Two Very Helpful Words

Most of us over forty know the classic line from the 1970 movie Love Story:

"Love means never having to say you're sorry!"

Well, as Ryan O'Neal said himself in the screwball comedy What's Up Doc? two years later:

"That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard!"

I don't think I have to spend too much time waxing on about this particular topic. Bottom line is this: if you've had a recent (or even not-so-recent) argument with your spouse....and you know you're wrong.....just say "I'm sorry" and end the thing! Even though you can't control someone else's response to your apology (that's a different subject altogether), at the very least you yourself will no longer be carrying around foolish pride, anger, pain, self-justification, alienation and all of those other impossible burdens that we place on ourselves when refuse to admit we're wrong. As one sage said, "In marriage, you can be right....or you can be happy!"

Letting go of having to "be right" all the time will probably increase the days of your life, too--certainly the quality of your life. And, most likely, you will be moving your marriage in a positive direction...back toward close togetherness again with the one you love--which was, hopefully, the reason you got married in the first place.

Mutual Admiration Society

When is the last time you lavished praise on each other? Expressions of love and appreciation for one another can mean so much. Loving words are a great start. I'm not talking about flattery here. In my view, flattery is complimenting someone in an untrue way....in order to get something. No, I'm talking about giving the one you love genuine compliments--heartfelt expressions of affection and appreciation for qualities that they possess. What are those things your spouse has, does and is (pardon my grammar) that makes your life more joyful? Whatever those qualities are, it's time to express those things to your spouse. Don't assume that these feelings are already well-known around your household. Even if your love knows that you feel that way, authentic compliments still go a LONG WAY!!



Next, move from words of love to affectionate touches, full embraces and to holding each other. Make the most of the moments you have together. Show excitement when you see the love of your life--otherwise, how will anyone (including the love of your life) know that that person is the love of your life? Make it obvious!



This may all sound so elementary--because it is. But our schedules, distractions of life and even the cares and concerns of the hard knocks of life can all keep us from expressing what we need to be expressing to our lifelong partners. Don't let those factors get the best of your marriage. Give special looks, special notes and special kisses to one another. You'll begin to remember all kinds of things that made you fall in love in the first place. I highly recommend an abundance of affection toward the one to whom you pledged a lifelong love commitment.

The Key To Intimate Love

One of the great keys to marriage success is to overcome the "me first" mentality. This shouldn't be too hard for us to comprehend. It stands to reason that one cannot serve a spouse selflessly while nursing a mindset that is constantly asking the question "when am I going to get what I want?" But let's make this clear: we did not come into this life naturally wired with those kind of benevolent feelings for others--not even for the love of our life! Even for the nicest people we know, that kind of "others-centered" love is not in our DNA. It's just a plain fact that everyone struggles from time to time with selfishness. It's also a fact that we need supernatural transformational help in order to love intimately. So what to do?

One of the first steps in moving past the mindset that "life is not fair for me" is to accept the fact that suffering is not all bad. Let me explain. While no sane person would aggressively pursue suffering, nevertheless, enduring suffering is one of the most dramatic ways that we can learn to identify with the heart of Christ. The Apostle Paul said in Philippians 3:10, "I want to know Christ, the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His suffering." Paul wasn't crazy. On the contrary, Paul understood that learning how to connect with, experience, and understand personal suffering was also how he was going to learn how to connect with God's heart.

Why is that important? Several reasons. It's important to understand that God can somehow use suffering for good in your marriage. It's important to understand that God can somehow use conflict for good in your marriage. But it's even more important to understand that connecting intimately with the heart of God is the key to connecting intimately with the heart of your spouse. I'll repeat that: Connecting intimately with the heart of God is the key to connecting intimately with the heart of your spouse. Only through learning how to love God--the author of all love--in a deeper way will a person have genuine love to give to others. Look in I John 4:19. We are clearly told, "We love because He first loved us." Period. So, in other words, you can't love your spouse richly, intimately, without experiencing and receiving love from God in the first place.

We love because He first loved us. God has suffered tremendously on our behalf, no more dramatically than when he sent His Son to die on the cross....and that unbelievable event happened all because of His deep love for us. So, if you also want to experience deep love in your marriage, first experience the deep love that comes only from the well of all love. You can do that through prayer and surrender to God's will. It can also happen through daily reading of Scripture. Try reading the first epistle of John as a beginning point.

