Turn Toward Each Other Instead of Away – Week 7

Respond to stressful times by turning toward each other, rather than away from each other.                             
                                                                        -Tim DeChristopher

Turn toward each other instead of away - is the third principle that Dr. John Gottman suggests we use in our marriages, as a way to help them work.  What does this mean?   Well, if you are married, you are practicing this principle either positively or negatively, daily, whether or not you know it.  Let me explain.  First of all, Gottman talks about making “bids” for our partner’s attention.  One makes a “bid” by trying to get some type of reaction like, affection, humor, attention or support, from someone else.  “Bids can be as minor as a back rub, or as significant as seeking help in carrying the burden when an aging parent is ill.”  The key is how your partner, or you, respond to a bid; you either turn toward your spouse, or away from them.  “A tendency of turning toward your spouse is the basis of trust, emotional connection, passion, and a satisfying sex life” (Gottman, 2015).   This creates a positive atmosphere and “banks” a positive balance in your relationship “emotional bank account.”  This is such a great way to illustrate the trust that can be built, “a deposit”, by turning toward your partner; or the lack of trust, “a withdrawal,” when a “bid” is rejected or thrown aside.  We also must make time for each other so we have opportunities to grow together.

This is all about how you react to the small things in your marriage. For instance, the wife asks the husband to please take out the garbage; the husband has two choices. He can willingly and lovingly just take out the garbage (even though he really doesn’t want to, but knows it means a lot to his wife), OR he can begrudgingly take the garbage out, complaining the whole time (which drags everyone down). Which scenario is increasing the balance in the wife’s “emotional bank account?” You got it! The first choice will bring a positive feeling into the couple’s relationship. I believe the most amazing thing about this principle is, most people are not thinking, “I need to make some deposits in my partner’s emotional bank account.” They just make a “whatever” decision based on their mood at the time. Sometimes it works for good, sometimes it doesn’t.

Intentional living is a concept that I have become more interested in over the years.  This is living your life with a conscious attempt to live by your values and beliefs which brings clarity and focus into your life.  Intentional living goes hand in hand with turning toward your spouse because it means you are making an effort to help improve your marriage or relationship.  You are choosing to make your marriage happy by making an effort to build, and lift up your spouse.  Turning toward your spouse, when you hear a “bid” from them, can dramatically change the dynamic of your marriage relationship.  If, one day, you hear your spouse say something under their breath, ask them if you can help them in any way.  Find out what their need is at that moment and decide to do something to help them out.  You will see your marriage change for the better, because this type of work is based on selflessness.  This after all, is what everyone wants in a marriage; someone to love unconditionally and someone to do the same in return.

President Gordon B. Hinkley counseled, “I find selfishness to be the root cause of most of the problems that lead to broken homes. I am satisfied that a happy marriage is not so much a matter of romance as it is an anxious concern for the comfort and well-being of one’s companion.  The remedy for most marriage stress, it is in repentance.  …. It is found in the Golden Rule” (Goddard, 2009).  
Establishing a good foundation to a marriage is based on treating your spouse the way you want to be treated.  

John 14:34 reads, "A new commandment I give to you, that ye love one another as I have loved you, that ye also love one another" (John 13:34, Authorized King James Version).  This scripture teaches us that if we love God, we will love one another . How does Jesus love?  Unconditionally.  In Ephesians 4:32 it says, "Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you."  Loving, turning the other cheek, repenting and forgiving others, are eternal principles intertwined with the Atonement of Jesus Christ.  We need to remember to bring God and Christ into our marriages.  Our spouses are not perfect.  We will, at one time or another, say an unkind word, forget to be somewhere after we have committed our time, or even forget to take out the garbage. “Couples often ignore each other’s emotional needs out of mindlessness, not malice" (Gottman). The point is, we are here to work on perfecting ourselves as well as improve our relationship with God.  

We must recognize that even though we love and cherish our spouses, they are not perfect.  “Faith in the Lord Jesus Christ requires that we trust God is working to rescue our spouse even as he is working to rescue us.  When we have energizing faith in Christ, we trust His progress with our partner. The more we trust God’s purposes in perfecting our partners, (and don’t try to take over the job ourselves), the more we all progress” (Goddard, 2009). It’s easy to be judgmental of your spouse, but we must remember, we are all works in progress.

Remember, we are all human.  We need to remember to forgive, instead of taking offense.  In these moments, ponder principle #3 in The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work– turn toward each other instead of away.  Make an intentional decision on how you are going to live your life and how you can positively build your marriage.  Hopefully, we will choose to act in such a way that helps bring love, peace, and harmony into our marriages. 

I just wanted to publicly thank my classmates for helping review and edit my blogs posts.  Thanks Margaret, Cassie, and Staci!  Good luck to you all with the remainder of the semester!

