Keeping Your Marriage Healthy

“Choose your love. Love your choice.” – President Thomas S. Monson

Key Takeaways

Three Pillars of Healthy Marriage

• Commitment
  • “Marriage between a man and a woman is ordained of God…husband and wife have a solemn responsibility to love and care for each other.” – The Family: A Proclamation to the World
  • Personal dedication: intentional decision and desire to stay in a marriage for mutual benefit.
    • Intentional personal dedication: you sacrifice for the relationship, invest in it, and seek partner’s welfare. While easier said than done, you need to remember you have to be willing to sacrifice and you can’t change the other person.
    • Exclusive cleaving and unity: spouse is preeminent in the life of the husband or wife, nothing social, occupational, or political takes precedence.
    • Practice spiritual patterns: couples who practice faith together have lower conflict and are more likely to be satisfied and committed (i.e. daily couple prayer and scripture study and weekly church attendance).
  • Constraint commitment: forces or costs that serve to keep couples together even if they would rather break up.
• Connection
  • “Love as distinct from “being in love” is not merely a feeling. It is a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit…They can have this love for each other even at those moments when they do not like each other…It is on this love that the engine of marriage is run: being in love was the explosion that started it.” – C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
  • Studies have shown that true marital love emerges from profound friendship
    • Get in sync with your partner’s preferences: Find out what your partner likes and do it! Date your spouse and study them. Try having a dream date once a month where you do only what your spouse wants.
    • Talk as friends: not job, kids, and problems – just as friends
      • Show genuine interest, look at spouse and give attention, take turns, avoid unsolicited advice, communicate understanding, take your spouse’s side, avoid interrupting or rebutting, express affection, validate emotions. Communicate exactly what you need: listening or feedback.
    • Respond to bids for connection
      • Couples can turn away, turn against, or turn toward bids for affection
      • Husbands who divorced disregarded their wives’ bids for connection 82 percent of the time (19 percent for those who stayed married). Wives disregarded their husband’s bids for attention 50 percent of the time (14 percent for those who stayed married).
        • Make an effort to do activities together
        • Have a stress-reducing conversation at the end of the day
        • Do something special each day to communicate affection and appreciation
        • Keep track of how well you’re connecting, and make enhancements when necessary
• Conflict or Lack of It
  • “I have witnessed much of the best and much of the worst in marriage…Faultfinding replaces praise. When we look for the worst in anyone, we will find it. But if we will concentrate on the best, that element will grow until it sparkles.” – President Gordon B. Hinckley
  • If we allow ourselves to get annoyed by the little things, we need to reflect and ask ourselves if it was actually our fault or strive to recognize the peccadilloes. If something your spouse does is really harming your attitude or feelings toward your spouse, talk to them about it.
  • Marriage researcher John Gottman suggests to make sure to keep ratios of positive to negative interactions to about 5:1
    • Accept your spouse’s influence (joint decision making)
    • Respectfully handle differences and solve problems
  • Focus on your spouse’s positive qualities (make and share lists, be specific)

Moore et al. – 2004 – What is Healthy Marriage Defining the Concept is a great article that examines “the concept of healthy marriage and the elements that, taken together, help to define it, such as commitment, marital satisfaction, and communication, as well as two elements that pose obvious threats to healthy marriage: violence and infidelity.”

Impact of Children on Marriage

• Marriages experience modest, not dramatic changes over time.
• Childrearing is only one of many influential circumstances in a married person’s life.
• Not a “child effect” but a “duration effect.”

“ . . . the seeds of new parents’ individual and marital problems are sown long before baby arrives. Becoming parents does not so much raise new problems as bring old unresolved issues to the surface.” (Cowan & Cowan, 1992).

Co-Parenting, Joint Decision Making

Sometimes mothers are too controlling when it comes to parenting and they don’t trust their husbands to do things “the right way”. Mothers often are the gatekeepers (maternal gatekeeping), which may disempower fathers. It’s ok if one spouse does things differently than the other for a bedtime ritual. Both partners should strive to work together and trust each other in parenting.

When it comes to joint decision making, it is important not to triangulate with your child and your spouse or team up with your child against your spouse. Be a joint united front  as husband and wife when it comes to decisions. If you disagree with your spouse, tell the children that you will discuss it together and get back to the child. Children pick up on parents’ disagreements over parenting and will learn which parent to “ask” from at an early age.

