A Change of Heart

In order to nurture our marriage we must first have a change of heart. This is what I have really come to learn this week. This is not easy to do if your heart has become harden within your marriage over years and years but I believe it can be done.

Our perspective on marriage needs to change first. Adam and Eve were a great example of this. Now when I am feeling down and negative about my marriage I only need to think about Adam and Eve, if I think I have it bad, Adam and Eve had it pretty rough. Leaving beautiful and perfect Garden of Eden to go into a “lone and deaery world.” I have been pretty lonely the past 7 months, having moved to a new place from a beautiful place with lots of friends. I still have more than Adam and Eve though. This fall into the world from the Garden of Eden was not a tragedy. “It was a brave step toward eternal accomplishment.” (Gottman Drawing Heaven Into Your Marriage). If we start thinking of our marriage in this way it will help us soften our heart.

Next we need to bring humility into our hearts. With humility comes sacrifice, I believe. In order to sacrifice we need to be humble and turn our heart and will over to the Lord. When we do this we can look at our spouse in a new light. The world doesn't look at marriage this way however. Gottman said, “Most of us want the prize without paying the price. We want to have a close, loving marriage, but we're not willing to give up our pet affections. But God has required us to make sacrifices if we are to enjoy that which is most valuable.” He continues... “The willingness to put our preferences on the altar in obedience to God and service of our partner is a sacrifice filled with grace and truth—goodness and eternal vision. Our sacrifices are the key to our growth and eternal possibilities.”

After we learn and understand and apply these things to our marriage we can start nurturing the love in our marriage. We can sacrifice to learn and understand our spouse more fully which will strengthen the foundation of friendship in the marriage.

My favorite quote I read this week was in Goddard's book, Drawing Heaven Into Your Marriage. He said, The cure for cancerous expectations is humble submission—a broken heart and a contrite spirit.” He goes onto to explain what “a broken heart and a contrite spirit” really means. “I feel sure that Jesus is not asking that we be depressed and miserable. I think He is asking that we surrender our demands that things be done our way. In place of being demanding we become agreeable, submissive, cooperative, and appreciative. This is the natural result of allowing Jesus to transfor the natural man to the man of Christ.”

What beautiful words that are so clear and make perfect sense. This really helps me understand how to have a change of heart in order to nurture my marriage and strengthen the roots of my marriage.

Seeing Marriage in a New Light

I have been going about this marriage thing all wrong for the past 8 years. Don’t get me wrong I love my husband very much and we have a great underlying friendship but year after year, hardship after hardship, I started feeling like we were getting worse at this marriage thing and not better. Aren’t we suppose to get better through the years at being married? I kept focusing on, “we just need to communicate better” or “if I could just make him understand me better” or “we need to somehow agree so we stop fighting.”
My eyes have been opened (I hope they stay that way) to the myths I was believing and the selfishness I have been getting deeper and deeper into.
 For the first few years of marriage I kept thinking how we needed to be better communicators and listeners. We tried lots of things but mostly I remember trying endlessly the “active-listening” technique with my husband. My husband hated it and I felt like it didn’t do any good. We ended up arguing anyway or even more so after trying it. I was elated after reading this in Dr. John Gottman book, The Seven Principles For Making a Marriage work, “Active listening asks couples to perform Olympic-level emotional gymnastics when their relationship can barely walk.” Thank goodness! I can throw that technique out the window, well I already did years ago, but now I can not feel guilty that it didn’t work for us.
I have always felt strongly that my husband and I need to agree on everything or somehow come to an agreement on some level to be happy in our marriage. I have come to realize how wrong I was. I couldn’t even find where in the different things I read this week that I came upon this realization. Somewhere along the way this week I realized that we will always disagree on things in life and that is OKAY! We will always have conflicts and argue and that is Okay too! When I told my husband this he said, “I have been trying to tell you that for years!” As long as we don’t let our disagreements turn into contempt, criticism, defensiveness or stonewalling we can still have a happy and strong marriage.
I always knew friendship was important in a marriage to keep it strong but this was a good reminder to focus on it more and the disagreements less. Dr. John Gottman said, “Friendship fuels the flames of romance because it offers the best protection against feeling adversarial toward your spouse.”
While reading the first chapter in Drawing Heaven Into Your Marriage by H. Wallace Goddard, I was reminded how extremely important the Savior and his atonement is in a successful marriage. He said, “Jesus’ infinite grace and goodness can conquer our smallness, selfishness, and peevishness. There is no arena of life where this conquest is more needed than in the scuffing and irritations of marriage.”
I feel a renewal in myself and a new confidence in my marriage that it will all be okay if I start focusing on our friendship, think about my husbands needs and desire and draw closer to my Savior through the atonement.

