by John M. Gottman and Nan Silver. Three Rivers Press, New York, 1999.

Over the years, I’ve read a few marriage-type books. Many of them have some great information in them. However, this one stands out to be as being the most practical and most likely to actually have a positive impact on your marriage. I’d highly recommend that you read through this with your future spouse before getting married and do a lot of the exercises in it. It focuses on the foundational things that really make a marriage great.

The Truth About Happy Marriages

6 – If we would spend 20 minutes a day on our marriage, we would get three times the health benefits of exercising. A good marriage means reduced stress, healthier immune system

8 – The biggest myth of all is that communication – and more specifically learning to resolve your conflicts – is the royal road to romance and an enduring, happy marriage.

We’ve also felt this. There can be times when we logically and mentally know how to navigate our way through a conflict, but it doesn’t help the conflict at all in the end and we don’t end up feeling much closer.

10 – Active listening was meant for individual psychotherapy. Teaching couples how to listen and communicate better resulted in only a 35% success rate. “Active listening asks couples to perform Olympic-level emotional gymnastics when their relationship can barely walk.”

15 – Avoiding conflict won’t ruin your marriage, as long as both partners are practicing the same style.

17 – “The determining factor in whether wives feel satisfied with the sex, romance, and passion in their marriage is, by 70 percent, the quality of the couple’s friendship. For men, the determining factor is, by 70 percent, the quality of the couple’s friendship.”

 19 – “Happy marriages are based on a deep friendship.”

This is completely true, through and through. When our marriage is at its best, it is because we are acting as friends. When it is at its worst, we are ignoring each other and not friendly or pleasant to the other.

20 – They are well-versed in each other’s likes, dislikes, personality quirks, hopes, and dreams.

21 – Once your marriage gets set at a certain degree of positivity, it will take far more negativity to harm your relationship than if your set point were lower. 

23 – Almost everybody messes up during marital conflict. “What matters is whether the repairs are successful.” 

Most marital arguments cannot be resolved. 

How I Predict Divorce

1st sign – a harsh startup to a conflict

2nd sign – the four horsemen

• Criticism
• Contempt
• Defensiveness
• Stonewalling

3rd sign – flooding

4th sign – body language

5th sign – failed repair attempts “The failure of repair attempts is an accurate marker of an unhappy future.”

6th sign – bad memories, not being able to remember the good times

Principle 1: Enhance Your Love Map

Get to know more about your spouse. Know their friends, enemies, stresses, worries, likes, dislikes, ambitions, hopes, aspirations.

Principle 2: Nurture Your Fondness and Admiration

64 – “94% of the time that couples who put a positive spin on their marriage’s history are likely to have a happy future as well. When happy memories are distorted, it’s a sign that the marriage needs help.”

Remind yourself often of your spouse’s positive qualities to prevent a happy marriage from deteriorating.

67 – If your fondness and admiration are being chipped away, the route to bringing them back always begins with realizing how valuable they are. They are crucial to long-term happiness of a relationship because they prevent contempt from becoming an overwhelming presence in your life.

Principle 3 – Turn Toward Each Other Instead of Away

82 – Couples often ignore each other’s emotional needs out of mindlessness, not malice.

83 – Happily married couples noticed almost all of the positive things the researchers observed their partners do for them. However, unhappily married couples underestimate their partner’s living intentions by 50%.

96 – A more profound friendship will be a powerful shield against conflict.

Principle 4 – Let Your Partner Influence You

108 – As boys get older…they rarely play with girls, so they miss out on the chance to learn from them. Although 35% of preschool best friendships are between boys and girls, by age seven that percentage plummets to virtually 0 percent. From then till puberty the sexes will have little or nothing to do with each other.

…Once a couple move in together or get engaged, the groom-to-be is suddenly immersed in what is probably an alien world.

Two kinds of marital conflict

Perpetual problems and solvable problems.

131 – Despite what many therapist will tell you, you don’t have to resolve your major marital conflicts for your marriage to survive.

