The Work of Marriage

Audio By Carbonatix

Sometimes I stop and think about just how much work it takes to maintain a marriage. That’s probably not a sentence you expected to read from the marriage and family guy the same week as Valentine’s Day. I hope you find a way to celebrate your valentine this week, but I also hope your investment in your marriage doesn’t stop at a nice meal or an overnight stay at someplace romantic. To have a strong and healthy marriage, you need to work to figure out how to speak each other’s language. I’m talking about the moments where you say something that you think is absolutely clear and can only possibly have one meaning, but your spouse interprets it differently than the way you meant it. Or when a short conversation ends with, “I’ll take care of that.” But you later find out that what you imagined as “taking care” of the situation isn’t what they had in mind.

Obviously, miscommunications will be part of all relationships that have a significant degree of depth, because nobody can read anybody else’s mind and because nobody can communicate perfectly and clearly all of the time. But couples can improve in their ability to communicate by remembering that a key part of communicating with your spouse is not that each of you gets to say what you want to say, but that the other person hears what you’re trying to say! And what this means is that sometimes the language you use as you are talking to yourself or as you are talking to other people won’t be the language that you use when you are talking to your spouse. And I don’t mean that the language changes because you’re walking on eggshells around them. I mean that the language changes because you know them so well that you have a better idea of how to communicate with them than you do with other people.

In addition to the communication aspect, there is also the need to divide up all of the responsibilities of day-to-day life. Things like cooking and cleaning and maintenance and laundry and yardwork and paying the bills and taking care of the kids and grocery shopping and all of the other things that need to be done to keep life moving along. There’s no “right” way to divide up all of those responsibilities. Each couple has to figure out the split that works best and feels best for them.

Actually, figuring out how to split up those responsibilities leads us to the next thing that takes work in a marriage: decision making. As soon as there is more than one person involved in making a decision, things can get complicated quickly. And in a marriage, there are two people with ideas on how the family’s time, money, and energy should be spent. Some of those decisions are small enough that if one person has a preference, you can just go with that. But other decisions will be much harder, because there will inevitably be times when you both have strong opinions and you aren’t seeing eye-to-eye. In those moments, each of you being willing to compromise goes a long way!

Finally, to keep the relationship growing and healthy, it’s important to find ways to spend quality time together while you’re doing all of this other stuff. Regular date nights, fun outings, or weekend getaways are great opportunities for couples to reconnect and to take some time away from all of the commotion of life so that they can just enjoy being with each other. The work it takes to maintain a healthy marriage is well worth it, and regular quality time together can be a great reminder of just how much your spouse means to you.