Seminar Part 10

Here is rule number 4 and the last post on this subject. I wanted to share this with several of you who asked questions before. I didn't want to say too much then but this is the answer to many of the questions I received about talking.

4. DO NOT TALK ABOUT YOUR MARRIAGE WITH YOUR SPOUSE! That's a disaster waiting to happen for sure.

Talk about movies, cooking, golf, celebrities, or whatever. Stop "working on your marriage and talking about it." That strategy did not work either. Drop it. Remember this is a game. You do not talk about your marriage; you are on the court playing inside your marriage. (Remember when your marriage was at its best, say, not long after you'd met. Did you work on it to become that way?) You are already relating to each other. You are IN the marriage. All you do now differently is that you changed the rules. The game goes on. Your changed behavior will result in your spouse's reconsidering staying in the marriage and wanting to have a good one too. And why wouldn't they? If they start a new one, it is bound to end the same way as this one was before you changed the rules.

Once you give up fighting (disagreeing or resenting) your spouse will too. Your husband or wife did not "win." You both won. A good marriage is a win/win game. As long as you keep insisting on being right – therefore they have to be wrong, or justifying your actions and nullify theirs; as long as you are trying to play a one-upmanship game with your spouse, the marriage will go down the tubes. The price that you are paying for sticking to your old strategies has cost you a fulfilling marriage with your spouse. When you give that up and stick with what you've learned in these posts, your marriage will start flourishing. Someone said that love was not gazing into each other's eyes, but together looking into the future.

That is a next step in creating a powerful and satisfying marriage.
BE CAREFUL: DO NOT SLIP INTO YOUR OLD BEHAVIOR even if your spouse does. Now you know what to do. The more you take the responsibility for your marriage, the healthier it will be. (Responsibility is not a burden. It's a privilege. It is a STAND that you take FOR something.)
Pray for your ability to be the best you can be NOW and every moment from now on, every NOW in the future.

This is the last of the awareness exercises: What would happen if you were to take 100% responsibility for your marriage? Would that make you stronger, or weaker? One day you may laugh at how silly, childish, immature, serious and significant you once were. Now you know better:
• Humans are not logical creatures when it comes to marriages.
• Do not complain to anyone who cannot do anything about it, like your
friends and family.
• Your marriage is a game. (For now, anyway)
• You cannot change the past.
• Do what works; drop what doesn't.
• You do not NEED each other.
• You cannot control the behavior of your spouse.
• You DO NOT have to be right.
• You CAN be happy at any time.
• You do not have to work ON the marriage - you are IN the marriage.
• You CAN choose what quality of a marriage you want to have.

This is it for now. Apply what you've read in these posts and your marriage will get repaired and both of you will become different people. Christ knew why to condemn a divorce. He knew that no matter what (for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health) marriage can always be saved. Better said, there is rarely a really good reason for divorce. First, repair the current marriage and then, if you want to find another husband or wife, at least you will know how to keep them. NOT! The percentage of second marriage divorces is much higher than first ones. Does that tell you something? Once you repair your marriage you will start to build the next stage, a 'gameless' relationship. This will be the next level of your development too.

By changing your ways and with Gods help your marriage will flourish. If you have to read everything over again to remember the steps, do it. Two ladies have already written about the success they are seeing. One said that her husband asked what had happen, that she seemed different. The second husband asked if she had a boyfriend on the side! Some spouses are already noticing.