is devoted to talking. You and your partner must talk about things you are interested in. You must make it a point to honestly talk about what is bothering you and not bottle it up and wait till the bottle bursts. It is also important to talk and share your future hopes and dreams.

It is important to make sure that you understand your spouse. You must understand each other’s thoughts, moods and emotions. We all have diverse mood, thoughts and emotions. One of the jobs in marriage is to know, support and understand the intellectual and emotional make up which God has given your partner. The goal is not to make your partner conform to your thoughts, emotions and moods but to help each other handle those individual feelings in healthy and positive ways. As part of listening couples need to take the satisfaction of the sexual appetite and emotional intimacy serious. Generally, people leave each other because of simple stuffs. I call them the little things. The difference between happiness and hell is the simple things, the little things.

If you are too busy to listen, you will lose. You will end up paying all those professionals to come in and help you listen. Think about it for second, you have been with your wife for 20 years and because of your inability to listen to one another you are now in the office of a priest, pastor, elder, deacon, counsellor and lawyer so that he can aid you listen to each other. That’s sad. You will spend money, lose your home, your assets, your children if you refuse to listen to each other.

3. You must learn to WAIT on each other

Everybody wants everything now; nobody wants to wait. Believe me when I tell you that, You and your partner won’t bond within the first 6 months, 1st year, 2nd year or even 3rd year. You will not access the CLEAVING RIGHT instantly. It takes time for you to leave your historicity behind. It takes time for you to leave your mother and father behind and cleave and become one flesh and develop your own culture with your partner, which your children will also adopt. 

The problem is that most of us want to treat our homes like we saw our parents do. That is wrong. The new couple will have to gradually pick and choose and develop their own culture. The fact that you father handled a particular domestic issue in a particular way doesn’t mean it will work for you in your new home. So, you got to learn the art of waiting so you can gradually cleave and bond to each other. The art of waiting simply means to cleave and become one flesh, and that takes time, so you got to be patience. A waiting partner is one who hasn’t given up on the significant other. A waiting woman is one who is waiting on you the man to grow up and start acting like a man.

If you are not willingly to wait and you think changing partners will solve your problem, chances are that if you go in for another partner, you will end up at the same place you ended up with your first.

4. Practice Forgiving and letting go.

The only people who can hurt us deep are those close to us. And the hurt is painful precisely because we have an emotional investment in that relationship. We must make room for the possibility of hurt from the significant other. You will never sustain a lifelong love without forgiveness. If you don’t develop the art of forgiveness, you will lose big time. Some of you don’t have the ability to forgive because your parents didn’t demonstrate it to you and therefore it’s not in your culture.

However, I dare to you to pray the Lord’s prayer and say “forgive me my trespasses as I forgive those who trespass against me”.

I don’t understand how you can ask God for forgiveness and believe that He will forgive you, for your improprieties and your mistakes and yet when you get a chance to operate in that forgiveness, you have no forgiveness for the other. Then you turn and tell me you are holy? Nah, you are hellish. You can’t be an unforgiving Christian. It’s an oxymoron. The nature of the Christian is to be forgiving. How can you be an unforgiving Christian? I can’t think far…  

Learn to forgive if you want your marriage to thrive or survive. Couples must, therefore, develop the ability to resolve conflicts. Every couple has disagreements. The key is to develop ground rules so that each partner feels respected and heard. 

5. Be OPEN

You see, after you have been hurt a couple of times. There is the natural survival instinct that will lock you up into a state of self-protection, to keep you from hurting again. The hardest thing to do is to open up again after you have been hurt deeply. The art of openness refers to opening your soul after it has been hurt.  The very fact that you are not opened is killing the relationship. Even God will not force his word into you unless you open your heart. Openness means to be present in the moment, to stay connected, to share what you truly feel with the significant other.

Let’s rewind back into the eighties, fifties and thirties. Grandpa never took Grandma out on a date anywhere. They never lived in the fancy houses we live in now. Neither did they drive the fancy cars we drive now. But you would agree with me, that the marriage of our grandparents and great-grandparents lasted and fared better than our marriages today. So, what are we missing? Our problem is that we are closing, we are becoming individualistic, selfish, and greedy. If we can open up and love again, we will feel again.

My prayer today is for all marriages going through rough times. You have come too far to give up- look at your kids, the sleepless nights, all the emotional investments and all the sacrifices you have made. YOU were happy at first, so what happened? 

May God, bring you help from Zion.