Episodes

We’ve noticed that a lot of marriages take a very traditional approach where all the work HE does is money-earning, and all the work SHE does in unpaid – and usually unacknowledged. So we ask, is this a good thing, or is it a problem? What happens for those wives who take on more and more, and might even do all the housework AND are employed full time? How does that work? If you are a wife that is struggling because you are overloaded with employment and housework – or a husband in the same ...

OK. So you had ANOTHER fight – another disagreement. It’s like, man, are we ever going to stop fighting? Remember, the goal is not achieving zero disagreements, it’s learning to disagree productively! Caleb and I recently had a disagreement. Caleb told the story in our podcast episode: “So I remember a recent disagreement we had. We were actually talking about a Sunday school lesson you were doing in the Old Testament. And you really wanted to emphasize the holiness of God as was expressed in ...

Courting your wife means continuing the maintenance behaviors that build admiration, affection, and respect, the same behaviors that brought you together, applied every week of your marriage. It is not about expensive dates or anniversary gestures. It is about how you live with each other on a regular Tuesday afternoon. The ten ways to court your wife in this article are drawn from twenty years of clinical practice and the published research on what actually keeps couples close. The couples we ...

My own daughter asked me today, “So, why do people do pre-marital counseling?” She’s 13. I’m glad she’s asking. You are likely wondering the same thing if you’re reading this and so I’d like to make a case for it. Not just for my own benefit – I do offer pre-marital counseling/coaching – but for your sake especially. You see, it does help. A lot. Is Pre-Marital Counseling Worth It? One meta-analytic research review we looked into showed that the mean effect size for premarital programs was ...

I know what you’re thinking. Why on earth would I want to support my spouse when we’re fighting? Well, because you want to stay married, that’s why. That’s the “brutally-loving” truth! But, there’s more. It makes fighting productive. Yes. That’s right. I mean it. It actually makes the conflict helpful for your marriage. Now, I could go down a rabbit trail about why fighting is good for your marriage but I want you to think about your beliefs about fighting and disagreeing instead. We genera...

I read a comic strip once about pregnancy and childbirth that had the title “Help, my entertainment center is now a juice bar!” While it struck my funny bone, there is so much truth in that statement. We may think that adding our firstborn to the family will be all hunky-dory, fun and games, but the reality is it usually results in a DECREASE in marital quality. Navigating the relationship issues that transpire following the birth of a child can be tough! If you’re a young parent reading this...

Do you find yourself always taking the blame for everything? I mean, not so much in the sense that your spouse won’t accept any, but that you just find that YOU blame yourself for everything? Even your spouse thinks you take too much responsibility for things? Last week we discussed differentiation. Remember, differentiation is the process of learning to simultaneously separate from and connect with a loved one. If you find yourself always taking the blame and never taking the risk of putting ...

In marriage, we need to strike a healthy balance between independence and dependence on each other. This is where we sort out the sticky stuff like needing you as my spouse versus just being needy – being an individual without taking away from a sense of ‘us’. Differentiation is a key paradox of healthy marriage and is one of those concepts that when the skills are embodied takes a marriage from ordinary to extraordinary. It pushes the constant growth of the relationship and the individuals wit...

We live in a quick-fix society. Everything is easy, cheap and disposable. Somehow we’re trained to think about what we get OUT of things, rather than what we can build into them to make them better. Sometimes marriage can seem complicated. Daily rituals are the little things that can combat the rough areas and make a difference in the day-to-day-living of a couple. They are easy and are sure to really boost your marital happiness. We’re not talking about one-off try-this-when-you-get-home-toda...

There is a lot of discussions nowadays in the business world about work-life balance. Today I want to challenge and inspire you to think seriously about your work-marriage balance! Materialism is the excessive desire to acquire and consume material goods. Think about the choices and values you place on material things (things you can buy) and how that affects your satisfaction with your marriage. Not that wealth is bad, nor is it wrong to prosper. Owning and enjoying material things is not bad...

Because of how sexuality is portrayed in media and how we are socialized to perceive it in our culture, I think there’s this perception that arousal is just something you flip the switch on to get things warmed up for sex. In reality though, what happens in the marriage bed starts much earlier, and much differently! This week, we really want to challenge you to push the idea of intimacy out past the bedroom and to think about it as part of the fabric of your daily lives. We have this simplisti...

What if you could focus on just five things to make sure that your marriage is a success? Relationships can sometimes seem pretty complicated. For this reason, we took a step back to ask the question, “What are the core things that we MUST focus on to make sure we’re on the right track towards marital bliss?” We found (through the research of the National Marriage Project and the Center for Marriage and Families at the Institute for American Values) that the top five things to bring happiness ...

