Weekend Challenge #2

The other day I read a great article taken from Mark and Grace Driscoll's new book, Real Marriage: The Truth About Sex, Friendship, and Life Together. Here's an excerpt:

Three kinds of marriage
In our teaching and counseling, we have seen people respond well to a simple explanation of three kinds of marriages: back-to-back, shoulder-to-shoulder, and face-to-face.
A back-to-back marriage is one in which the couple has turned their backs on each other. As a result, they live separately and do not work together (shoulder-to-shoulder) or draw each other out in friendship (face-to-face). In such marriages the partners range from strangers to enemies, but are not friends.
A shoulder-to-shoulder marriage is one in which the couple works together on tasks and projects, such as keeping the home, raising the kids, growing the business, and serving the church.
A face-to-face marriage is one in which, in addition to the shoulder-to-shoulder work, the couple gets a lot of face-to-face time for conversation, friendship, and intimacy.
As a general rule, women have more friendships than men. And their friendships tend to be more face-to-face. This is because men commonly have shoulder-to-shoulder friendships around shared activity. If they take the time to reflect on whom they have considered friends in different seasons of their life, most men recall boys they played with on a sports team and guys they worked with on a job. But they often know very little about these guys they called friends, because their tasks consumed their time and conversation, as they talked about the task in front of them rather than the emotion between them.
Conversely, women's friendships tend to be face-to-face and built around intimate conversation. This explains why women do the sorts of things with other women that men do not do with other men, such as going out to lunch or coffee just to talk, sharing deep intimate feelings while looking each other in the face without a task bringing them together.

A word to husbands and wives
Wives, to be a good friend, learn to spend some time with your husband in shared activity. If he's watching a sporting event, sit down and share it with him. If he's working on a project, hang out nearby to help or at least ask questions and be a companion if nothing else. If he's going fishing, ask if you can come sit in the boat with him just to be in his world. For a wife to build a friendship with her husband requires shoulder-to-shoulder time alongside him.
Husbands, to be a good friend to your wife, learn to have deeper and more intimate conversations. Open up, telling your wife how you're doing and ask­ing her how she is doing. Listen without being distracted by technology or a task (put your cell phone away), but instead focus on her, looking her in the eye for extended periods of time. Draw her out emotionally, and allow her to draw you out emotionally. Keep your advice to a minimum and learn to listen, empathize, comfort, encourage, and in so doing resist the constant male urge to find a problem and try and fix it. No wife likes feeling like a problem to be fixed rather than a person who wants to be intimate. For her, intimacy means “into-me-see," which means she wants to know her husband and be known by him. For a husband to build a friendship with his wife requires him growing in face-to-face skills. Intimacy is ultimately about conversing. As an old proverb says, “The road to the heart is the ear."

This weekend's challenge: Husbands, spend some face-to-face time with your wife; wives, spend some shoulder-to-shoulder time with your husband!