Building Bridges In Your Marriage
How is your marriage doing today? How sturdy is the bridge that leads to your spouse? The husband and wife relationship is the most important earthly relationship we can have. You may have a good marriage or a bad marriage, but even the best marriages sometimes need extra reinforcement.
How would you label your relationship with your spouse today?
ROMANCE – Sparkle in your eyes when you talk about or think about your spouse. There’s passion. There’s intimacy.
ROUTINE – The sizzle has turned to fizzle. It’s stable but has no spark. It’s okay, but not great. Things could be worse, but then again they could be better.
ROOMATES – It’s dead. Gone flat. The bridge has collapsed.
Fact is, if nothing changes in your marriage, it is going to: (1) Decline (2) Maintain (3) Grow.
Even good marriages hurt some of the time, but bad marriages hurt most of the time. I realize that one visit to the doctor’s office will not heal your marital infirmities. You might need surgery and then recovery. Today is just the first cut. Afterwards, you’ll need to begin to medicate and treat the wounds that plague your marriage.
Relationships get stalled. You can buy an expensive shiny new car that looks awesome on the outside, but until you put fuel in it, you’ll not be able to enjoy it. Sometimes relationships get stalled and go nowhere. If it’s a car, it could be as simple as putting more fuel into it or as expensive as rebuilding the engine.
What Fuels, Builds, Repairs, And Rebuilds Relationships?
#1 COMMUNICATION
Communication can get very confusing. Communication Demographics Magazine listed communication blunders that happen when an American company tries to communicate from English to Spanish:
General Motors named a car "Nova" which in Spanish means "Doesn’t go."
Braniff Airlines Slogan – "Fly In Leather" translated in Spanish means "Fly naked."
We are in the middle of a communication revolution. Just think of all that’s happening these days with the convergence of all the cable systems, satellite systems, telephone systems, internet, cell phones, fiber optics, messages flowing through your own central nervous system, etc. Yet, we still have a hard time talking and listening to each other.
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Communication is a big problem in marriage. Fifty percent of wives say their husbands do not talk to them like they need them to. Eighty-six percent of divorcees interviewed stated that lack of communication was the #1 contributing factor to the breakdown of their marriages.
The most important aspect of communication is listening, but the words you use are vitally important. Proverbs 18:21 – "Death and life are in the power of the tongue…" Ephesians 4:29 -- "Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen."
#2 TRUST
Trust is not inherited but earned. If you can’t trust what someone is saying, then there’s no real communication going on. It’s impossible to have high quality communication without high levels of trust.
Four Ways We Destroy Trust In A Relationship
LIES – If I said to you, "Eighty percent of what I’m going to tell you today is true," that wouldn’t make sense to you. If you inject any element of mistrust into a relationship, it destroys all communication. Simply let your yes be yes, and your no be no.
FLATTERY – Flattery carries with it the motive of manipulation, to get you to do what I want you to do, and no one likes being manipulated. We all have built in "baloney detectors" and we can tell when we’re being manipulated.
BROKEN PROMISES – Whenever you break a promise, you break a trust. People never forget broken promises. When you make a promise you are establishing an expectation. You’re making a deposit. When you break a promise, you are making a withdrawal from the relationship. Do that long enough, and well…
SILENCE – People don’t trust anyone they feel like they don’t know. If you’re silent all the time, people don’t know what’s going on. Tell people what’s on your mind so they can know who you are.
How can trust be rebuilt after it is broken? The answer is one word, one attitude, one action at a time. The greatest damage an earthquake does to a house is that it destroys the foundation. To rebuild, the house has to be lifted and a new foundation built under it, and then the house must be put back together. Is it worth the work? Yes, it was a beautiful home that was saved.
#3 WORK ON YOUR HEART
What is in the heart will eventually manifest itself by what we say and do, similar to the law of sowing and reaping. "For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks." Angry words are not a slip of the tongue but an overflow of the heart. Angry words produce more angry words and more angry words. It’s a vicious cycle.
We will never experience a real change in our relationships until we’ve had a change of heart. Proverbs 27:19 – "As water reflects a face, so a man’s heart reflects the man." Change must occur inside out if it is to be trusted as genuine.
#4 LEARN TO LISTEN
Most people don’t listen very well. "He who answers before listening—that is his folly and his shame" (Proverbs 18:13). Listening is one of the most caring things you will ever do. I have never regretted too many things I didn’t say, and I have always learned more and understood more by listening instead of talking.
What do you want your marriage to be like after you’ve been married 50 years? Madly in love, emotionally, physically, intellectually, spiritually? Hold hands in public? Take walks around the lake? Indescribable depth? Get hits off one another’s oxygen tanks?
Make it happen. ~
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By Steve Cummings
Steve Cummings is a full-time minister and life strategies coach, who conducts family and communication workshops, instructing people on how to improve all aspects of their interpersonal relationships. Email Steve: steve@tusculum.org
