Author: Jack

Don’t Throw Your Marriage Away, Save It.

I’ll be the first to admit I have a problem deciding when to throw something away and when to save it. The struggle I have is when I look at something thinking I might throw it away, I then think to myself, “maybe if I throw it away now I will one day in the future wish I still had it.” Because what I’m really trying to decide is, has this lost its usefulness to me, or does it still have some form of value to me?

That’s the same problem I see a lot people have when it comes to their marriage. They are trying to decide if their marriage has lost its usefulness to them or not. If they determine that it no longer has the value that it once did, such as “makes me happy,” “fulfills me,” “completes me,” or “satisfies all my needs,” they are ready then to dispose of it.

Growing Your Marriage Through Confession

These two simple words “I’m sorry,” can be so powerful for growing your marriage and yet these two words are so seldom heard.

I’m sure you know saying “I love you” is very important for a strong healthy marriage, but confessing your faults to each other and saying “I’m sorry, I was wrong” should be just as important to you as saying “I love you.”

Confessing you are wrong is actually a major part of demonstrating your love for your spouse. It can be an act of devotion to your marriage and love for your spouse for a number of reasons.
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Where Marriage Healing Begins

The desperation I felt to save our marriage was tremendous. I had waited so long for signs of hope and yet so many times it seemed my hopes were dashed. I had no problem accepting the fact that I had hurt our marriage. So all I could think of was trying to find some way to fix the problems I helped create.

After a good while into our last separation, my wife finally decided to go see a counselor. There were a lot of issues she had been dealing with from her childhood and she finally reached a point where she said enough is enough. She wanted the stuff that had tormented her all of her life to be gone once and for all.

Do You Get Tired of Holding On?

Do you ever feel like giving up because you just don’t know if you can take anymore? I know how you feel. You wrestle with the desire to quit, but your belief in staying committed to your marriage keeps you holding on. The heartache, the tears, the weariness, sometimes feels like more than you can bear. And there are times when you don’t see any hope of things getting better and all you can think of is running away. I get it, I have been there too.

I think if I were going through now what I went through before, one of my favorite songs would probably be, “Say Something (I’m Giving Up On You).” It’s one of those sad songs that captures the kind of heartache I used to feel. With tears blinding my eyes I would have been singing along with lyrics like, “You’re the one that I love and I’m saying goodbye.”

What Does a Good Marriage Look Like?

.The desire for a good marriage is a strong desire for most people. I’m sure, most people who are married or hopes to be married wants their marriage to be good. But how do you know if you have a good marriage if you’re not sure what a good marriage looks like?

Sure, you can look around and compare your marriage to other couples. If their marriage appears good you will want to know if you have what they have.

If you think their marriage is built on great friendship, then maybe that’s what you need to have. They could be good communicators. Maybe that’s your answer. If they are romantic and affectionate with each other, that could be what your marriage needs. Or if they report having a very satisfying sex life you could think that is your answer as well. All of these and so much more are great qualities to have in marriage. Read more

Living With Regrets

For most of my adult life I have been living with regrets over the mistakes and bad decisions I have made in the past. It seems my thoughts are always dwelling on some sort of “I should have done that differently,” “if I had known what I know now I could have ……….,” or “I would have made a different choice if I had …………”

It’s the old Should-a-Could-a-Would-a thing that I get caught up in. And sometimes I don’t just visit the land of Should-a-Could-a-Would-a, sometimes I tend to live there for long periods of time. And when I go there, not only is it a place of torment for me, it is also a miserable place for my wife to have deal with me when I’m there.

Get Passion Back into Your Marriage

You don’t have to settle for a marriage where you no longer feel passionate for each other. It doesn’t have to be that way. And you don’t have to dismiss a lack of passion in your marriage as something that passes with time. It is possible to keep the passion going for as long as you both shall live.

Janet and I are living proof that passion can be reborn in a marriage and it can be sustained for a lifetime. This week we will celebrate our thirty-first anniversary and we are probably more passionate for each other today than we ever have been, in spite of the fact that for many years we struggled to even like each other. And even if you have lost the passion you once had for each other, it is possible to Get Passion Back into Your Marriage.

Can You Balance Your Partnership and Friendship?

Every marriage should have a good balance of partnership and friendship. It is difficult and there are many couples who fail at it every day, but it is possible.

Marriage is the only relationship where we should have both partnership and friendship. Ordinarily, in any other relationship, it is considered unwise to mix the two. A business partnership that starts from friendship will usually hurt the friendship. And a partnership that develops into friendship can hurt the partnership. Unless everyone understands the difference and they are able to balance the two properly.

How do You Build a Great Friendship with Your Spouse

A few weeks ago I wrote a post, How Are You Two Related? where I started talking about how in order to have a good relationship we have to look at how well we relate to each other. Then on our last post, How Do You Relate? As Friends, Partners, Lovers, or All Three? I talked about how there are three major ways for us to relate to our spouse and the three types of love that go along with those ways of relating to each other.

Now on this post, I wanted to dig deeper on the subject of relating to each other as friends. But as I looked back at a previous post I did last year, Becoming Best Friends for Life, I felt there is really not that much I would say differently than I did then. So I thought the best thing to do here is to share an edited excerpt from that post.

Friendship in marriage is really important. It’s that place in marriage where two people are joined together in a way that they not only love each other, they really like each other.