As I sit here, gazing at a picture of my handsome husband, I am asking myself the question, “Should I talk to him about it? It has been bugging me for a few days… Oh, I know! I’ll just shoot him a text message and hint at it – that’ll work out well!” NOT! I think the age-old question of “Should I bring it up with my spouse or just let it go?” needs some good wisdom thrown at it. To start with, I want to quote Caleb who says, “Marriage is a crucible for character formation – but only if we’re ...

It’s Valentines Day this weekend! Happy Valentine’s Day! We specialize in marriage and love so we’re supposed to be all enthused about Valentine’s, right!? So, why do we have mixed feelings about it all? First, some history… There is no firm historical record of how Valentine’s Day came to be, but there are a couple of commonly held possibilities. Apparently, there was an ancient Fertility festival called Lupercalia which occurred on February 15th. This lovers’ holiday traces its roots to ra...

In 2015, couples are saying that communication is their biggest struggle. Why, when we’ve never had so many ways to communicate and keep in touch as we do now, are people still struggling with this? The research is somewhat ironic. Well, not the research itself, but the fact that the topic of marriage communication was studied, documented, tallied, hashed out, etc. back in the 1980s and ’90s. However, in 2015: couples still say this is their #1 area for improvement. Why is that? Let’s look to...

What does faithfulness, or fidelity, mean in your marriage? What does it look like? Are your boundaries strong enough to protect your marriage from an affair? What got us started down this road of thinking is the observation that you can be in a committed marriage and never have sex outside that marriage for forty years, but still be giving members of the opposite sex a lust filled looking over. This begs the question about what loyalty and fidelity mean in a marriage. If you proudly say “I am...

Ahhh…the science of love. It’s pretty cool that something as amorphous as love can be studied. And even cooler when you find research that identifies the daily habits that catalyze the deepening of love. Withdrawer or Pursuer? Some of the most helpful research on love falls under what is known as Attachment Theory. It’s a superb framework for understanding the emotional bond of family and marriage relationships. In the context of marriage, the theory provides for the idea that a spouse will ...

One of the things we want to get you thinking about at the very start of this year is what you are going to do, with deliberate purpose, to enrich your marriage this year. Marriage is an easy thing to take for granted. Think for a moment about the things you value most. What do you do with those things? You get insurance for them! There is every kind of insurance out there which most of us have on our valuable possessions, like life insurance, medical insurance, disability insurance, house insu...

Here’s a fresh thought for fixing or just strengthening your marriage this year: try improving your sleep quality. Really? Yes, really. In this episode of our marriage podcast, we interview Shawn Stevens. He is a best-selling author and the creator of the Model Health Show, currently the #1 Nutrition and Fitness podcast in the world on iTunes. [youtube id=”zAM6iPk53m8″] Watch the video for the full interview. I invited Shawn for an interview because I wanted him to help us understand how we can...

Sometimes after a long day, you just want to climb in bed and go to sleep… but your spouse has other ideas! Differences in sexual desire are very normal. Usually, there is one high desire and one low desire spouse in a marriage – sometimes desires are equal, but not very often. Normally, the husband is a high desire and the wife low desire, but there is nothing wrong if it’s the other way around! We want you to be aware of how these differences in desire can affect your marriage. On a side no...

Christmas is supposed to be a time of joy and cheer with everybody bubbling over with joy. Sometimes it is, but sometimes it just plain hurts. It’s the time of year when there is so much stress and tension. Maybe you’re alone this year, and there is a lot of grief and pain involved. No matter what we’re going through, God has a story of redemption for our lives. Let’s start with the Christmas Story from Matthew 1:18-25 Now the birth of Jesus Christ took place in this way. When his mother Mary ...

After a fight, you basically have four options: you can exit the relationship, you can be patient and loyal by waiting for your spouse to change, you can neglect your spouse, or you can repair. (Branau-Browna & Ragsdale, 2008) We’ve discussed fighting in the last few topics: why fighting for your marriage is good, different fighting styles couples use, and basic ground rules for use in a fight. This last topic in our series, about how to repair after a fight, is definitely the most important of...

Most of us have the wrong idea about conflict in marriage. We fear the conflict could lead to the disintegration of our marriage. That’s a reasonable fear, in many ways. But we paint with too broad a brush. You see, it’s not the conflict itself that puts the marriage at risk but rather the behaviours within the conflict. If you’re just jumping into this series, this episode and show notes are the third in a series of 4 on fighting in marriage. In the first show, we talked about why fighting i...

Fighting is something I am passionate about. Probably because I was so bad at it when we first got married… I would get mad and come across as hostile, crying and flinging words that I didn’t always even mean. Caleb would try to apologize, calm me down and say whatever it took to get himself out of the situation. And what did the fighting accomplish? Nothing! The issues never got resolved. Enter Caleb’s grad school where he learned how to teach others to fight. Thankfully, he taught himself ...