"Me" or "We"

Me me me me me….we have become such an individualistic society and it is slowly but surely bringing our world crumbling down. So much of society is focused on what he or she wants and what will make “me” happy that we are forgetting that in order for society to keep standing strong we must have a firm foundation and we don’t get that firm foundation by individualistic ideals. Our foundation is not upon selfishness and individual happiness. We must work together to uphold a strong society. If we all think only of ourselves and what will bring “me” happiness instead of what will bring the world as a whole happiness our foundation will crumble and so will society.

Everyone should live and love as they desire, we all have our agency to choose as we desire. Those that choose to love another of the same gender should not be discriminated against. But what does that mean? I believe it mean that they should be allowed to have

“legal protection…regarding ‘hospitalization and medical care, fair housing and employment rights, or probate rights, so long as these do not infringe on the integrity of the traditional family or the constitutional rights of churches.’” (The Divine Institution of Marriage).

The definition of marriage should not have to change to give them those rights. Marriage and family is the foundation of our society that uphold the values and morals that keep our society from crumbling.

When we start thinking of “we” instead of “me” we can see the long term affects that changing the definition of marriage will have on society. We need to take our “me” blinders off and look at the effect it will have on our nation and world in the generations to come.

“While it may be true that allowing same-sex marriage will not immediately and directly affect existing marriages, the real question is how it will affect society as a whole over time, including the rising generation and future generations.

In addition to undermining and diluting the sacred nature of marriage, legalizing same-sex marriage brings many practical implications in the sphere of public policy that will be of concern to parents and society. [18] When a government legalizes same-sex marriage as a civil right, it will almost certainly enforce a wide variety of other policies to enforce this. The implications of these policies are critical to understanding the seriousness of condoning same-sex marriage.

The all-important question of public policy must be: what environment is best for the child and for the rising generation?” (The Divine Institution of Marriage)

This is just a small part why standing up marriage as a man and a woman is important. There is so much more and we need to educate ourselves about it. We need to know where the people that disagree with this are coming from and their points of view. We need to know how it will affect our society and nation. We also need love and compassion. That doesn’t mean we put our beliefs and values behind though. But as Elder Dallin H. Oaks has observed, “Tolerance does not require abandoning one’s standards or one’s opinions on political or public policy choices. Tolerance is a way of reacting to diversity, not a command to insulate it from examination.”[11] (The Divine Institution).

Unconditional love for everyone is a key part in keeping our society standing strong and it is definitely a part in this great debate over marriage. No one is perfect and we all have challenging we are overcoming. When we remember this we can love more perfectly as the Savior does.

The topic of legalizing same-sex marriage is stressful for me. I believe firmly in the definition of marriage as a man and woman for many reasons. The tough part is that I know so many wonderful people who strongly believe in something different. Who have found happiness in same-sex relationships. They are amazing people. Those who have children are wonderful parents who love their children with all their heart.

I need strength from somewhere to stand up for marriage. I received some of that strength from this quote from President Gordon B. Hinckley,

“We go to great lengths to preserve historical buildings and sites in our cities. We need to apply the same fervor to preserving the most ancient and sacred of institutions – the family!” What we desperately need today on all fronts. . . are leaders, men and women who are willing to stand for something. We need people . . . who are willing to stand up for decency, truth, integrity morality, and law and order . . . even when it is unpopular to do so—perhaps especially when it is unpopular to do so. . . . . .Never before, at least not in our generation, have the forces of evil been so blatant, so brazen, so aggressive as they are at the present time. . . . .We are involved in an intense battle. It is a battle between right and wrong, . . . . [W]e desperately need men and women who, in their individual spheres of influence, will stand for truth in a world of sophistry. . . . We need moral men and women, people who stand on principle, to be involved in the political process. . . . The weight of our stance may be enough to tip the scales in the direction of truth and right.