Best Tip For Successful Marriages

The Best Tip for a Great Marriage is listening to your partner.  Ha!  Easy?  So frigging hard!!  Because WE all want to talk!   But if you listen, you will learn to understand. “Marriage is survival,” Pastor says at a wedding.  Then the uncomfortable laughter in his large audience confirmed the truth of it. Despite all our struggles, we’ve managed to survive the worst of times. Marriage is hard.  There are no books.  Which is why I share what I learn! Cause we always gotta grow and be better! The man that says, “I don’t understand my wife” is a horrible listener.  Or he thinks he is listening but he’s not open to understanding. I teach a class to 7th graders. It’s a class about love and life and gratitude. It’s a wonderful class and because I teach it, I’m reminded of life lessons and values every week when the words come out of my mouth. Yet, as soon as the very next morning, or maybe even on my drive home, someone will cut me off and I’ll shout out “Ass+*@!!” Not because I’m a horrible person…but because I’m, oh yeah, human. Try as I might, even as I teach this stuff, I fail daily. But I recover. Maybe not in 2 minutes or even when the person who upset me apologies, but when I relax, reflect and remember what is right and how to treat others. That could take an hour to a month or even longer. I teach it…but I have to practice it too. I even share that with my students so they know how hard it is to try to always be good and kind. The priest at our church (who we always think is pure and angelic) shares his struggles with being nice and Godly when he’s out and about. But he’s wearing the clothes that say he is to behave. Ha. That must be hard! At the airport, where I work, it’s almost hourly when crazy happenings are enough to drive myself or my co-workers into an outright tizzy. Yelling and screaming have to be controlled but we use each other to silently scream and ‘dump.’ And when faced with hearing a co-worker expressing anger about a guest or another co-worker, it’s easy to judge how they are wrong. And all of us, as outsiders, can remain calm and buff and teach the ‘crazy’ person till they relax. Then, tomorrow, it’s your turn to freak out…or quietly complaining about some guest or co-worker that wronged you…and guess what happens? It’s the co-worker who was upset yesterday that is now calm today and has the voice of reason to talk you to the other side of calm. See how team-mates work?? That’s how we need to be in marriage. Team-mates. We are easy to point on ‘wrongs’ on our partner because we can SEE them. But do we calmly point them out to our partner…and walk them thru to get to a thought of reason? Or do we take these angry outbursts as wrong-doings of perfect idiots who should know better and get mad at them for even thinking such thoughts? Especially when the day before they were teaching you how to behaving properly when you almost socked a lady for cutting you in line? You say, “They should know better because they always tell ME to do right and then when push comes to shove, they push and they fail. See how they are wrong??” I say, “It’s because they forgot.” “HOW? How can they forget, they just corrected me about the same thing yesterday!?” “We all forget because we are all human.” It’s our job as partners to constantly remind each other to be on our best….and we all will fail. Always. That’s just part of being human. So when our partner screws up, behaves badly and does something out of anger. Don’t judge them…help them see the other way to think and feel. They will get there. But be on their side. Frustrations get us all a little wacky. So talk to your partner about how you will fail and need them to remind you how to get out of your frustration…then remind them that tomorrow they will need your help to get out of their frustration…and so it continues till we die and are perfect up in heaven.