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What guidelines do you suggest for healthy boundaries when putting the needs of your spouse before your own needs?
Fundamentally, we have to recognize that all of us have emotional needs, social needs, physical needs, and spiritual needs. The scriptures call me, as the husband, to serve my wife, to give my life to her like Christ gave His life to the church. And the same spirit is on the part of the wife, when she submits to the husband. Both of those words are preceded by the concept, submitting yourselves one to another. And wives are told to submit to husbands, husbands are told to love their wives and give themselves to her.
So the biblical pattern of serving your spouse is there, for the husband and wife. I think the husband is to take the initiative, as Christ took the initiative to love the church. The scriptures say we love Him because He first loved us.
In the process of giving my life away for my wife, I have to recognize that if my own needs aren't met - physically, emotionally and spiritually - eventually I won't be there to meet her needs.
For example, if I don't meet my physical needs of food, rest, and exercise, I'm going to die early, and I won't be there to give my life to her. She will be alone. It's fundamental to recognize the necessity of meeting our own basic
needs so that we can be a healthy person in order to continue the process of serving our spouses over a period of time.
In the spiritual area, you need to make time for your daily time alone with God. Nothing substitutes for that personal, daily time when you and God sit down and you listen to God and have this personal time everyday. If you're not meeting with God on a regular basis and developing your own spiritual life, you will draw back from servanthood, you will not be the husband or wife God intended you to be.
You need to make time for your emotional needs too. We can get so up tight in all the things we're doing that emotionally, we're no longer affective in loving our spouses. Learning your own emotional make up and what you need to keep yourself emotionally balanced, is critical.
Some people find great help in taking five-minute vacations throughout the course of a day. Taking a five-minute walk around the house is exactly what they need to keep themselves on an even keel emotionally. It's different for different people. You need to learn your own limits, you need to understand your stress limitations, and you need to learn when to back off and divert your heart, mind, and body.
Taking care of ourselves is fundamental in order to do what the bible tells us to do, namely, give our lives away to each other.
How do you make your spouse more important than your children?
In a theoretical sense we know that our relationship with our spouse and our relationship with our children are extremely important. And in a sense, we don't want to pit those against the other. The well being of our children and the well being of our spouse and marriage, are both very important.
However, what happens sometimes, is when the children come we begin to focus on their needs and almost without knowing it we begin to ignore each other and the needs of the marriage. And then we wake up a year or two down the road and realize our marriage has suffered. We don't feel close to each other. We have negative feelings toward each other. And sometimes, one of us is getting attracted to someone else outside the marriage. We focus so much on the children, that we didn't give proper attention to the marriage.
Let's sit down before the children come and say to each other, "We're excited, we're looking forward to this child, but there's a danger that one or both of us will so focus on the child we will forget each other. Let's make a covenant that when this child comes, we will remember that the most important thing we can do for this child is keep our marriage strong.
At this time you discuss how you might give time to each other. This might be the time to initiate a date night, if you haven't already done so. This is the time to say, "Maybe for three months after the baby comes, we won't have a date night where we go out, but we'll sit down two nights a week after the baby's in bed and we'll give an hour to each other." You establish some things to safeguard your time with each other, realizing it's all tied together: Your good marriage and the well being of your child are a package, and you really can't separate them. When you do, you get into trouble,
If the marriage is neglected and the marriage falls apart, all your good efforts to invest time in the life of that child are going to be lost because that child will grow up with one parent instead of two parents. That is not a healthy situation.
How do I get my spouse to welcome outside help, whether it is from a counselor or a resource, such as a book or marriage conference?
There's alot of help available today in books, videos, marriage seminars and counseling. Sometimes the people who need it most are not aware they need it. They're happy with things the way they are. They're getting their fulfillment maybe not in the marriage but from their work, the church or some social involvement. It's okay with them that the marriage isn't going the way they earlier dreamed it would.
The other partner really wants things to be different. It is often the case that one spouse will desire help more than the other.
We've said for a long time, we cannot change our spouses. But the fast is, we can influence our spouses, and we do every day. The question is are we having a good influence or are we having a poor influence? Let's try to learn how to have a positive influence on your spouse.
Typically, when one a spouse realizes the marriage needs help, we tend to get negative. We tend to get critical of our partner, it shows up in our behavior, we withdrawal.
If you want to have a positive influence, first you have to have a positive attitude and use positive words. Back off from the hurt, pain and frustration and ask yourself, "How can I have a positive influence on my spouse?"
You start giving them positive affirmation for the good things they are doing. After you've done that a while, you make a request of them. Not overnight - not until you give them lots of affirmation.
Before you make that request, you might even ask, "How can I be a better husband to you? What could I do to help you this week?" You begin to reach out and ask them for information on how you can serve them. What you're doing is practicing biblical principles that you wish they would practice.
After you've done that a while, and they see there's been some change in the way you're responding to them, you make your request of them. Because they have seen these changes in you and they feel more warmly toward you, they are now more likely to respond to your request to participate in outside help.
Is there a particular activity or practice a couple could do consistently during their first year of marriage that might get them off on the right foot for a healthy relationship?
First, they could share a book on marriage. They would agree that each of them would read a chapter and at the end of the week they would sit down and share with each other one thing they learned about themselves. It's a vehicle for self-revelation. In that context, chances are they will be growing through the process.
Secondly, once a year, the rest of your lives, attend a marriage enrichment event. It might be a weekend retreat sponsored by your church, it might be a weekend seminar that comes to your city, it might be a class in your church. Every year commit to attending some marriage enrichment event. If couples will start that habit the first year of marriage, they will get on the right track.
A third suggestion, particularly during the first six months of the marriage, once a week, have a sharing time in which we share with each other one thing that's troubling me. One thing, you wish your partner would change.
Sometimes couples are reluctant to do this in the early stages because they're still in the "in love" experience. The fact is when two people get married, they discover things they never knew about each other. It can be little things, things you never noticed before, things that bug you. There needs to be a way of processing those things in a positive way and make changes.
My suggestion is this. Once a week you agree that we will sit down and open ourselves up and say, "Okay, tell me one thing you wish I would change that would make things better for you." Before responding. the spouse first tells their partner three things they like about them. If there's nothing that bothers you, you pass that week.
What you're doing is recognizing that we're going to make some changes in the first year of marriage, and here's the way we're going to do it. We're not going
to save up all these things that bug us and then one night, shoot each other with five things we need changed. We have a plan.
If couples would do that, most couples could work through those little troubling things in that first year of marriage and they wouldn't become "unresolved conflicts" five years after they're married.
Read Part One — click!