When you actively pursue the heart of God....and His love.....and begin to experience the understanding of why He would willingly suffer for us....I guarantee you that things will start to change inside of you. I guarantee that you will begin to operate in your marriage with more grace, patience and empathy--and all of those traits are very appealing qualities in a relationship. So give it a shot. Draw closer to God and see if you don't figure out how to draw closer to one another. What in the world do you have to lose?

The Love Bank

Dr. Willard F. Harley, Jr., author of the classic marriage book His Needs, Her Needs, talks about a concept he created called the Love Bank--to help couples understand how people fall in and out of love. His now-famous concept is that each of us has a Love Bank that keeps track of the way each person treats us. He goes on to say that everyone we know has an "account" and the things they do either deposit or withdraw love units from their accounts.

When you associate a person with good feelings, "deposits" are made into that person's account in your Love Bank. And when the Love Bank reaches a certain level of deposits, the feeling of love is triggered. Dr. Harley says that as long as your Love Bank balance remains above that threshold, you will experience the feeling of love. But when it falls below that threshold, you will lose that feeling.

What if you are currently not fond of the person in your marriage? Well, then it's not long before you'll want to do everything you can to get out of that relationship--and in our culture, what is an easier solution for that than divorce? But Dr. Harley's rationale is that to help someone fall in love again, you simply stop making Love Bank "withdrawals" and start making Love Bank "deposits". For more detailed suggestions on how to do that, go to his website at www.marriagebuilders.com

This is not rocket science. The old cliche "if you want to have friends, you've got to be a friend" carries a lot of weight in marriage. After all, marriage is designed to be, in many ways, the ultimate friendship, the ultimate personal connection. If you're turning away from your spouse for extended periods of time, the odds are pretty certain that that relationship is going to deteriorate. But it doesn't have to be that way. With prayer, you can do a lot from your end to reverse that trend. I encourage you to make deposits and investments in your most important relationship. You literally won't believe the dividends that will be paid out later.

Ladies, Give "Prince Charming" a Break

I (Kellie) get the benefit of hearing many different women comment about their husbands. Sometimes I get to hear great comments like "He did the nicest thing for me the other day ..." or "Can you believe it, he just wanted to cuddle". But unfortunately, I hear many sad comments like "He just doesn't seem to get me" or "He's not really interested in seeing our relationship grow". Dr. Hurst's diagnosis? In a lot of these cases, these women are temporarily suffering from "Prince Charming-itis". Somewhere along the way, we women believed that once we found "Mr. Right", all would be right with the world because our man would take on the task of meeting all of our emotional needs. Wrong! There is no man on earth who could possibly meet that monumental task.

When I was a little girl, I was well versed with all of those wonderful fairy tales ... especially the one with the cute guy on the white horse who would ride into town, stop everything, and gaze into my eyes (um ... I mean, Cinderella's eyes!) and make everything right. But here is what I've learned about "Brett Charming" after a couple of decades of marriage ...

1. I cannot place all of my emotional eggs in his basket. It is completely unfair of me to expect my husband to be my end-all. He won't be able to do it, and I set him up to fail when I expect him to.

2. My husband is really busy with a lot of other important things ... like working very hard for our family. To place him on the pedestal of being the all-knowing Master of Meeting Emotional Needs is quite unfair.

3. Andy Stanley (a pastor from Atlanta) says that men think of their marriages like a good car. They just want it to work ... they don't want to have to work on it every weekend! This doesn't mean that our guys can't learn to be more emotionally involved - it just means that they're not wired the same way we girls are.

So let's cut the guys a little slack. It's a great place to be when you can look at your husband in all of his "man-ness" and be thrilled with who he is. Perfectionism has no place in marriage. Ladies, when your man falls off that white horse, hop back up there with him and hold on for the ride of your life!

The Ideal Date

We're often amazed at how typical it is for couples who have been married for more than five years to settle into a pattern of not dating each other anymore. Perhaps more than anything else, reversing this trend positively in your marriage has the greatest potential of putting sparkle and connection back into your most important relationship. But where do you start?

It may just seem to a lot of women that an ideal date to a husband would include the following three components: eating home-cooked food, watching football, and having sex....and not necessarily in that sequence. It also may seem to a lot of men that an ideal date to a wife would include activities centered around antiques, poetry or Josh Groban. Take it easy, both of you. There are dates you can plan together that explore other avenues and still be mutually enjoyable:

-Try having a formal dinner in the park. Scout ahead of time for just the right setting. Pick up nice food, dress up, bring candles, tablecloth and romantic music. One quick hint: Don't do this one in Houston during August.

