60 Seconds To a Better Marriage!

 This is my first shot at formatting and writing a hub, so please keep that in mind as you look this over.

For the last 15 years or so I have spent thousands of hours with couples in marriage therapy.  In addition, my wife and I have been married for 25 years with all of its winding journey which included five children.  During that time, I had always hoped to write about the subject that I talked with other couples about, but it never seemed that I had the time.  Two years ago, I had an accident and ended up a quadriplegic.  Now I have some time!  And for better or worse, I would like to share some of the wonderful discoveries I have made over the past years.  Most of my comments on this site will be short and to the point.  As a man, I hope to help other men improve their marriages.  But my information could equally apply, and in fact would be better, if practiced by both the husband and wife.

Marriage is a wonderfully exciting journey with many mountains of joy and valleys of sadness.  It truly is a journey of heroic similitudes.  As young couples, we start out naïve and full of energy.  And then our journey takes us through some type of "dark forest".  Emerging from the forest, though scarred we may be, we are much the wiser and can then finish our heroic journey which for many of us includes imparting of our wisdom and experiences with our children and our society. 

Today's 60-second exercise is to take a moment and reflect upon our marriage in terms of the heroic journey that it is.  As a couple, where are we on that journey?  What can we do to hold the course of the journey and let it work its miracle in our marriage.  May these questions and your reflections help you to put your marriage into perspective.

As I am beginning to write this new section of my "60 Seconds To a Better Marriage", I am listening to (not the same as eavesdropping, but more like overhearing :-) a telephone discussion that my wife is having with one of her good friends.  They are laughing and talking about things that I know very little about.  My wife works at a job where she often works graveyard shifts in order to make up the income for my lost income (see my profile).  For the first time in our married life, she talks with friends that I have never met.  She owns a whole line of Harley Davidson clothing and I've never even touched or talked about a Harley Davidson motorcycle.  She got an Apple iMac for Christmas and I'm in a dyed in the blue Windows user all the way back to IBM and DOS.  She owns an iPod and has some 3000 songs on it, many of which I have never heard and most of which she is danced to and I never will (again, check my profile for relevant background information).

Now I'm not complaining or being critical of any of these pieces of her life.  Oh, and did I mention she has a tattoo of a butterfly?  What I am trying to point out is that she has developed and is traveling on an individual journey as well as traveling beside me on our marital journey.  Sometimes the two can cross and run together comfortably.  But sometimes they cross at a perpendicular angle (I think that's right, if I remember my math!), but often they run very naturally more of a parallel pace, interweaving or not with my own journey.

When I was a young married man, I did not easily accept the individual journeys our lives make within the context of the marital journey that I spoke of in my last capsule.  Subconsciously, I pulled her away from her personal journey and compelled her to stay with me on our marital journey.  Looking back, it probably wasn't our marital journey at all but rather my personal journey that I just wanted her to hold my hand through.  As we have made it through the bruises of traveling unconscious and in accurate journeys, I have woken up to the reality (with a capital R) of the journeys we are traveling.  I have found over the last few years that as I have contemplated her individual journey and asked her objective questions and been sincerely interested in her life, our marriage satisfaction has greatly increased (at least for me, I speak).

So here's the 60 second invitation for today: think about the individual and heroic journey that your wife travels; see if you can figure out where she is in the journey; ask her some objective and reasonably intelligent questions about her journey and to be genuinely and curiously interested in her responses.  May this reflection on her life and journey hope you to have more respect and freedom in your relationship.  Peace! 

 When marinas are designed, one of the most important features to have is a breakwater.  This is some sort of structure usually constructed out of piles of large rocks or a long string of tightly secured docks.  If you have ever doctor boat of any kind, you can easily understand why this is one of the most important features of a good marina.  It is quite difficult, sometimes nearly impossible, to securely docked a boat with even small waves jostling the boat.

In my last two posts to "60 Seconds to a Great Marriage!", I've talked about the marital journey and the individual journey within the marital journey.  The word ' journey' as a romantic connotation that makes one feel rather calm and heroic.  Certainly, if you make it through this journey, you will have developed a calm and you will indeed have discovered the hero within yourself and your marriage.  But does that mean that the journey is calm and heroic throughout?  My experience has been that it is neither for either the individual or the marriage.  There are many days, or weeks, or longer where the traveler will experience anxiety, discouragement, loss of bearing and much that does not resemble a hero.  This does not mean though that we are in fact lost or off course.  Often it is quite the contrary -- we are precisely on course and traveling as the heroes of the fabled status.

So what are we to make of these feelings of anxiety, discouragement, loss of bearing, or other such troubling notions?  As mentioned, it has been my experience that these are precisely appropriate feelings that indicate subsurface feelings of fear or negative core beliefs.  Often these come from our very early years, sometimes he even before we have learned to talk.  That's what makes it so difficult to access these fears and negative core beliefs.  So what do fears and core beliefs have to do with the construction of a marina?  Well, just like it is difficult to dock a boat in rough waters, so in similar manner it is difficult to calm our fears and address are negative core beliefs with the jostling and unsafe environment.

As it turns out, the marital partners are responsible for creating a strong ' breakwater' that creates a calm haven from the storms of our journeys.  Without that safety, in some form or manner, it is highly unlikely for long-carried fears and negative core beliefs of either the individual or the marriage to be resolved so that the journey of both may remain intact.  In other words, we, as a partner to one with fears and negative core beliefs, are our companions best ' therapist'.  Soulmates are not discovered but created in this crucible!

So how do we boil this down to a 60-second exercise that will improve our marriage?  Well, I'm sure that you have many ideas that would work just fine.  Here is one that has seemed to work for myself and my clients: think of a time where you have been talking about something personal with a friend or your spouse and you stop talking, perhaps even midsentence, and felt like he could not continue.  What gave you a feeling that you could not continue?  Most likely, it was caused by some feeling of it not being safe to continue.  Perhaps the other person wasn't listening, maybe they were interrupting you with shallow suggestions, or maybe you could sense that they were agitated by their body language, or any number of other reasons.  The exercise is to think about how you create those unsafe waters when your companion is experiencing fear or negative core beliefs.  What can you do to change your behaviors or responses to your partner's exposure of themselves?  Then the next time you see your spouse displaying the beginnings of a fear or a negative core belief, quiet your self and create a realm of peace.  Try to the initiate some sort of soft and gentle contact with your spouse giving them a non-verbal indication of safety.  Passing through these dark valleys successfully can be one of the keys to our journey.  As you practice creating safety, may you and your companion softly tread your way through the dark fog of fears and discouraging core beliefs.  Peace