273 Dog Years
Warning, I am not a trained counselor so any advice given from me is coming from my experience and may not be applicable to you. If it doesn’t fit your circumstance or doesn’t make sense to you and you need help, I highly encourage you to reach out to Pastor Patrick or another trained professional.
I have a young friend that went through some relationship problems recently (I didn’t ask and she didn’t tell me what they were so I can’t divulge anything). I so much wanted to sit down with her in a quiet place and give her the opportunity to share what was going on and offer any insights I might have. I didn’t do that because, first, I wasn’t asked; secondly, I’m not trained; and lastly, relationships are important things that deserve trained help.
Anyway, this got me thinking about what kind of advice I might have given based on my experience. Here are several tidbits from our 39 years of marriage – as of when I write this:
1) We mislead ourselves in our fiction and movies about relationships. We want to believe if we find the right person, we’ll be madly and passionately in love with that person in an unchanging way the rest of our lives. Our course the corollary is that if we aren’t madly and passionately in love with the person in an unchanging way, we’ll must not have picked the right person to begin with. Both of these are emphatically BS. In my assessment, the most important aspect to marriage is the commitment that two people make to go through the rest of their life supporting each other. I can, without reservation, say that if you hurt me, you need to worry more about repercussions from my wife than you do from me. For us, that commitment has grown stronger over the years.
2) Marriage is work. Like most couples, we’ve divided up the household chores (and revised that division from time to time as circumstances have changed) and it would be easy to get mad at one another when you felt that your partner isn’t holding up their end. But, for the most part, we’ve learned that getting mad isn’t productive. I would say we’re still experimenting how to share our observations with each other in ways that don’t stimulate a fight and, ideally, are at least considered by the other person. One of the breakthroughs we’ve had in the last 10 years has been going beyond those negotiated chores to wanting to help each other. It is not uncommon for one of us to ask the other one if they want something when we go into the kitchen, for example. This makes the person offering feel good in giving a gift and is appreciated by the other person (sharing both feelings are important communication aspects).
What I would guess would be most couples, when we first started living together (for us it was marriage but that seems to be less important now a days), we were almost competing against each other to establish our dominance in the relationship. Most of the time this was not very productive. Thank God, he gave us a child two years into our marriage and we were too exhausted and overwhelmed to compete for dominance.
3) Be careful who and when you share relationship issues with. Again when we first got married, we lived two minutes from my parents and ten minutes from my wife’s parents. While it was wonderful to have their support (and both sets ached to support us), it was way too easy for us to get into a disagreement and one of us throw up our hands and go and talk to their mom. Thank God, four years into our marriage, we moved twelve hours away and had to fend for ourselves and learn to depend on each other.
4) Think about the big picture. If you approach the disagreement about how quickly you decide to take out the trash with the same intensity and passion you approach the disagreement about long term objectives, you diminish both situations. Right after we moved here, our son wanted to wear his shirt untucked to church (as opposed to my upbringing and 25 years ago). I vehemently argued that he needed to tuck in his shirt. To me, it was a respect for my wishes as his parent. To him it was a stupid rule that other kids didn’t follow. We needed to talk to a professional counselor to ask me, in the big picture, if my relationship both then and into the future was more important than the issue of tucking his shirt in. I decided to give in.
Well, I am sure I could come up with a lot more advice but this is already getting long. Oh, one of the jokes my wife and I make is converting our years of marriage into dog years (you know, 7 person years for every dog year of life). So, if you do the math, we have been married 273 dog years (39 years).
“But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law. And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.” - Galatians 5:22-24 ESV
But the most important relationship advice is to work on your relationship with God. The better your faith walk is, the better you’ll have and use the fruits of the spirit. How much of the above advice could have been summarized into better use of the fruits of the spirit?
