It’s a complaint I hear regularly from people looking for help for their marriages: “I feel distant from my spouse.” “I try to get my husband to open up, but instead he just shuts down.” “My wife just doesn’t seem interested in me anymore. I feel like we’re a million miles apart.” “I don’t know [...]
"The family that prays together stays together." The old adage is more accurate than we realized. Multiple US surveys reveal that although the divorce rate for Christians is about the same as those outside the church, Christian couples that pray together have a divorce rate of less than one percent! In fact, it is the [...]
Marital drift happens even to the best of marriages. Though once deeply in love, busyness, the demands of work and family, and unresolved conflict can turn a couple into roommates. Fortunately, steps can be taken to prevent drift and put you relationship back into synch. Identifying drift is the first step then choosing to do something [...]
“Since we have such a huge crowd of men of faith watching us from the grandstands, let us strip off anything that slows us down or holds us back, and especially those sins that wrap themselves so tightly around our feet and trip us up; and let us run with patience the particular race that [...]
When you’re having a disagreement with your spouse, you have two choices: You can respond or react. Reacting is a reflexive, defense mechanism that kicks in to protect our ego. We react because we sense that we are being misunderstood, dissed, criticized, corrected, or attacked. Reactions are typically impulsive (i.e., “shoot from the hip”) and [...]
It has been called by a variety of terms, such as "living together", "shacking up", "cohabitation,” "serial monogamy,” and "living in sin." By definition, cohabitation occurs when two unmarried people of the opposite sex live together before marriage. It is a halfway house, of sorts, for people who do not want the degree of personal [...]
Marital success or failure can now be predicted before the wedding day with 81 percent accuracy. The following is a seven-point checklist for preventing faulty mate selection. The decision to get married is made too quickly. It is a fact that choosing a mate for life is much more complex than the movies make it out to [...]
It’s getting harder by the day distinguishing Christians for non-Christians. This is particularly true in the area of divorce. Statistically, our failure rate for marriage is not significantly different from those outside of the faith. As a Christian counselor, nothing disturbs me more than to see a couple deliberately throw in the towel with little or no attempt [...]
Beware of thinking, "Adultery would never happen in my marriage." Sadly, many who believed they were invincible are the very ones who have fallen into immorality. I have counseled countless men and women who have sat with their heads in their hands lamenting their stupidity for having been involved in adulterous behavior. I have [...]
Respect the image of God in the other person. Gary Smalley, one of the country's best-known authors and speakers on family relationships, has said, “How would you treat your spouse if you saw them as being autographed by God?" The Bible tells us that we're ALL made in the image of God (and that [...]