Dan Wile in After the Honeymoon: “When choosing a long-term partner…you will inevitably be choosing a particular set of unsolvable problems that you’ll be grappling with for the next ten, twenty or fifty years.”

The key is avoiding gridlock with perpetual problems.

Marriages are successful to the degree that the problems you choose are ones you can cope with.

149 – The basis for coping effectively with either kind of problem is the same: communicating basic acceptance of your partner’s personality.

You will not accept advice from someone unless you feel that they understand you.

No one is ever right in perpetual problems. There is no absolute reality in marital conflict, only two subjective realities.

Principle 5: Solve your Solvable Problems

158

1. Soften your startup
2. Learn to make and receive repair attempts
3. Soothe yourself and each other
4. Compromise
5. Be tolerant of each other’s faults

161 – discussions invariably end on the same note they begin.

Principle 6: Overcome Gridlock

Respect each other’s dreams

224 – “Couples who are demanding of their marriage are more likely to have deeply satisfying unions than those who lower their expectations.”

Principle 7: Create Shared Meaning

Create Family rituals

• Triumphs
• Bad luck
• Guests
• Birthdays, holidays, special events
• Visiting family

We aren’t very good at handling poetry in the church; most of the good stuff goes way over our heads.

We look at Song of Solomon and try to squeeze it into a Bible study about a good marriage. If King Solomon put on a Marriage Retreat weekend, it would be the laughed out of town. Who is he to teach us about marriage? But if he published a poem between he and his lover, we would be all ears and would walk away learning a thing or two.

Or what about the Psalms – a horrendous place to create our theology, especially the kind we like – crisp, clean, simple. Good luck with that. Kill my enemies, don’t let me be put to shame, great are you. I’d hate to see what kind of theology develops when someone tries to take the average of my best and worst prayers. If the Psalmist wrote some systematic theology, it might be the worst book ever.

The writers were sharing an experience they thought others might benefit from by hearing; they weren’t there to teach with a three point outline and an application at the end.

We miss the point all the time in poetry. Poetry is meant to help you experience something, not teach you something.

Take Job. All in all, it does a terrible job of teaching someone about the meaning of suffering and the problem of evil. Especially if we try to approach it like a historical guide.

Was Job really a person? Where does this book fall chronologically? Where did Job live? Does Satan really go in front of God all the time? Does God really ask him, “Whadda been up to?”

All of that misses the point. There’s an experience we are meant to share in and we lose it when we ask these questions too much. Continue reading

Teach Your Own: The John Holt Book of Homeschooling by John Holt and Pat Farendga. Perseus Publishing, 2003.

“Why do people take or keep their children out of school? Mostly for three reasons: they think that raising their children is their business not the government’s; they enjoy being with their children and watching and helping them learn, and don’t want to give that up to others; they want to keep them from being hurt, mentally, physically, and spiritually.”

This pretty much sums up a lot of my motivations for wanting to do homeschooling with you guys. When I struggle to think of a good reason for the Why? behind homeschooling, this sounds right to me. I like you guys and want to spend a lot of time with you, I think you’ll get a better education with Mama and me than with our current system, and I want to be close to you when you get hurt.

At some point in the book, he talked about the bias that people have against children and that many people don’t actually like or respect children. Just today, I heard a guy talk about Job having a “juvenile” faith. What the hell is that? Jesus told us we need to become like children to enter the kingdom. He was using “juvenile” as a word to mean “not there yet”, but in a very pejorative sense.

If I like you guys so much, why would I be willing to give you over to someone else and to a system that took you away from me most of the day and didn’t do a great job doing what they said they would do?