Goddard H. W. (2009). Drawing heaven into your marriage: eternal doctrines that change relationships. Cedar Hills, UT: Joymap Publishing.

Gottman, John M. PH.D., Silver, Nan. (1999, 2015 second edition) The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work. Harmony Books New York

Love Map & Nurture your Fondness and Admiration - Week 6

Marriage is like a muscle; if you don’t work on it, it will wither.  Couples need to continually work on their marriage to make it strong.  This enables their marriage to resist the temptations that might cause it to be destroyed. 

It’s very normal for a marriage to be tested; in fact it is unavoidable.  Some couples think that they should have a great marriage without putting in the work to attain one.  Part of having a happy marriage requires sacrifice.  “When we make sacrifices, we are following the Savior, who sacrificed everything in order to rescue us. The willingness to put our preferences on the altar in obedience to God and service our partner is a sacrifice filled with grace and truth” (Goddard, 2009).  When we have issues in our marriages, if we willingly make sacrifices in behalf of our spouse, we become more like our Savior, displaying unconditional love.

In our quest for strengthening marriage, Dr John M. Gottman shares seven principles which will help, in his book, The Seven Principles for Marking Marriage Work.  The first and second principles are Enhance your Love Map and Nurture Your Fondness and Admiration.  

Principle #1 – Enhance your Love Map

What is a “Love Map?” 

Gottman states that love maps are the cognitive understanding of your partner’s inner-psychological world.  Couples that spend time strengthening and updating their Love Map, remember the major events in each other’s history and keep updating this information as the facts and feelings of their partner’s world change.  “Couples who have detailed love maps of each other’s world are far better prepared to cope with stressful events and conflict” (Gottman, 2015). 

For marriages to be strong, and remain strong, it is imperative that we take an ongoing interest in our spouse.  We should always be in tune with their needs, wants, goals, desires, life-long ambitions, fears, insecurities, hurts, injuries, hopes, and dreams.   There are  exercises that Gottman suggests, to help a couples’ love map grow within their relationship.  Here is a short sample of the questionnaire that Gottman put together to help couples strengthen their love maps of each other.  He encourages couples to make time to go through these exercises to help increase their knowledge about one another.

Enhancing your love map is just the first principle in making your marriage work.   This is a continuous effort in learning about your spouse, to help you grow together.  “Happily married couples don’t just know each other, they not only use their love maps to understand each other, but to express fondness and admiration as well” (Gottman, 2015).

Principle #2 – Nurture your Fondness and Admiration

When you are thinking positively about another person, your emotional state is positive.  When you think negatively about someone, your emotional state is generally negative.  This has huge implications when it comes to marriage.   When couples think of their marriage in a positive light, more than likely, their marriage consists of friendship, love, and generally, will be happy and successful.  However, to help their marriage remain in a positive state the couple will need to nurture their fondness and admiration toward each other.  Why?  If a marriage is not nurtured, it will eventually lose its vitality, wither and die. 

Nurturing your fondness and admiration toward your spouse helps you to maintain a sense of respect for them.  Because of this respect, elements like criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling (the four horsemen) will be kept at bay.  Nurturing your fondness and admiration is the antidote to contempt, according to Gottman.

How do we accomplish this task without feeling insincere in our attempts to build up our spouse?  One of the exercises that Gottman suggests is called, “I appreciate………”  You and your spouse each choose five phrases on the list and say them to your spouse.  Following each phrase, an example is given.  For instance, “The way you treat my family means a lot to me, (like when you helped my dad till his garden), or “Thanks for bringing me flowers,
(I was having a hard day, and the flowers showed you cared, and I felt loved).  These are samples of how this process works. 

At first, this might seem awkward, however it opens the doors of continued optimism in your marriage, and shows charity your spouse.  Doing this helps squelch negativism in marriages.  Like Cheryl Crow’s sang in her song, Soak up the Sun, the lyrics read, “It’s not having what you want, it’s wanting what you’ve got.”  This is just as simple as taking time to appreciate and love what we already have.

Check out the following radio clip.  It includes Dr's John and Julie Gottman on Nurture Fondness and Admiration. 

Crow, C & Trott, J (2002). Soak up the Sun. [Recorded by Cheryl Crow]. On C’mon C’mon [CD]. New York City: A&M.

Goddard H. W. (2009). Drawing heaven into your marriage: eternal doctrines that change relationships. Cedar Hills, UT: Joymap Publishing.

Gottman, John M. PH.D., Silver, Nan. (1999, 2015 second edition) The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work. Harmony Books New York

Behaviors that Negatively Affect Marriage - Week 5

John Gottman is a renowned relationship expert.  He and his wife, Julie, live in Seattle and have studied relationships extensively for over forty years.  He has helped develop a “Love Lab” at the University of Washington that is an apartment where a couple lives for a weekend.  In the apartment, there are cameras installed and heart monitors placed on the participants.  Gottman’s claim is that he can predict, around 91% of the time if a couple will divorce by observing them in a fifteen-minute conversation.  This is amazing to me; however, I understand that Gottman has been studying marriages and relationships for a very long time.  Not only can he predict whether or not a marriage will end, he has also found what will make a marriage last.

