Skip to main content

Tips for a Happy Marriage

Marriage Boundaries

You probably got married as friends, but then found yourselves running into difficulty because you each had your own way of living and doing. You came from one family, and your partner came from another family, and those families were different.
Your job as a couple is to create some boundaries and rules that will guide you in your marriage. But if you’ve never created any rules before, and you or your partner don’t like rules and boundaries, it won’t be an easy task.

Who is the Leader?

You are equal partners making decisions in marriage. Responsibilities must be divided up. You need policies, procedures, and rules in order to work cooperatively as well as independently.
You will enjoy working together as you know each other better and gain confidence in each other’s decision-making ability. Developing faith and trust takes many months. Forging a new way of life from your different backgrounds takes time and patience.
Remember, you are equal partners. You are both vitally interested in all areas of the marriage. As in a business, consult with each other and participate in making decisions and reviewing them.

Competing Spouses

When the Dolans, a Christian couple, came to see me, they had not spoken to each other for several weeks. The tension had become unbearable.
The issue was over dancing in gym class. Hal Dolan had said flatly that their son should not participate.
Melissa Dolan had agreed in front of her husband, but privately gave their son permission to participate. Hal found out about it through a conversation with a neighbor who had visited the gym class.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The Key to Happy Relationships? It’s Not All About Communication

If couples were paying any attention during the past few decades, they should be able to recite the one critical ingredient for a healthy relationship — communication. But the latest study shows that other skills may be almost as important for keeping couples happy. While expressing your needs and feelings in a positive way to your significant other is a good foundation for resolving conflicts and building a healthy relationship, these skills may not be as strong a predictor of couples’ happiness as experts once thought. In an Internet-based study involving 2,201 participants referred by couples counselors, scientists decided to test, head to head, seven “relationship competencies” that previous researchers and marital therapists found to be important in promoting happiness in romantic relationships. The idea was to rank the skills in order of importance to start building data on which aspects of relationships are most important to keeping them healthy. In addition to ...

How to lose weight

More than one-third of adults in the United States are obese. In fact, the furor over obesity, which some have termed an “epidemic,” has reached such proportions that one big-city mayor has gone about banning large-sized, sugary soft drinks and the First Lady has been on a crusade to control the dietary offerings in public schools. Even many adults who do not fit the clinic definition of obese are still overweight, and a large percentage are looking for the best ways to lose weight. Shedding pounds largely comes down to the two-pronged factors of diet and exercise. Not modifying the first one enough, and not getting enough of the second one, ends up giving the individual a recipe for being overweight.  Conditions related to obesity include heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, and certain types of cancer, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Counseling someone to eat less and exercise more might be the simplest advice possible, but it’s also, partiall...

Can Nightmares Cause Death? Spirit Possession? Mental Illness?

A lot of the research on nightmares suggests these events test the strength of one’s mind. If the mind is not strong, nightmares can take hold with greater force and the torment can extend beyond one’s dreams. Dr. Patrick McNamara of the Boston University School of Medicine looks at nightmares in a modern clinical context that also takes into account the history of dream phenomena in many cultures. He connects nightmares with a world of malevolent spirits. Spirit Possession Some people who experience frequent nightmares, both today and throughout history, also show signs in waking life of mental illness and even what may be seen as spirit possession. Dr. McNamara seems unabashed in speaking about spirit possession. “Nightmares very often involve supernatural characters that attack or target the dreamer in some way. I mean monsters, creatures, demons, spirits, unusual animals, and the like,” Dr. McNamara said in an interview with Boston University’s alumni publicat...