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“Eros love is love that reaches upwards. It is love for what we need to fill our emptiness, love for what is lovely and lovable…William Blake engraved the picture of a tiny human figure with a ladder pitched toward the moon and underneath, in block capitals, the words I WANT! I WANT! Those are the words that eros always speaks. Not so with agape. Agape does not want. It gives. It is not empty. It is not full to overflowing. Paul strains to get the distinction right. Agape is patient; eros champs at the bit. Agape puts up with anything; eros insists on having things its own way. Agape is kind – never jealous, boastful, rude. It does not love because but simply loves – the way the rain falls or the sun shines. It “bears all things,” up to and including even its own crucifixtion. And it has extraordinary power.

“…Beauty does no love the Beast because he is beautiful but makes him beautiful by loving him.”

– The Clown in the Belfry (1992)

This is a passage that I’ve never been able to live up to. Only on rare, passing moments have I been able to think about giving this kind of love. No matter how much I know and believe that agape is what I need to do, I always feel entitled to eros. I will give agape if I get my eros needs met first.

It is a great fear of mine that I may never get this right. Like trying to sprint at the end of a long run, I can keep it up only for a very short time before I ease back into my normal eros stride.

May God help me.

“In my own experience, the ways God appears in our lives are elusive and ambiguous ways. There is always room for doubt in order, perhaps, that there will always be room to breathe. There is so much in life that hides God and denies the very possibility of God that there are times when it is hard not to deny God altogether.”

“The danger [with writing about saints] is that you start out with the idea that sainthood is something people achieve, that you get to be holy more or less the way you get to be an Eagle Scout.”

–The Clown in the Belfry (1992)

Billy stared out the window of his office while the meeting continued on without him.

Last quarter’s numbers exceeded the proposed budget by 12%, although receivables are still lagging…

Billy had been running the company his father had started for the last fifteen years. Billy and Bill Sr. were never close. People around the office called Bill Sr. “Bull”. Bull made deals with handshakes, but broke a few hands along the way too. But the rock crushing business was like that. You couldn’t be weak. At least that’s what Bull always said.

Bull had sent Billy to college to study business, assuming he would take over the company one day. Billy was more interested in science, but Bull was a lot better at negotiations in those days.

An MBA, a wife, and two sons later, Billy was the youngest executive in the company. A sudden heart attack for Bull forced the company to draw up a clear succession plan and Billy became a thirty year old Vice President. A second heart attack made him an orphaned CEO.

Import sales are continuing to pick up on a month-by-month basis, with granite showing the largest gains…

Billy had done good things with the rock crushing company. He combined his ingenuity, passion for technology, and his father’s continued influence to grow the company into a nationally recognized name. He was the first in his region to start international operations and made opportunities where none existed.
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This Christmas, our family got together for a dinner.

People walked in and out from 5pm to 9pm. Food was laid out buffet-style in the kitchen; eat as you want. I think my mom said a prayer and the grazing started. The food included snack sandwiches from Chick-fil-a, three pre-made trays from the local grocery store, store-bought dip, and exactly two homemade dishes.

Grandpa distributed checks to everyone. My aunt waited for someone to notice that she was engaged, which nearly didn’t happen until the end and happened with as minimal of a ruckus as possible. Then everyone left.

As it was going on and after it happened, I was struck how empty it all seemed. I shouldn’t complain; at least I have a family to gather with – more than my dad can say now. But at the same time, aside from gathering, it didn’t feel like much was going on.

Family culture and traditions are hard; they take work. They take planning, preparation, going to the grocery, sticking to it when no one else wants to anymore, motivating people like me to get up and do something. And they usually take a strong woman to keep them going.

Maybe this loss of culture is bigger than just my family. As our lives get more and more convenient, we gratefully give more and more of them over corporations and technology who want to do the work for us for a reasonable fee. Anytime something gets hard, it probably isn’t worth it anymore. We get used to easy. And anything that isn’t easy is harder than it used to be.

Previously, on Thanksgiving, Grandma and Grandpa gave all the kids a new ornament to hang on our trees, and we drew names for gifts – all the cousins in one hat, and all the aunts and uncles in another. We spent the rest of Thanksgiving trying to figure out who had whose name. Continue reading