Marriage is a great leap of faith, that you and your partner will be able to rely on each other for the long haul.  The great thing is, marriage can be simple.  “Grace and mercy are at the heart of a loving family” (Goddard, 2009).  When we decide to marry, we must realize that we are marrying an imperfect human, and we will have the opportunity to practice patience, long-suffering, charity, and many times, forgiveness.

The belief that a couple can save their relationship by communicating more sensitively is a myth about marriage that can potentially tear it apart.  This is only one myth of many that Gottman talks about in his book, “The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work”.   Myths are dangerous in that they can “lead couples down the wrong path or, worse, convince them that their marriage is a hopeless case” (Gottman, 2015).  The following myths are the most common.   

Neuroses or personality problems ruin marriages. 

“We all have issues we are not rational about.  These triggers are called ‘enduring vulnerabilities’ (Gottman,2015), and when used against our partner, they can cause marriages to unravel.  Everyone has a quirk or something odd about them.  It is finding the right partner, someone with whom you can get along with, that makes happy relationships.  If you can figure out how to respect and accommodate your partners neuroses, you can have a successful relationship.

Common interests keep you together. 

This depends on how you interact with your spouse during the activity.  If the activity builds comradery, and enhances love and friendship, then great.  If the activity is not benefiting the marriage, because of disagreements on how to do the activity or one spouse is criticizing the other in the way they are participating, then it’s not worth joining in that activity together.  

You scratch my back and ……..

Some believe that if you do something nice for your partner,  your partner needs reciprocate quickly.   With good, strong relationships, there is no keeping score.  One loves and serves the other because they genuinely love and want to serve them.  As soon as one starts tallying up who has done more for the other, problems will arise in your marriage.

Avoiding conflict will ruin your marriage.

Every couple handles conflict differently.  Some couples choose to not address conflict and avoids fighting at all costs. Some couples argue a lot, and some are able to talk out their differences with compromise.  It doesn’t matter what style is used as long as it works for both people.

Affairs are the root cause of divorce. 

When a marriage is in trouble, couples are not having their needs of a fulfilling relationship met.  This can send couples looking for an intimate connection outside the marriage.  This is less about sex than it is about filling a need of support, friendship and understanding, respect, attention caring and concern.  “80% of divorced men and women said they broke up because they gradually grew apart and didn’t feel loved or appreciated” (Gottman, 2015).

Men are not biologically built for marriage.

It is assumed that men are philanderers by nature and ill suited for monogamy.  However, extramarital affairs do not depend on gender as much as opportunity.  Since women have entered the workplace in droves, the number of extramarital affairs of young women now slightly exceed those of men” (Gottman, 2015).

 

Men and women are from different planets.

Many people have heard that men are from Mars and women are from Venus.  The following statistic is why this is not true.  Dr. Gottman states that “the determining factor in whether wives feel satisfied with the sex, romance, and passion in their marriage is, by 70%, the quality of the couple’s friendship… and for men, the determining factor is, by 70%, the quality of the couple’s friendship… so men and women come from the same planet after all.” Gender may contribute to marital problems, but they don’t cause them. 

Gottman suggests that the key to a happy marriage is a deep friendship.  This means that you are genuinely concerned about your partner.  That you feel what they are feeling.  You enjoy each other’s company and want to make sure that person is happy.  You support them in their hopes and dreams, love them for their quirks and show your love for them not only in big ways, but also in the small, simple gestures made every day.  Fostering this friendship is they key to a happy marriage.  Gottman uses the term, “attunement” to show how couples are “in tune” to their spouse.  This means that you literally feel what your partner feels.  Trust and commitment are essential to a happy marriage.  In turn, their happiness is contingent on their partners feelings.

I am one lucky lady because I found and married my best friend.  We laugh together, cry together, and rely on each other for support and special connections.  We have been married for 26 years, and counting.  I believe that we have accomplished this because we have fostered our friendship.  We do not go outside our marriage for this type of relationship.  We have each other’s back and are on the same team, rooting for each other and our family.  “When we focus on our discontent, we will blame others. In contrast, when we focus on someone else’s pains, we are more likely to have compassion” (Goddard, 2009).

To read more on exposing the myths of marriage click on the links below.

https://www.gottman.com/blog/debunking-12-myths-about-relationships/

http://www.readersdigest.ca/health/relationships/7-common-marriage-myths-busted/view-all/

Goddard H. W. (2009). Drawing heaven into your marriage: eternal doctrines that change relationships. Cedar Hills, UT: Joymap Publishing.

