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.