Amazing Marriage, How to Have One

Enjoying every minute of our amazing marriage

Someone from my men’s group introduced me to his wife. He said, “This is Peter. He’s the one with amazing marriage.” I guess I must have talked about wife a lot in men’s group.

It’s just so natural for my wife & me to enjoy practically every minute we are together.

Our marriage did not start like that. Below are a few things we figured out over the years.

Consideration & Respect

One day in men’s group I spent probably less than a minute giving one man a bit of marital advice. A few weeks later he came back and said his marriage was “a thousand times better”.

All I had done is paraphrase a Bible verse. I told him that 1 Peter 3:7 tells us to “treat our wives with consideration and respect so that our prayers would not go unanswered”. I told him to try to treat her with consideration and respect every minute of every day.

The above concept is one of the real secrets of our amazing marriage.

Conflict resolution to have an amazing marriage

Every couple disagrees about something once in a while. The disagreement can become so strong that it could be considered a conflict. Note that this behaviour is normal and resolvable.

When you discover a new conflict, just discuss it and figure out a solution.

There are two very valuable tools to figuring out a solution:

• Reading the Bible out loud together.
• Praying out loud together.

The Bible has been called the best marriage manual ever. It’s amazing how you can find solutions to problems by reading it along with prayer.

Five Love Languages

What if I spoke to my wife all the time speaking Spanish and she did not understand Spanish. We would have communication problems. In the same way, we would have communication problems if we did not understand each other’s love language.

Dr. Gary Chapman was a marriage counsellor who observed that various couples had five distinctly different ways of expressing love to their spouses. He was so fascinated by this observation that he wrote a book about it. It’s called The Five Love Languages.

The 5 love languages are:

• Acts of service,
• Gift-giving,
• Physical touch,
• Quality time, and
• Words of affirmation.

You can find them explained more fully on this web page.

Money

Money problems are one of the big three causes of divorce. (The other two are sex problems & communication problems.)

Most of us have a finite amount of money and could easily use more. So, it is necessary to adapt your lifestyle to the amount of money available.

My wife & I went to a financial counsellor. Among other things, she had us set up a budget. We had to decide how much money we had each month and where each dollar would go. Both of us had to sacrifice things that we would have liked to have had.

We started buying practically everything with a debit card. (Credit cards are too tempting. Besides, you eventually have to pay it back. Not only that, but the interest can add up to a great deal of money.)

We inserted the budget in a spreadsheet with list of blank spaces for those items we may spend money on more than once a month. A couple times a week I enter our debit card spendings in the appropriate cell on the spreadsheet.

Now we have a tiny bit of money left over at the end of every month. The stress is gone. We have enough money. I even try to transfer $100 into savings every month to cover occasional unusual but predictable expenses. (For instance, you occasionally will have to get new tires or new brakes for your car.)

Bye-bye stress, welcome amazing marriage

We incorporated the above points into our lifestyle. Now we have virtually no stress and virtually every minute together is an enjoyable experience.

 

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