Goals to Keep My Marriage Healthy

1. Before we have children, I want to work on improving our ratio of positive to negative interactions to 5:1.
2. After we have children, I really want to make sure that my husband and I are parenting together. I know of many women who don’t fully trust their husbands with their kids. I want to strive to make sure I support my husband and that we share responsibility as co-parents.
3. I want to make sure that we don’t let our marriage become second to all of the other things that come with being parents. I want to treat our relationship special so much that our kids have no doubt that we love each other.

Plan to Meet the Goals

1. I think by increasing the positive interactions between us as a couple now, we will have a happier home and a more supportive environment when we are stressed and juggling kids and work. Not only should I try to focus on my spouse’s positive qualities, but I need to make sure to tell him! I can do this by making a list of specific things I admire, love, or am grateful for and give it to him so he knows. My husband’s prominent love language is words of affirmation. I don’t tell him enough how wonderful he really is and how grateful I am that he is my best friend and husband. I also love the self-questions that Linda K. Burton suggested to keep us in-check with our actions toward our spouse. I plan to have these on my night stand so I can review them frequently so I can decrease the negative interactions.
2. There are a few things I want to do now, before we have kids, to make sure my husband feels valued and we see each other on equal ground. I really like the following suggestions that Dr. Walker made to make sure I am not taking over the house and kids as a mom.

• Be positive – appreciate his efforts
• Let go and step back – don’t correct the way your spouse does things
• Examine your standards and value his different way of caring and cleaning
• Trust him
• Encourage him and allow him to be involved in full range of parenting
• Give him alone time with kids

The first four bullet points I can implement now to evaluate my attitudes toward my husband to see what I need to change. I already know that I could work on not correcting the way he does things and value his different ways of cleaning the house or cooking food. I sometimes catch myself saying things like, “Why are you cutting the onion like that?” or “You forgot to put away the shoes” after the fact that he cleaned the living room. I really want to strive to monitor my thoughts and words because I can imagine that some of my comments might hurt his feelings and I don’t even know it.

After we have kids, I want to allow him to take part in all facets of parenting. Discipline, fun, dirty diapers, teaching how to read, and more! I personally don’t think I will have a problem leaving my husband alone with the kids because he is the oldest of eight kids in his immediate family. But I want to maintain that attitude, so as soon as we become pregnant we are jumping in with both feet together!

3. There are several things we can do together and I can do personally to make sure our marriage is still our number one priority. I love the idea from lecture mentioned above about exclusive cleaving and unity. My spouse is preeminent in my life. Nothing social, occupational, or political takes precedence. Not even my kids. I want to show our kids that our marriage is the most important thing to us. My husband should be “first my favorite” and my kids “my second favorites”. I can do this by treating him with love and care in the little things. For instance, when he comes home, I can make sure to give him a hug and a kiss first. We can make sure that we have weekly date nights and schedule time together each week. The Dating Divas have a wonderful blog full of date ideas and how to strengthen your marriage.

I also think the second pillar of a healthy marriage, connection, will be the most important in our lives. My husband is planning on attending medical school to become a pediatric heart surgeon. It is going to be a long, and sometimes very lonely, road. I will be by myself quite a bit for many years. So I think for us, we will need to make connecting with each other a priority to keep our marriage healthy. I think having a separate time for “us time” each week or each evening will be important so we can talk and make sure the other’s needs are being met.

Elder L. Whitney Clayton’s talk Marriage: Watch and Learn is also one of my favorites. It outlines various principles that “build strong, satisfying marriages that are compatible with heavenly principles.”

Other ideas to promote greater marital satisfaction:

• Seek greater balance between Parent, Worker, and Spouse Roles
• Share expectations and conduct frequent “checkups”
• Make time to talk to each other
• Negotiate an agenda
• Adopt an experimental attitude
• Don’t ignore sex and intimacy

Reference unless otherwise sited/linked:

• Walker, L. Class lecture 21: Keeping Marriage Strong, School of Family Life 240: Parent Child Guidance, Winter 2017

To end, here are just a few of my favorite quotes about marriage to remind me to keep our marriage healthy!