If you want a good relationship and marriage or even just have enough mental stamina to read through a long post for the sake of some good suggestions for your marriage (current or future)... This post is a follow up on the one I did a while ago about #divorce. This time it’s about relationships as a whole, addressing the idea of people celebrating being #single over being in a relationship. I have seen quite a bit of commentary in so many posts and comments on reels and such with a toxic attitude of “stay single! [The other gender] isn’t worth it!” and I feel like this world really needs what I am about to say below. For those who have struggled with the #dating and marriage realm, please don’t write me off right away. Please give what I’m saying here a chance. You might find yourself surprised at how much it may resonate with you. A quick disclaimer before I begin (once again). I am not a therapist and won’t pretend to be (that’s my brother 😉 ) but what I can say here comes from going through and overcoming a massive amount of relationship #trauma as well as finding a #blissful marriage that most people today can only dream about. No, I’m not bragging or saying that that somehow makes me better than anyone else, but rather to illustrate why it’s never okay to give up on having a happy marriage and #family. I even wrote an entire… I think 4 1/2 minute song about that very subject matter called Happy Family (find it on my Spotify)
Here we go. When I was going through #CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) in Canada as a part of my own #addictionrecovery, one of the things my therapist talked about was blanket statements. We see them used in much more than just the dating world, they are used in politics, religion, schools, workplaces, and even just everyday conversations with friends when we carelessly group people together under one umbrella and spew out these all-or-none statements. Ideas like:
“all men watch porn”, “all women are bad drivers”, “all democrats are brainwashed”, “all republicans are misogynistic”, “not one cop out there cares about anything but filling his quota”, “no such thing as an honest car salesman/mechanic anymore”
These are all prejudiced #lies. They are blanket statements that assume that EVERY LAST one of those people are that way. I’m not talking about intent here. I’m talking about the actual words you speak. Ever studied The Four Agreements? Be Impeccable With Your Word is one of them. If you don’t mean it exactly as you say it, DON’T SAY IT! I know some people will say, “it's just an expression.” Guess what, it's also a lie and who do the scriptures say is the father of lies? Yup! Satan himself. It it's not true, keep life simple and don't say it! And yes, that includes #sarcasm. Did you know the origin of the word sarcasm? It's roots are German, sarkazein, meaning to tear flesh. (Don't believe me? Look it up.) The entire purpose of sarcasm is to injure; the antithesis of love. Besides, there is absolutely zero evidence to support any of those statements above. If anyone who reads this truly believes any of them, it means you have fallen prey to the prophesy in D&C 45:26 “…[mankind’s] hearts shall fail them, and they shall say that Christ delayeth his coming until the end of the earth. And the love of men shall wax cold, and iniquity shall abound.” Blanket statements are not only untrue, they drive you away from the love of God.
The Family: A Proclamation to the World says “Successful marriages and families are established and maintained on principles of faith, prayer, repentance, forgiveness, respect, love, compassion, work, and wholesome recreational activities. By divine design, fathers are to preside over their families in love and righteousness and are responsible to provide the necessities of life and protection for their families. Mothers are primarily responsible for the nurture of their children. In these sacred responsibilities, fathers and mothers are obligated to help one another as equal partners.”
Many of those who see this will disregard or disagree with this document and Collette even has a relative who claimed President Hinckley was a fallen prophet when he read that document for the first time. I grew up in a little town that was sadly and heavily steeped in the idea that women were men’s “better half”. These are very #toxic anti-Christ ideas. Ideas like these is how Satan has been able to manipulate men and women into believing that they will never be good enough as they are so if they can just be the other gender, they’ll feel better about themselves. Lie #1. That or he’ll convince people that there’s no hope of finding a healthy relationship with the opposite sex so the “might as well find one with the same sex”. Lie #2. He lies them into the spiritual bondage of same sex relationships. No I’m not saying that’s the case with every gay or lesbian out there. I'm sure people are sometimes gay or lesbian for reason's even legitimate experts don't understand (real experts, not “gender studies” majors), but the lies I mentioned there are certainly some of the tools the devil uses to deceive.
My friends (and even those who aren’t my friends), don’t fall for this lie. The Proclamation I mentioned above clearly teaches that “Marriage between man and woman is essential to [God’s] eternal plan”, which means that if you have given up on the possibility of a happy relationship and marriage with the opposite sex (and yes, there are only two), then you’ve fallen for the lie that you’re beyond the promises that await the souls of the obedient. God made it VERY clear in D&C 82:10 that when we remain fully obedient to His commandments He HAS to bless us. This extends to all blessings associated with all commandments, including the blessing of a happy marriage in His time to a man (if you’re a woman) or woman (if you’re a man) that can last all through the eternities.
