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