What Gives a Positive Basement of Marriage?
My wedding day was one of the
happiest days in my life. I married to man what I loved and liked. We had
common things, I had feeling that “he understands me”, and we loved to be
together. When I get married I had unconscious hope that “all my afflictions
has gone”, and we will have happy untroubled life together. Only during some
time I started realized that our “perfect understanding of each other and match
together” are illusion. We all have
illusions that happiness comes so easily and satisfactions flow freely. Only
some years later I comprehend that the story about how to come to the point
“they lived happily together” just starts with wedding not ends. At the
beginning I didn’t understand the full meaning of marriage: that marriage is
also about perfecting our characters and learning, not only happiness. I was a
little bit choked this week byreading
Daniel Wile’s, marriage therapist’s, statement that choosing a partner is
choosing a set of problems, that each potential relationship has its own
particular set of inescapable recurring problems.
Brother Goddard teaches:
“Afflictions are the process by
which God cultivates growth. Rather
than dread difficulties we can learn to welcome them. We can welcome them as
blessings from heaven. Since marriage is God’s finishing school, we should
expect more afflictions or challenges in marriage than in any other area of
life” Adam and Eve were driven out of
the Garden of Eden to learn and work to perfection.
Only
now I can look to my afflictions more welcoming when at least some of them I
have walked past.
We
have to pay the price to get a prize:
“We cannot steal the fire of love from heaven. We must buy it with soul
stretching payments”.(H.W.Gaddard). W hat is our price, our sacraments in the
marriage? One of them I would say –
“meek heart” and surrendering our
demands that things be done our way. “In place of being demanding we become
agreeable, submissive, cooperative, and
appreciative.”
This
week we have learned about two Dr. Gottman principles of making marriage work
what I suppose is making a positive basement of our marriages. The first is “enhance your love maps” shows how good
we know our spouse. “If you don’t know someone, how can you truly love”, Dr.
Gottman asks. He teaches that in knowledge there is strength: Couples who have detailed love maps of
each other’s world are far better prepared to cope with stressful events and conflict.,
for example, the birth of couple’s first
baby. I agree with that. If we know each other we can better adapt to the
changing circumstances of family life. Good advice is to know each other the best as we can before marriage and
continue during marriage by lovingly observing and asking about other’s likes
and dislikes, character, personality, childhood experiences, about
relationships with previous partners, parents, siblings, extended family, close
friends and co-workers, about behavior in stressful situations, his or her dreams
and aspirations, fears and worries etc. This activity includes also telling your partner about the same
information about yourself and enjoying mutual disclose. We can continue to
enhance our love maps during our marriage. I love to ask my husband every
evening and he told me some most important events in details: “how was your
day? How did you feel about that?”.These conversations have to include not only
facts, but also thoughts and feelings. It requires time of talking and talking.
Here are some websites to have ideas for questions:
The first of all we have to make a time for talking. I
love advice of some marriage therapist’s about “The
“Magic” Five Hours a Week” to strengthen your marriage. They recommended a
20 minutes talk each evening at least 5 working days (20 x 5 = 100 minutes per
week) “Give warm hellos: enjoy a 6-second kiss, look into each other’s
eyes, have a debriefing conversation by telling hat your day was like, describe
thoughts and feelings you had throughout the day, talk about your fears and
achievements,” and add 120 minutes weekly date, where you can ask some questions from
the list (one by one, according to situation),
Another
principle Dr. Gottman taught is
nurturing your fondness and admiration. If a couple still have functioning
fondness and admiration system, their marriage is salvageable. Although happily
married couples may feel to driven to distraction at times by their partner’s
personality flaws, they still feel that the person they married is worthily of honor and respect. If a
couple experiencing negative moments in their relationships it’s important to
return to their positive basement. I love to hear couple’s “love stories”! There are so much fondness and admiration
in them!
We
time to time are remembering our “love story” with my husband, and every time
it is a little bit different and new story, because small interesting details
have been discovered. Another our “secret weapon” to enhance our positive
sentiment override is our sessions of “What
do I like in you?”. We are sitting each opposite to other, holding hands
and in joyful voice telling each other things like that: “I do like that you
are so handsome, so positive and that you love me. I like how you care about
our children, how you come home with smile and 6 seconds kiss…. ” We are doing
5 minutes to one side and 5 minutes to another side. I like even more 10 x 10
minutes talks. You can change question: “What do you respect in me? What do you
admire in me? etc”. Also we can show and raise our fondness and admiration to
our partner by doing small and positive things every day by appreciating for
every small and important thing, showing physical attachment (kissing, warmly
hugging), complimenting, by thinking uplifting thoughts about our spouse, about
his or her positive attitudes (choose ten of them).
You can look for Dr. Gottman fondness
and admiration building course here.
Fondness
and admiration is an antidote to one of the harmful Horseman – Contempt. When I
am happy about my marriage it is preventing me for focusing on negative so much
and recovering more quickly from the conflicts and disappointments. I am still working on my tail-story, and I
believe that it will not end and continue endlessly and happily.
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