***Now, I figured instead of just telling you not to give up on a blissful, joyful, romantic relationship with the opposite sex, I can at least tell you from first hand experience what has and hasn’t worked for me in this area. For context, I have been in an extremely complicated, abusive marriage (where not even several experienced therapists and ecclesiastical leaders could figure out how to help us). I am now in a marriage there is lasting, persistent #joy and there’s never been one morning where we wake up or one night where we lie next to each other thinking “I really don’t like him/her right now.” In my current marriage, Collette and I haven’t had a single fight in almost 4 years or marriage.
And I'll tell you how we do it.
1. Not sweating the small stuff. Hear me out. I think it was my grandpa, when he performed my marriage to Collette in the Payson Temple, who said “when you go into a marriage, go in with eyes wide open and then when you get there, close them a little.” The obvious purpose behind this statement was to make sure we knew everything about each other that was possible to know without living and sleeping together, including each other's biggest strengths and weaknesses. Then, when you begin living together, you close your eyes and not worry about small things. Stuff like leaving the toilet seat up, putting toilet paper the wrong way, not doing the dishes “the right way” or squeezing the toothpaste “incorrectly” or stupid things like that.
If you're one of those people who thinks “but if it's important to me it should be important to them”, consider this. SHOULD it be that important to you? Important enough to make you resentful when you don't get your way? Think about it scripturally, or, as President Nelson said, “think celestial.” Granted, some things are objectively that important, but I'll talk about that shortly. Between Collette and I, I have a bad habit of leaving my socks on the floor when I take them off but even though it still happens sometimes after four years of marriage. But she doesn't ever let it get to her because she knows she has a habit of leaving her bobby pins on the floor; and with the color of our carpet, they often aren't found until we end up accidentally vacuuming them up or I step on them or find that one has somehow made it's way onto the kitchen or bathroom floor. Whatever. There are several other stupid little things that we could easily get annoyed at, from a few of my driving habits to her indecisiveness with shopping and everything in between. We know there are far more important things so we're like, “seriously? Who freaking cares?” Which leads me to my next point.
2. With the stuff that does matter, we make absolutely sure we work until we DO see eye to eye on it. Now don't get me wrong. That doesn't mean we CURRENTLY see eye to eye on every single moral question that could possibly arise. We have had the hard conversations (and kept them peaceful) about everything from sex and preferences in the bedroom, money, tithing, Word of Wisdom matters, LGBT issues, abortion, politics, guns and media choices to temple worship, garments, prophetic counsel, the atonement of Jesus Christ, racism, church history, proper child rearing methods, and the Family Proclamation, energy work and more. Some of these conversations are still something we talk about when occasion arises that we don't see 100% eye to eye on right now. My point with this is that we will continue to have those conversations and NEVER shy away from them or allow them to become points of contention. Most of those subjects are something we do see eye to eye on, but not all of them. We simply keep trying, keep working together through them and we NEVER give up or resign ourselves to perpetual disagreement about them for the rest of our mortal lives. And no, of course it's not just spiritual things we try to be supportive of with each other. We persistently encourage each other's gifts and talents and less important (but still important) elements of our marriage. We are always working to remember to speak each other's love languages - quality time is #1 for Collette and words of affirmation is probably my biggest. She is amazingly supporting of my music and I love encouraging her in her food and childcare abilities. We just don't stress about it to the point where if one of us makes a mistake, we act like a wounded dog and get spiteful. We let it go, forgive, do better and move on. We work persistently, patiently and kindly towards complete mental, spiritual and social unification in every matter of morality and religion. And that leads on to my third point.
3. How we resolve disagreements.
First and foremost, in our efforts to do this, we never ever ever ever EVER resort to name-calling, insults, sexist, or sarcastic or emotionally charged blanket statements (i.e. using terms like “always” or “never” or “all” or “none”) or hyperbole or anything else unkind or unfair. We simply talk through our problems, expressing our feelings clearly but kindly. I've noticed a lot of people giving up on or simply refusing to have and persevere through the hard conversations because it requires them to approach something that makes them feel uncomfortable. I'm only partially sorry to say this (and I know Collette will back me up on this), but get over it!! Swallow your pride and have those conversations. Lack of those conversations is why one couple we know in our extended family is basically just a man and woman living as roommates together. One wants to do all the right things and the other has zero desire to them but does them anyways because they feel “obligated” to. There's no discussion about it and therefore a perpetual situation of a toxic, unspoken agreement of “I'll just do this gospel thing on my own then if you don't want to.” The spouse who refuses to have the hard conversations is the only spouse who never apologizes, is quite rude most of the time when they don't get what they want and claims that “you only really hurt the people you love.” What an absolute farce and an empty existence.
