Tag Archives: marriage advice

How to Fight Fairly

Marriage comes with arguments even with the most loving couples. Two separate people have two separate opinions sometimes. Fighting while not pleasant isn’t necessarily bad for you marriage, as long as you fight fair. Here are some tips. Never Hit Below the Belt As the person closest to your spouse, you have some a pretty lethal arsenal of weaponry that you could potentially throw at your spouse in times of anger. But hitting below the belt on sensitive topics will only betray the trust your spouse has for you, not win the argument. It is tactics such as these that … Continue reading →

Attack the Issue, Not Each Other

One of the things that I am working on within myself is to avoid attacking my spouse when there is an issue at hand. Instead, I try to focus on attacking the issue with him, instead. This helps keep the personal attacks and nagging each other away. Attacking the issue instead of each other can come up in many forms. For example, rather than attack my spouse for not getting a certain home repair done, I simply ask “What can I do to get this completed?” When he forgets to shoo our old cat down to the basement and close … Continue reading →

Does Absence Make the Heart Grow Fonder?

There is a line in a song by Barenaked Ladies that says “Absence makes the heart grow fungus.” It is a funny take on the famous saying about how being apart makes you desire your partner even more than you might normally do. But the other side of this is implied in that line of the song. If you are emotionally absent, then the relationship can moulder and die. So, what are some of the ways that absence might make the heart grow fonder? Forget the annoyances All of those little things that build up and seem so annoying at … Continue reading →

Three Positive Stories

One of the things that impressed me the most about a friend of mine when I first began to know her is that she never had anything bad to say about her husband. While other wives got together at play groups and complained, she never once criticized her spouse in order to relate or bond with everyone else. it impressed me so much that I knew I wanted to be her friend. So often we complain about our spouse in an effort to gain some sympathy, perhaps to seek advice or to relate to someone else. Women especially tend to … Continue reading →

How to Deal with Time Spent Apart

I remember reading somewhere that Paul and Linda McCartney never spent a night apart from each other during the entire length of their marriage. While I don’t know if this is true or not, I think it would be a wonderful goal for a couple. Still, there are inevitable times when you have to be physically separated from each other. Maybe one spouse is in the armed forces, or has to take an extended business trip or has to care for family far away. Whatever the reason, it isn’t usually easy to be apart. Here are some tips on dealing … Continue reading →

Having a Sense of Yourself Will Help Your Marriage

Before you can be a loving and giving partner to your spouse, you have to first be secure in yourself. Many times in a marriage, especially in a young marriage, one partner tends to drift away from who he she really is until this partner really doesn’t have a clearly defined sense of himself or herself. This can be harmful to a marriage in many ways. How do you identify yourself? Many years ago, when women married they identified themselves mainly by their husband’s name. Jane Doe, for example, would become known to even her old friends as Mrs John … Continue reading →

The Basic Tools of Marriage

Most of the time, when people enter into a marriage, they have no idea what they are in for. They focus so much energy on the ceremony itself or the idea of being married that they forget about actually being prepared for the marriage itself. Months or years later, things can change and start to break down. Fortunately, with the proper marriage tools, repairs can be made. So what are the basic tools of marriage? Well, love, certainly. Love is the bond that brings you together and can hold you together. When things get tough, you can rely on that … Continue reading →

Don’t Fall in Love with Potential

Marriages are successful when two spouses love each other for who they are, not what they might become. But it is so easy to fall into a relationship where you love your partner for their potential not for who or what they are. While people should grow together and be more than they were when you met them, this way of being can end in marriage tragedy. We have a family friend who is in a new relationship. The couple enjoys each other, and both partners are bright, intelligent and caring people. The problem here is that in some areas, … Continue reading →

Overcoming a Crisis in Marriage

The statistics for a divorce after a crisis in your life are overwhelming. A crisis, whether it is an internal conflict such as infidelity or something outside of your control, such as a death in the family, this is the time when your marriage may be most vulnerable. Here is some advice on how you can survive the crisis and make your marriage even stronger. Someone once told me that a crisis in life is just like a hurricane. It is large, loud, very scary and can result in injury or death. I think this is a good comparison. Hurricanes … Continue reading →

Don’t Fight Fire with Fire

The argument starts innocently enough. One of you may have had a bad day or a bad morning and is grumbling about something. The other person walks into the room and becomes an immediate target. “Why can’t you ever remember to do such and such?!?” The other person on the defensive immediately snaps back, “Well, at least I’m not always doing this, that and the other thing!” The next instant you know, you are in a full-blown argument with issues being dragged up from every direction and point in time. This resulting argument is now blown so out of proportion … Continue reading →