How to keep your marriage well

ROMANTIC relationships are important for our happiness and well-being.

YET with more than 40 percent of new marriages ending in divorce, it is clear that relationships aren’t always easy. Fortunately, there is something you can do to keep your marriage in good working order.

As the year begins, I would like to remind us areas that many readers indicated were of concern in their marriages:

First purpose to talk openly. Communication is a key piece of healthy relationships.

Healthy couples make time to check in with one another on a regular basis. It’s important to talk about more than just parenting and maintaining the household.

Try to spend a few minutes each day discussing deeper or more personal subjects to stay connected to your partner over the long term. That doesn’t mean you should avoid bringing up difficult subjects. Keeping concerns or problems to yourself can breed resentment.

When discussing tough topics, though, it pays to be kind. Researchers have found that communication style is more important than commitment levels, personality traits or stressful life events in predicting whether happily married couples will go on to divorce. In particular, negative communication patterns such as anger and contempt are linked to an increased likelihood of splitting up.

We therefore need to understand how to communicate. Communication is something that is verbal, it is also non-verbal. We communicate a message to our spouse, and they communicate back to us. Communication takes patience and there are ways that we communicate effectively.

There are ineffective ways. One poor communication style that I promise will end a marriage is when we begin a conversation harshly, in a rude form and in a mean way. Couples that begin communication this way might as well stop it right then.

In some cases, communication starts from harshness and degenerates to something worse until we start feeling negative about the other person. We go into bad opinions about them. Then we cannot fix the discussion or the problem we are dealing with because we feel bad about the person due to the communication which began in the wrong way. It then goes to having bad memories about this person that we are married to for the rest of our life.

You know you can begin communication in a good way. You can start by complimenting the person or saying I want to discuss this. I want to have good communication between us.

Well, this is just a brief discussion on the whole thought of communication and commitment, but understand this, in every relationship we need to know how to communicate effectively.

The husband with his wife and even with the children. And we need to understand that this is critical for a healthy marriage

Disagreements are part of any relationship but some fighting styles are particularly damaging. Couples that use destructive behavior during arguments such as yelling, resorting to personal criticisms or withdrawing from the discussion are more likely to break up than are couples that fight constructively.

Examples of constructive strategies for resolving disagreements include attempting to find out exactly what your partner is feeling, listening to his or her point of view and trying to make him or her laugh.

At the same time, realize that long-lasting marriages take commitment for the rest of your life to this one person. It is an investment of your life into them but it is also an investment of their life into yours so you make each other’s lives even better.

Most importantly, when people get married and know the Lord as their God, then they have a triune relationship. They have the husband, wife and God involved. This relationship really works because of that overall relationship.

They are committed to each other for the rest of our lives. They remain committed even when things aren’t working out well. They believe in each other and have invested in them.

When getting married, you have to feel good about it because true love in marriage is not based only on emotional feelings, these come and go. ln marriage, love is commitment, love is a decision. You decide to love the person you are married to because you are committed to them. To be continued next week