Cherish me as much as I cherish you, Now!

Cling to each other.

I have to admit that reading both Dr. Gottman's book and Dr.  Goddard's book about marriage and how to strengthen our relationships has been really heart wrenching for me.  Oh how I wish my beloved husband were here so that I could tell him how much I appreciate him and cherish him.  Oh how I hope he knew when he was alive how much I loved and cherished him and our relationship.  He along with our children were my whole world and brought immense joy to my life as I hope I did to his.  Now, I have to be content with cherishing his memory and making sure that my children and grandchildren know how much I love and appreciate all that he did and the legacy that he left to us.  

There were a few things that I have regrets over, we were married for 33 years and I did know him very well but, after reading some of the questions and exercises to do to really get to know your spouse on a different level, I wish I had asked him questions about his feelings about his childhood.  I knew about experiences but not how he felt about them, or what they meant to him. 

In researching a marriage topic for another class this week, I came across an article that said, marriage is good for men but it isn't for women.  It piqued my interest because that is not my experience.  Marriage and its companion parenthood, has been the most incredible journey. It  has challenged me, supported me, helped me to grow and develop into a person with much more depth, love and understanding than any other experience I have had in my life.  As I read the article, it was implying that most women had more fun with their girlfriends before they were married and that marriage made them less footloose and free and more responsible.  I wondered about the relationships that the author has had.  Yes, when you marry someone, you do give up freedom because you now are, one half of a whole but the benefits of having someone by your side to cherish you and love you and support you and make you the number one priority in their life and for you to have the opportunity to do the same for him add a richness to life that is difficult to describe.   The two of you together, if you will cherish each other will accomplish more good and have more happiness than either of you could do alone.  Please don't waste time on things that don't matter.  If there are things in your relationship that need repair, repair them.  If you don't have very much fun anymore, go have some fun.  Don't wait until you can only cherish the memory of your spouse, cherish them today.  

Remember why you fell in love in the first place.

When two people decide to get married, usually it is because they love spending time together and can’t imagine not being together.  There is an abiding friendship in their relationship that brings out the best in both of them.   I remember spending all day with my husband before we got married and then talking to him for hours on the phone.  What did we have to say, I’m not sure but we didn’t want the connection we felt to break.  While this is partly due to the newness of the relationship, it doesn’t have to end.  People usually are not static.  They don’t progress to a particular place and then stop changing and progressing.  The key to keeping that same kind of friendship alive after marriage is to nurture the idea that both of you are growing and changing individuals, your relationship needs to also grow and change with you.  

My husband was a master at helping me to grow and progress as a woman.  I had to be careful about what I wanted to do because he would jump on giving me all the support I could want, sometimes more than I wanted.   I once had a crazy idea to raise rabbits for meat.  My thinking was that my kids needed to have a more organic connection that the food we eat, comes from a living animal and that animal gave its life so we could eat.  I mentioned the idea once to him and the next thing I knew, he had made a set of 12 rabbit hutches in the back yard.  What ever I wanted to explore and do, he backed me completely.  Likewise, when he decided that he wanted to volunteer to coach high school football in our town, that became our family activity on Friday nights for about 8 years.  It was fun and exciting and I was so proud of the influence he had on the young men in our community.     

Dr. Gottman, the county’s foremost expert on relationships, said in his book, The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work, that Emotionally intelligent marriages, “have hit upon a dynamic that keeps their negative thoughts and feelings about each other (which all couples have) from overwhelming their positive ones.  Rather than creating a climate of disagreement and resistance, they embrace each other’s needs.”

I believe this embracing each other’s needs by being supportive and excited about what your spouse is excited about helps to keep the same kind of friendship you had in the beginning.  Rather than growing out of love, you grow into a deeper bond of friendship and love for each other. 

A Covenant Marriage vs A Contract Marriage which do you want?

I recently read an article about a celebrity marriage that ended after 2 years or so.  A quote by one of the partners in speaking about their split in an interview said, “Part of the reason it all went so well,… was because both (of us) are actors who are used to attaching and detaching from projects.”  When I read this comment from the husband, I was really sad for them, mostly because they don’t know what a covenant marriage feels like.  Theirs was a contract marriage that had run its course and now was over. The contract was mutually broken with no hard feelings, they could just “detach”.  No wonder their marriage didn’t last.

