best marriage advice Archives

I must admit, I’m a bit of a ModernMarried.com stalker. I love the main blogger and chief encourager at MM, Maggie Reyes.

If you’ve visited Maggie’s blog, you know she has a gift for lifting the lowest spirits and shares her perspective on love with honesty and transparency but always without judgement.

She loves being married and her joy whenever she talks about marriage is infectious. I just want to rub a little of what she’s got all over the world every day.

As the saying goes, “Happiness is a perfume you cannot pour on others without getting some on yourself.”

She is wonderful. She is a delight. And her marriage benefits from that spirit of happiness daily.

When I stumbled across her post on the best marriage advice she ever got, I wondered if it was the same as the best marriage advice I’ve ever received. It wasn’t. It was entirely different which made it even that much more interesting to me.

Now, I’m not sure which piece of advice I think is better. Maybe we’ll just call it a draw. Both are words of beauty, something we can add to our marriage each and every day.

Until tomorrow…make it a great day!

__________

When The Hubs and I were dating we went to a lot of workshops together. My favorite of all the different classes we did was about connecting with your heart. It was a 6 week class. I don’t remember the name of the teacher, the place where we took it or what we studied. All I remember from the class is one sentence. One, glorious and powerful sentence:

You create your relationship every day.

That’s it. So simple.

The teacher said that people wonder why relationships die. They go out with someone, it’s all fabulous in the beginning and then suddenly something happens. The relationship gets stale.

He went on to say, relationships do not get stale. People forget – you create your relationship every day. What people do is stop creating and then wonder what went wrong.

Well I guess if you count all that, it’s a whole paragraph. 6 week two hour class – and one paragraph was all I got. Oddly enough, it was all I needed.

We left that class and promised, solemnly swore even. We will create our relationship every day. We will not forget and go stale. We will be fresh. Every day.

Once we decided we create our relationship every day then the next question was – how?

We decided to text each other at least once a day. We don’t like to call each other during the day when we are both focused and working, however we religiously text each other at lunch time.

Texts go something like this:

Monday
Hubs: 1:05 pm Loving my over-scheduled wife kisses.
Hubs: 1:21pm Nashville soundtrack is out.
Wifey:1:33pm Yay! Itunes! Late lunch kisses!

Tuesday
Hubs: 12:14 pm Manipulative Assistant Ellis is out on Smash. New showrunner making changes.
Wifey: 12:18pm Yay!
Hubs: 12:12pm And more musicals, not just Bombshell
Wifey: 12:20pm Yes! They all need jobs on different musicals – more songs.
Wifey: 4:52pm Lovey dovey kisses for my hubsicle!

Wednesday
Wifey: 9:02 am Off to sort mail
Hubs:9:03 am Just whistle while you work

We have fun. We make each other laugh. Sometimes The Hubs reads Entertainment Weekly during his lunch time. He has declared himself my personal news-machine hence the updates on my favorite shows.

We create. Fresh Everyday.

Just like Starbucks and Krispy Kreme.

When we get home we hug. We stop whatever we are doing and hug.

Hugs are sacred.

Then we leave the day behind, change clothes, open the mail and start with our Daily Check-In.

We go on dates. When a new movie is coming out we ask each other out. We plan it. As if we were dating. Because we are.

We plan vacations. We love -with zeal and devotion- planning vacations. Not just the vacation itself, but the planning of it. I love beautiful hotels and magical experiences. The spiritual retreat with my favorite author. The acoustic concert with my favorite singer. The Hubs loves guide books and maps. We both love making memories together.

Whenever handed lemons, we promptly make lemonade. On a trip to Costa Rica we accidentally locked our keys in our car. (Notice that I say we. The details don’t matter, we are a team and it happened to both of us. That ‘we’ really helps when there is a lemon parade. ‘We’ got in this together and ‘we’ will get out of it.)

Anyway, as I was saying, there we were not going anywhere in Costa Rica. For several hours.
So we took a hike. Literally. We hiked up a hill. Saw cows. Laid in the grass and looked at clouds. Laughed and hugged.

