It’s important to remember that in your marriage there is you and your spouse. While you are both interconnected with a variety of other people from extended family to coworkers to friends – it’s important to remember that when it comes to your marriage – it’s you and your spouse. You are a team. You rise and fall together. I remember being told for years that my husband and I had the perfect relationship, of course, I knew better. But on the outside, we presented that unified front. We were a team and that’s what most everyone saw.
On the inside, we may not have been perfect and we certainly had our struggles. But by working together – we appeared to have it all together and I have to say that a great deal of the time – we did have it together.
Here are some tips that we incorporated into our marriage to help us both keep up the teamwork and to keep our marriage about the two of us. By extension, this teamwork benefits our extended family, our children and our friends.
- Give Your Spouse a Break – We both have relatively thick skins and in general, neither of us takes the harsh or quick biting comments of the other as personal. Nine times out ten, one or the other of us apologizes for having said something badly – the tenth time – we may end up in a discussion over it, but we remember that we both love each other first and foremost
- Assume Good Intentions – This is all my husband, he taught me this from the first day we met and it took me years to truly understand the concept and embrace it, but when we assume good intentions – a lot of miscommunication errors go out the window
- Rejection happens – He doesn’t have to like every idea that I have and I don’t have to like every idea that he has – just because we reject a solution or an option does not mean we are spurning our lovers, it just means we’re both individuals with independent thoughts
- Listen to what they say, not what we think they are going to say – we all do this – we have conversations in our heads about how something is going to go and somehow, especially when we hear negativity in our own heads, we transfer it to what our spouse is saying by implying there is a subtext to what they are actually saying – so it’s important to listen to what they are saying, not what you think they were going to say
- Don’t Sulk – Sure, it’d be great if we got our way all the time, but we’re not five – sulking and pitching fits isn’t attractive in children and it’s just downright ugly in adults
- He’s Always on My Side and I’m always on his – period. When there is conflict or contrariness around us, we’re always on each other’s sides. Our disagreements are ours and we don’t take someone else’s side against each other
Our solutions aren’t perfect, but they work for us. How do you and your spouse incorporate teamwork into your marriage?
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