In a covenant marriage, each spouse takes the prime spot in the thoughts and emotions of their husband or wife.  The happiness of the spouse is more important than your immediate happiness. Sometimes one partner needs 75% more grace and patience than the other.  If in that moment, the other partner can give 100%, there is still a surplus of love and grace.  When they are both giving 100%, a surplus can be banked for future needs.  When each partner is only willing to give 50%, there is rarely if ever a surplus, and emotional emergencies do come up.  After all, we are human with frailties, anxieties and emotions.  Sometimes one or the other of us is unlovable.  In that moment, we hope our partner is willing to be 100% loving or at least willing to stick it out and work it out until the crisis is over.  

On Monday of this week, it was the 10 month anniversary of my sweet husband’s passing into heaven’s realm.  It was a very bittersweet day for me.   We had a very happy marriage, it was not perfect because two imperfect people have a difficult time making a perfect marriage but it was a covenant marriage.  When we were first married, my husband said, “Let’s make a deal that the word divorce will never be on the table, that just will not be in the possible solutions for our problems.”  I wondered occasionally in our younger years how this would all work out and I am sure he on occasion thought the same about me.  Being married is sometimes really hard.  I think however the alternative is worse.  Because we were committed to each other and our children, we worked on our relationship and ironed out all of those rough patches.  Now that he is gone from me for a while, I am immensely grateful for the blessings of having a covenant marriage that will last into the eternities.  The tender blessings of loving and being loved in a covenant marriage are the essence of joy.

What is the cost of 5 people deciding to change the definition of marriage?

Why would the government concern itself with marriage?  According to the Defense of Marriage Act, enacted in 1996, one of the primary purposes of government getting involved in the marriage debate at all is that, “At bottom, civil society has an interest in maintaining and protecting the institution of heterosexual marriage because it has a deep and abiding interest in encouraging responsible procreation and child-rearing. Simply put, government has an interest in marriage because it has an interest in children.”

Children raised by their biological mother and father fare much better on every social science standard that has been studied.  The health of our society is determined by the health (emotional, physical and intellectual) of the rising generation.  Their ability to succeed is largely determined by the way they were raised. 

Katy Faust, an adult mother who was raised by her mother and homosexual partner said in an amicus brief to the supreme court, “…, when it comes to procreation and child-rearing, same-sex couples and opposite-sex couples are wholly unequal and should be treated differently for the sake of the children.

When two adults who cannot procreate want to raise children together, where do those babies come from? Each child is conceived by a mother and a father to whom that child has a natural right. When a child is placed in a same-sex-headed household, she will miss out on at least one critical parental relationship and a vital dual-gender influence. The nature of the adults’ union guarantees this. Whether by adoption, divorce, or third-party reproduction, the adults in this scenario satisfy their heart’s desires, while the child bears the most significant cost: missing out on one or more of her biological parents.

Making policy that intentionally deprives children of their fundamental rights is something that we should not endorse, incentivise, or promote.

According to Ryan T. Anderson, the author of Truth overruled, there are two views of marriage.  The Consenting view which views marriage as the deep emotional bonds between two people regardless of their gender or the Comprehensive view of marriage which has been the view of marriage since the beginning of time.  That view is that marriage is a unique relationship between a man and a woman who are bound to each other and to the children they will produce through the sexual union of those two people.  The marriage binds not only the parents to each other, but the offspring they produce to the parents. 

While the comprehensive view of marriage has been accepted by all societies for millennia, we had 5 lawyers decide that it was time for our society to change, but not on the grounds of liberty and democracy.  They circumvented democracy because the majority of our states had decided democratically that the definition should not be changed, because these five people decided that they knew better than what has stood the test of time, the fundamental meaning of the marriage relationship has been legally changed.   They chose to circumvent our democratic process and as an extension, our liberty.  

The role of the judiciary is to determine if laws are constitutional.  Our constitution says nothing about marriage nor does it say anything about personal relationships.  The majority of cases that have been decided by the supreme court were about how the government should stay out of the personal relationships of the citizenry.  Except in this case where the majority of the justices have decided that it is their right to decide what a marriage relationship should be. 

IN addition to changing the definition of marriage, they have decided that the religious convictions of those who take the comprehensive view of marriage and want to uphold their right to believe in marriage between a man and a woman as being demeaning to same sex couples and stigmatizing them.  Justice Roberts in his dissenting opinion said, “These apparent assaults on the character of fairminded people will have an effect, in society and in court. See post, at 6–7 (ALITO, J., dissenting). Moreover, they are entirely gratuitous. It is one thing for the majority to conclude that the Constitution protects a right to same-sex marriage; it is something else to portray everyone who does not share the majority’s “better informed understanding” as bigoted.

With the courts opinion of religious minded people as bigoted, when the inevitable conflicts arise between same sex couples and those who hold their religious views as protected, it will be difficult to see if the court can uphold the 1^st amendment after overstepping its authority so completely in this case.