Remove the “D” Word From Your Marriage
If your marriage isn’t in trouble or hasn’t been, consider yourself incredibly blessed. Most couples go through some really bad stuff at some point. And the “bad stuff” has led to divorce more times than not, with Christians divorcing at the same rate as non-Christians. If you’ve already been through a divorce, you’ve experienced the bad stuff.
How can you avoid this awful, painful experience? (or how can you avoid it again?)
“If you ever consider divorce you will always have to consider divorce,” my first mentor told me. He said “Take it off the table. Remove it as an option. Don’t use the word. Don’t even acknowledge it as a possibility. Instead of spending your energy deciding ‘where the line is’ (e.g. how bad does it have to get before you’d split up), spend it on solving your issues. And you do that best by trying to change yourself, not each other.”
Being a “car guy”, I came up with this analogy….
What if the car you have right now were the ONLY car you could ever have? What if there was a law that said you could never swap your car for another one? Ever. Or ever again.
How much time would you spend on the internet looking at other people’s cars? Why would you envy the shiny new models? It would do nothing but frustrate you.
And how would you treat your current, “for the rest of your life” car? Wouldn’t you be a little more inclined to make the sacrifice and service it? To give it what it needs? To really take care of it?
You might even find yourself being pretty proud of it after a few years. You could have a classic, if you’ll just nurture it and give it TLC!
Cars that were manufactured 40 or 50 years ago were pretty homogeneous when they rolled off the assembly line, just like brides and grooms on their wedding day.
But years later, precious few of those cars remain intact. Those that are cared for and preserved become more and more unique as the years go by. And their owners feel happier each year they didn’t yield to the temptation to “trade ‘er in”.
So it will be for you if you forget about ever getting _____(the “d” word) and make your marriage work!
Question: Will you recommit to being a better husband and never using the “d” word in your marriage ever again? You can leave a comment by clicking here.
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Responses (4)
Wow Regi! This a a challenging message. But it’s one people need to hear.
Marriage can be hard. I know that and so does my wife. But it’s something that we committed to. We told each other that we will take the bad with the good, even when the bad seems overwhelming at times.
I can’t wait to see what our “classic” marriage will look like in another 20 to 30 years.
Regi-
I absolutely love this. Andi and I were talking not long ago about the fact that there’s an indescribable value in just simply staying together. It’s almost like God just gives you some unexpected, un-striven for blessing of happiness just because you trusted him and stuck it out. Even when our obedience is sometimed carried out through gritted teeth, it seems he still rewards our trust with good gifts.
It’s not that we had some big breakthrough one day or that either of us have been completely freed of all our crap and baggage. But all I can tell you is that we’re crazier about each other than we’ve ever been and so much of the stuff that used to drive us crazy in a bad way has just kind of melted away in the last few years. We’ve had seasons of bliss and seasons of profound unhappiness, but we’re just in an incredibly sweet place right now that doesn’t seem to have much to do with any of the externals on which we’ve focused so much time and attention in the past.
One of our favorite Dinner & A Movie Date Nights ever is Apollo 13. The big idea is “FAILURE IS NOT AN OPTION!” If you view success in marriage as your only available option, it makes you lean into God and your community of healthy friendships to discover ingenious solutions to what seemed like insurmountable problems. You realize you’re not in it alone and that you have at your disposal a Mission Control who knows more than you know about the ship you’re flying and who is pulling for you every step of the way. And though you’re not aware of it, the world is watching breathlessly, despearately hoping that you’ll succeed because it gives them hope for their own marriage.
Thanks for leveraging your marital near miss and showing so many of us what kind of beauty can rise from the ashes of surrender.
Chris
I was interviewing someone recently that was joking around about the “D” word – it makes me cringe to think about making a joke about something so important.
Thank you for encouraging my husband each and every day. My husband and I live by this. Since we’ve been married we just don’t even mention that word. Great stuff!