How To Thrive In Your Marriage

How To Thrive In Your Marriage

How To Thrive In Your Marriage

What do you suppose the greatest indicator of the future of a marriage really is? What is the one thing that will determine the passion and fulfillment a couple will feel in the coming years? The answer may surprise you.

Before I give you the answer, take a moment and consider how you would define your first year together. If you had to summarize it in one word, what would it be?

When I first got married I was in the United States Marine Corps. Too green to know how the system operated, I naively filled out the paper work to have my belongings transferred from Cleveland, Ohio to Washington D.C. Then my wife and I moved into our new apartment and waitedand waited.

What I didn't quite realize is that there is clock time, and then there is military time. While the military will move your stuff, they will move it once they have a full enough shipment heading to your particular base. Otherwise it sits in storage. That meant it would be almost six weeks before I would see my stuff again.

So there we were in an empty apartment. No dishes, no bed, no furniture, no television and no silverware. And guess what? We loved it! Some of our fondest memories are of eating pizza with plastic ware while sitting on the floor and then dozing off in a sleeping bag.

The next year we were moved to Japan where I could have sworn the bugs living in our kitchen were big enough to carry away small children. With no air conditioning and temperatures near one hundred degrees everyone kept their windows open. This meant that along with the sounds of the street echoing in our tiny apartment geckos would come and go as they pleased. Appealing? Beats me, but we loved it.

However, not everyone shared our fondness of all things new. Indeed, a number of people have made it clear that the first year of marriage was the worst year. Others didn't find humor in lizards invading their space; some didn't have the patience to wait for their belongings to arise, and more found the stress of a new city too much to bear.

Which brings us back to our question, what is the number one indicator of where a marriage is headed? As Dr. John Gottman shares, "Nothing foretells a marriage's future as accurately as how a couple retells their past."

So how do you define your first year? The first five years? Last year? Remember the first step in being a leader is to see things as they are but not worse than they are. And the great thing is that you can always find what is right as easily as you can find what is wrong.

Perhaps it is time to retell the story, your story, and relive the magic that was there in the beginning that drew you together, even if it means sitting on the floor eating pizza with plastic ware.

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