One of my favorite memories ever was created when our keys were locked in our car.

Lemonade. It’s the new classic coke.

Fresh. Everyday.

COMMENTS: Name one thing you do to keep your relationship fresh. Drop your comment on the Happy Wives Club Facebook page where hundreds of thousands of women engage daily.

THE BOOK: Read the book that inspired the powerful TED talk and prompted author of The 5 Love Languages, Gary Chapman, PhD., to write the book’s foreword. Drs. Les & Leslie Parrott, bestselling authors of Saving Your Marriage Before It Starts said, “We’ve been counseling couples and writing marriage books for a long time, and we can say with absolute certainty, there has never been a book quite like The Argument-Free Marriage. If you think no such union exists, or if you’ve come to the conclusion that arguments are necessary in marriage, allow Fawn to challenge that notion and set you on a path to creating the greatest partnership in life: your marriage.”

Isn’t ironic how a marriage series, pulled together in a matter of a day by four different bloggers, could be so impactful?

Today, is the final day of this impromptu series. I keep referring to it as impromptu because I didn’t have any clue I would host it it until the first post by Maggie Reyes went live on Monday.

As soon as I hit “publish”, I thought, How amazing would be be if I could gather “best marriage advice” articles from four spectacular women and publish a new one each day through the end of the week?

That thought became action and all the women I reached out to responded with excitement.

I chose these four bloggers because I know they are all happily married and the best advice they’d received along the way was certainly being applied in their own marriages (even if they weren’t conscious of it).

What I didn’t anticipate was how different their answers would be which made it that much more enjoyable and inspiring. I’m so grateful I was fortunate enough to host this series. It truly has been one of my favorites.

Cheers! And enjoy this beautiful lesson shared by Christine St. Vil with MomsNCharge.com after interviewing her parents who have been married for more than 47 years.

Until Monday…make it a great weekend!

_____________

Like Paula in yesterday’s post, I have to admit that I too, had to really think about this question.

What was the best marriage advice I’d ever received?

I tried to think back to our wedding video and the sweet words of wisdom that were left by so many of our guests, but nothing was sticking out. I thought back to my bridal shower and the almost seven years we dated before we got married, but nothing was really coming to me.

I then tried to think of all of the interviews I’ve conducted with married couples in the last couple of years, but still nothing really jumped out at me.

But then, something kept coming to me.

It was the advice my parents shared in an interview I did with them last year when asking about how they got to year forty-seven in their marriage.

This is advice I always had in the back of my head, but I now define it more clearly: The only end goal you should have in marriage is to honor, love and cherish each other until the day you die. And the only way to do that is to understand that marriage was not designed for your own benefit. When you understand this, tensions that may arise, don’t last very long.

This “end goal” thought process has taken some time for me to fully understand and appreciate. My husband and I have been through several growth spurts, many impactful changes, and really learning how to communicate effectively.

When you take off the wedding dress, the fancy shoes, the make-up and the tiara, and all you have are your wedding vows to stand on and your spouse by your side, you realize that the only exit strategy in marriage is death. And I don’t know about you, but I want to be alive for a very long time.

I will gladly work through my obstacles and challenges in my marriage because I know that those moments are just that…moments. They don’t define our marriage. They only make our marriage stronger, and allow us to work more fluidly together as a unit.

Beginning with the end in mind means that we may not agree on an issue today or tomorrow. But we have a lifetime together to make it work. It means that there are days we’ll make each other really happy, and there will be days where we may not even want to talk to each other. It means that there will be days when we can’t keep our hands off of each other and days where we don’t even want to touch.

But there will be so many more days that we spend joking, laughing, cuddling, and hugging. Those are the days that we choose to focus on because those are the days that will allow us to focus with the end in mind.

Beginning with the end in mind means that we are working towards one goal…together. It means that we’re in this marriage journey together, as one unit. And as Kim Hall pointed out earlier in this series, there is a whole lot of strength when harnessing the power of two.

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The Best Marriage Advice We Ever Got

The Best Marriage Advice I Got: Begin With The End in Mind