Gottman, John M. PH.D., Silver, Nan. (1999, 2015 second edition) The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work. Harmony Books New York

Covenant Marriage or Contractual Marriage, what’s the difference? - Week 4

Every couple will face opposition that will test their marriage.  What type of marriage do you have?  In Bruce Hafen’s talk, “Covenant Marriage”, he discusses two different types of marriages, contractual marriage and covenant marriage.   He states, “When troubles come, the parties to a contractual marriage seek happiness by walking away.  They marry to obtain benefits and will stay only as long as they’re receiving what they bargained for.  But when troubles come to a covenant marriage, the husband and wife work them through.  They marry to give and to grow, bound by covenants to each other, to the community, and to God.  Contract companions each give 50 percent; covenant companions each give 100 percent” (Hafen, 1996).

What this means to me is that if you are in a contractual marriage and things are not going your way, you can throw your marriage away.   Marriage and family are not valued as they once were.  It has become disposable and many people think that their first marriage will be a tester or a trial marriage, and if it doesn’t work for them, they are out!  A covenant marriage is one where husband and wife are a team and they work together to solve problems.  They support each other and lift each other up helping their family thrive and be happy.  A covenant marriage is one where man and woman are part of a triangle with either one at the bottom corners and Christ at the apex.  As they grow closer to the Lord, they naturally grow closer to one another. A covenant marriage is a selfless marriage.  Elder Bednar talks about this very thing when he says, “…that we have made the comfort and convenience of our eternal companion our highest priority, then they will become less self-centered and more able to give, to serve, and to create an equal and enduring companionship” (Bednar, 1996) 

Marriage can be difficult.  I have noticed over the 26 years of our marriage; my husband and I have had ups and downs.  We have had a wonderful marriage and with that comes trials of life.  We are human, and because of that, there have been times where we have struggled because we forget to put God and spouse first.  The awesome thing about being married to your best friend is that you don’t want to hurt them.  We always have a more successful marriage when we are trying hard to do the simple things of praying and reading scriptures and obeying the commandments.  We are able to talk to each other and lift each other up while expressing our worries and troubles.  This helps us build our relationship. 

Temples are where we can be married and sealed for all time and eternity linking us to our families forever.  In President Bensons talk, “What I Hope You Would Teach Your Children”, he talks about his mother pulling up a chair next to him in the kitchen and telling him about temple work.  She told him about the importance of the sacred ordinances performed there.  She expressed her hope that her posterity would one day enjoy the priceless blessings of the temple. (Benson, 1986) 

I wondered what I did as a mother with my young children, to show them how sacred and important the temple is in my life.  I called my daughter and asked her what she remembered being taught about the temple when she was little.  She mentioned three things that we did that left a lasting impression on her, about the temple.  The first memory she had was that whenever we saw a temple, mostly in Utah, we would make a point to drive up to it and “touch the temple."  She remembered feeling like temples were special places, so much that we left the beaten path to physically touch the temple.   Second, we talked about how this was a special place.  On every temple there is a statement, "The house of the Lord."  These are Gods temples and we go there to make promises and covenants with Him.  Last, we had pictures of different temples hung up around our house.  We often talked about being married forever in the temple, and about eternal families.  These are great ways of showing the importance of temples.

One thing that I want to mention is that the only way that we can be sealed together is through the power of the priesthood. “Elijah brought the keys of sealing powers-that power which seals a man to a woman and seals their posterity to them endlessly.  In the celestial glory there are three heavens or degrees; and in order to obtain the highest, a man must enter into this order of the priesthood, meaning the new and everlasting covenant of marriage; and if he does not, he cannot obtain it (Benson, 1986)

I’m grateful for covenant marriage and for the opportunity that I have had, in this life, to marry, and be sealed in the temple, to my best friend.  It’s exciting to think of what life will bring and to know that if we keep our covenants that we made to each other and to God in the temple, we have potential to live together forever as a family.

Bednar, D.A. (2006, June). Marriage Is Essential to His Eternal Plan. Retrieved from https://www.lds.org/ensign/2006/06/marriage-is-essential-to-his-eternal-plan?lang=eng

Benson, E.T. (1986, April). What I Hope You Would Teach Your Children about the Temple. Retrieved from https://byui.brightspace.com/content/enforced/360707-Online.2018.Winter.FAML300.05/Course%20Files/Benson_Temple.pdf?_&d2lSessionVal=Ndjyg0CkoEYbkzK24pF8cuM9n&ou=360707

Hafen, B. (1996, November). Covenant Marriage. Retrieved from https://byui.brightspace.com/content/enforced/360707-Online.2018.Winter.FAML300.05/Course%20Files/Covenant_Marriage_Hafen.pdf?_&d2lSessionVal=Ndjyg0CkoEYbkzK24pF8cuM9n&ou=360707