Collette and I know better than that, work incessantly for better than that and have been able to maintain a beautifully unified marriage where we overcome things that make us feel held back. We don't give up on our faith in Christ and our covenants to sustain His chosen prophets or on each other when something is hard.
4. We don't raise our voices at each other.
We understand that expressing anger angrily has no place in any Christ centered home. This isn't just because I'm on the Autism spectrum. Having Asperger's syndrome for me means that the only loud noises I do have a really hard time with human voices speaking in frustration or anger. But this is not the reason why Collette and I avoid speaking to each other with tenseness in our voice. The reason is because it's un-Christlike and it's wrong. Simple as that. Drawing on some of the points above... when we resolve our disagreements, we simply make the effort to choose words that honestly and kindly address our feelings. If we can't find those words, we give each other time to think through things enough to find them. We realize that it is not only possible but essential to learn to SAY rather than SHOW how we feel when the emotion is unpleasant. Sometimes this makes conversations stop and go very suddenly, but if that's what it takes, it's worth it. Just because you don't raise your voice doesn't mean the weight of your words is lost. If your message isn't getting across, raising your voice doesn't force the idea into the person's mind more, it just transfers the their focus on to the messenger (you yourself) instead of the message. Find better words! Sometimes one of us can't find the words or come up with an analogy or whatever else sufficiently in the moment. All of the sudden, many times after praying for it, later on we realize a good way to say it and we politely ask for the other person's attention to explain ourselves and the other one immediately stops what they're doing and listens. We both know that after God and our Savior Jesus Christ, we are each other's first priority, period. This arrangement has made it sooo much easier to feel loved, valued, needed, enjoyed and safe, even with difficult emotions and challenges. As a result of doing these things,
-there ACTUALLY IS persistent peace between us, -the Spirit regularly dwells in our home, -we feel answers to prayers regularly, -we have the strength to stand up against the world (I just recently wrote a song that talks about that, too).
And we are still, 4 years into our marriage, in the phase of constantly saying “I love you” and wanting to kiss and cuddle, etc. a lot when we are together. That honeymoon feeling of loving everything about each other hasn't ended the entire time. It is still easy to overlook annoyances, we still love sharing the little things with each other, we still love trying new things together, and life hasn't “caught up with us” or made it any more difficult to keep the holy elements and spiritual connection of our marriage strong. Nor has any of life's normal challenges made our physical and emotional connection more difficult to maintain.
I'm not saying this to brag. I'm saying this because I'm telling you, if you 1. align your life and choices with the restored gospel of Jesus Christ 2. maintain an unyielding loyalty to counsel given to us from God's prophets (including ancient AND modern scripture) 3. simply refuse to let a relationship with the opposite sex be defined by anything other than the doctrine of Christ, no matter how strong your opinions are about it. All the marital problems we see our modern culture steeped in will easily and permanently disappear.
-You won't have arguments about money because you'll both see eye to eye about good financial habits and want to live by them. -You won't have struggles with physical connection because you'll both have a complete understanding of and love for the law of chastity and complete fidelity. -You won't struggle with things you would normally find bothersome about the opposite sex with your spouse because the eternal perspective you'll develop together will instill in both of you a deep desire to care less and things that matter less. Also, sin will become much less appealing. -On the opposite end of that, you won't be tempted to use selfish excuses like “I'm a woman, let me do the woman thing” or “I'm a guy, let me do the guy thing” as justification for laziness, shallow materialism, arrogance, unrighteous dominion, levity, idol worship, indulgence, vanity, gluttony or any other number of sinful behaviors and beliefs we often see falsely associated with real masculine of feminine nature.
I promise you all of the things that we see more frequently tearing apart marriages will disappear from yours if you start caring more about the Lord's standards than your own. And trust me, “There aren't any guys/girls like that out there anymore” is a cop out and a lie. BECOME that person and you'll automatically attract someone just like that. It really does work. I was reminding Collette yesterday that the first time I initially fell in love with her and asked to kiss her was in a moment where her love of the Savior shined through her countenance. Her spiritual glow made her physically more beautiful and exponentially more socially attractive. Believe me, the increase of physical and social beauty that comes with a greater spiritual glow as a result of your BEHAVIOR is a real thing.
If anyone has any questions and peaceful comments I welcome them here.
I have just seen so much bitterness about the idea of marriage between man and woman in our modern world, I felt what I have shared here is desperately needed. If this helped give you hope or brightened your day or motivated you, please share.
