What Are You Feeding Your Marriage?

Years ago, as a young married couple, Mike and I invested in a video series by Gary Smalley. It was called Hidden Keys to Loving Relationships. Watching those videos (yes, they were actual video tapes) and applying the lessons was, without a doubt, one of the most impactful things we ever did for our young marriage. It not only helped us communicate and persevere over the last 20+ years, but they also fed my desire to help other married couples have the kind of marriage Smalley talks about.

In one of his videos he uses the illustration of a plant to demonstrate how important positive care and words are in a relationship. I always thought it was a good visual, but it recently hit home when one of my mentors used it to describe a concept in marriage called "the space in the middle."

See, when we marry we often lose ourselves in the marriage. As things go right, or more often wrong, we identify those rights or wrongs as reflections of who we are, and that simply isn't truth. Let me assure you, friend, you are not your marriage and your spouse is not your marriage. When you can step back and acknowledge that you are you, your spouse is your spouse, and your marriage is your marriage, you can then start to care for it as you would a separate entity. Now, from this vantage point we can see what it is that we have been applying to the marriage and make adjustments if what we have been doing isn't giving us the results we want.

This is where the plant imagery comes in. Let's assume you have a plant and you want very much for it to survive and thrive. However, you are unaware of the things this plant needs to grow and flourish, so you mistakenly pour bleach on it and keep it in the closet. As you can imagine it does not take long for that little plant to wither and die.

Let's pretend that instead of feeding it bleach, you decide to pour nothing on it. You lock it away in a dark room and you leave it be. Again, you can imagine that it won't take long for that plant to fade away.

Conversely, lets assume that you read all the best gardening books and talk to all the right people and discover that a plant needs air, soil, water, and lots of life giving sunlight. When you give the plant what it needs to thrive, as you can guess, it grows strong and becomes everything God intended that plant to be.

You can apply this same principle to your marriage.

Just as we would never assume that a plant would flourish under the terrible conditions mentioned above we often mistakenly pour unkind words, contempt, jealousy, and selfish words and actions on our marriage and then can't understand why it seems to be withering before our eyes. If instead we can step back from our marriage and look at it as something we want to care for and inject it with things like love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control we will be giving it the things that it needs to grow and succeed.

So, how does this play out in real life? Just a few years into our young marriage, Mike and I had three small children under the age of 5. To say both of us were exhausted, is an understatement. On a regular basis Mike would come home to chaos with me standing at the door holding a baby out to him, exasperated I would begin my laundry list of issues and problems that had occurred throughout the day.

And he was no better at greeting us when he got home. He was working full time and going to school full time, so often as he walked in the door, not with excitement to be home and see everyone, but with his mind full of what he had to do next. Our marriage was lacking something and if it continued down this path, we would surely get what we were putting into it, a wilting relationship.

But then, we made a decision.

We decided that our marriage needed a little bit of "awe" put back into it. I decided that instead of throwing a baby at him and complaining about all that had gone wrong that day, that I would treat him with the awe and amazement he deserved when he walked in the door. I know what you are thinking, but what if the dishwasher quit working, the baby poured baby lotion on the carpet, and the dog chewed up the mantel piece? Did you keep it all for later? Yep! He was met with the kind of awe that someone famous would receive if they unexpectedly walked into our house, problems and difficulties could wait till later.

And he decided that he would put away all the things he had to do, for just a little while, when he walked in the door and give us all of him. All the projects and assignments and road frustration, all was left outside the door and all we got when he came in was excitement that he was home to be with us.

So how does this support the space in the middle? We saw that our marriage was limping along, and we could see that it needed a little extra attention. We weren't quite pouring bleach on it, but we certainly weren't giving it all that it needed to grow into the loving, caring, thoughtful, servant-hearted relationship we wanted it to be. And when we found a fault, we made a decision to do things differently.

Let me say that again, we made a decision to do things differently, and our marriage thrived under the new conditions.

So how do you discover what it is that your relationship needs? Some good questions to ask yourself are:

1. "What are you feeding your marriage?"

2. "What kind of marriage do we want and are the things we are feeding it today going to help it grow into what we want it to become?"

3. "What can you start doing differently today that will give you the results that you want tomorrow?"

Thanks for reading! And if you think I could help you in your relationships, please contact me on my contact page!