-Relive your first date together--that is, if you can still remember it. Give it your best shot to recreate that scene as close as you can--strictly for fun. Breath mints not optional.

-Listen to live music. When was the last time you both went to see one of your favorite bands in concert together? If it happens to be a band from the 70's, it may even help your own self-esteem as you watch some of these guys out there still performing--you might realize how good you both still look and feel by comparison.

-Try going to a bookstore together. Most of them have Fourbucks Coffee, overstuffed chairs (if you can scam one), and gobs of books that you each want to peruse. You can show each other your favorite things and/or just enjoy reading in privacy for 45 minutes or so. Then go get a quick light dessert close by.

-Cuddle at home with a great DVD. If you're too tired or too out of dating practice to get started with something more ambitious, begin with this easy one. Bring home great take-out, ignore the phone, dress comfortably and get cozy together on the couch. Give each other permission ahead of time to fall asleep. This can be a simple but important start towards reconnecting. Then you can work your way up to one of the other dates above.

Or be creative and invent your own thing to do. I will tell you that most married couples do not date each other regularly. There are so many things that compete for our time. You definitely have to be intentional to get back in the mindset of dating one another--but the payoff of satisfaction can be so worth it. The bottom line is to get back in the habit. When was the last time the two of you had a planned date, even a simple one? If you can't remember, then that is too long. Get started and have some fun. You'll wonder why you put it off.

Sixty-one and Counting.....

Happy Memorial Day, everybody!

Some very good friends of ours, Gay and Joan Hudson, have just celebrated their 61st wedding anniversary!! They are members of our church and just wonderful examples to our lives. Recently, I interviewed Gay to find out what it is like to have been married that long to such a special person. Here are some of those edited comments:

Q: How long did you and Joan date before getting married?
A: We were in the same circle of friends and knew each other for quite a while (maybe two years or more) before we actually started dating. Then, once we started, it was not long before we began talking about getting married in two or three years since we were both in college at the time. It turns out we were married in four months and finished college as a married couple--with one beautiful daughter. NOTE: We were not intimate until our wedding night!!

Q. How did you happen to propose to her?
A. I actually did not happen to propose. Instead, we talked about it, decided it was right for us (even though we were just kids), and I asked her father for her hand in marriage. His main caveat was that we graduate from college. We DID!!

Q. What kind of premarital advice (if any) did you receive before your wedding? Do you recall any particular words of wisdom?
A. The only marriage "counseling" we received was individually from our parents....and my grandfather. Words of wisdom offered:

"Don't rush into physical intimacy."

"Never go to bed angry with an unsettled matter dangling."

"Always consider each other's feelings and treat one another with kindness and respect."

Q. What do you see as the biggest challenge, in general, of two people learning how to live together in a marriage relationship for the rest of their lives?

A. Always remember that they are two unique individual personalities with different perceptions and approaches to many events in life. There will be necessary compromises that serve both as equally as possible. There can never be "my way or the highway."

Q. How important is a spiritual foundation to your marriage?

A. We both came from a family/church background and that has been the foundation of our marriage. As we have become more "seasoned", we have found faith to be even more important in our every day lives--and in the raising of our children (and their rearing of our grandchildren, all of whom are faithful Christians today).

Q. What has been the biggest surprise of your married life together?

A. The biggest surprise was how totally fulfilling a solid marriage partnership can be. You marry hoping for the best--and when God steps in and adds His blessing to the union, it becomes awesome.

Q. What has been the biggest joy?

A. The biggest joy in our life together has been (and is) the three daughters God placed in our care. That joy has been compounded by seven outstanding grandchildren and one great-granddaughter.

Q. What would be your number one piece of advice that you would give to young couples considering marriage today?

A. Always put your spouse's welfare, dreams, wishes and self-worth ahead of your own and constantly let her or him know how important they are to your life and happiness--and let them know how much he or she is loved.

I'm grateful to Gay for his candid responses to my questions. I'm even more grateful for his example of 61 years of faithful marriage. What a badge of honor! I'd say my wife and I have a long way to go, but it's a great goal worth shootin' for!

Thanks, Gay and Joan....and Happy Anniversary!!