A Burst of Life in Your Relationship
Imagine feeling a surge of new possibility with your mate. You have an adrenaline high of deep appreciation of one another and you have new tools to deal with differences. Your relationship has shifted toward resilience and joy. How wonderful would that be?
It sounds great but seems difficult to attain? That's because our culture deals with marriage backwards.
For a wedding, you might spend months planning every aspect. A host of planners and designers, florists, and chefs guide you to consider, practice, and tweak each decision. As a result, you end up creating an amazing wedding! But the wedding only lasts one day.
For a marriage, there's often little time, care, or expertise invested in creating an amazing relationship. The walking-on-air stage fools you into thinking it will be easy. The well-guarded secret, untill you’ve been there, is that marriage is really hard to do!
Like many others, even after years of trying your best in marriage, you might be feeling:
- Frustrated that you are not getting what you want
- Afraid that your love is not going to last
- Confused over how to make things better without messing up what is good now
I felt this way myself. I was married for 35 years, and while lots of it was great, some of it was painful. A common strategy of mine was to bury my fear and frustration and become depressed. Another was to lobby for change but to bail out when the going got difficult. A favorite strategy was to blame my spouse and take the high road of superiority. (Do you have that one down to an art form?)
Needless to say, my strategies didn’t bring about the kinds of change that might have helped my marriage thrive. Over time, in spite of the underlying love, our marriage dissolved. But YOU can take a different path.
