I Love You More: How Everyday Problems Can Strengthen Your Marriage

I Love You More: How Everyday Problems Can Strengthen Your Marriage

Unabridged — 5 hours, 58 minutes

I Love You More: How Everyday Problems Can Strengthen Your Marriage

I Love You More: How Everyday Problems Can Strengthen Your Marriage

Unabridged — 5 hours, 58 minutes

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Overview

How to make the thorns in your marriage come up roses.

The big and little annoyances in your marriage are actually opportunities to deepen your love for each other. Relationship experts and award-winning authors Les and Leslie Parrott believe that your personal quirks and differences--where you squeeze the toothpaste tube, how you handle money--can actually help draw you together provided you handle them correctly.

Turn your marriage's prickly issues into opportunities to love each other more as you learn how to:

  • build intimacy while respecting personal space
  • tap the power of a positive marriage attitude
  • replace boredom with fun, irritability with patience, busyness with time together, debt with a team approach to your finances
  • . . . and much, much more.

Plus--get an inside look at the very soul of your marriage, and how connecting with God can connect you to each other in ways you never dreamed.


Product Details

BN ID: 2940171755836
Publisher: Zondervan
Publication date: 09/21/2009
Edition description: Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

I Love You More

How Everyday Problems Can Strengthen Your Marriage
By Les Parrott Leslie Parrott

Zondervan

Copyright © 2005 Les and Leslie Parrott
All right reserved.

ISBN: 0-310-25738-7


Chapter One

love is not enough

A marriage survives and thrives when a couple learns to use problems to their advantage.

All beginnings are lovely. French proverb

Two days after our wedding in Chicago, Les and I were nestled into a cottage, surrounded by towering timbers along the picturesque Oregon coast. A few miles to the south of us were the famous coastal sand dunes where we planned to ride horses later that week. And up the coast was a quaint harbor village where we thought we might spend another day leisurely looking at shops and eating our dinner by candlelight in a rustic inn some friends recommended. Other than that, we had nothing on our itinerary for the next five days except enjoying the beach and each other, rain or shine.

Neither of us could have dreamed up a scenario that would have been better for our honeymoon. Not that everything was perfect. For starters, we accidentally locked ourselves out of our rental car the day after we arrived. I was commenting on how the sun was trying to poke its way out of some clouds when Les realized the keys were in the ignition and all the doors were locked.

"You stay here in the cabin," Les said, taking his first stab at being an everything's-under-control kind of husband. "I'm going to walk to that filling station on the main road and get some help."

"I'll go with you," I responded.

"Are you sure? It might rain."

"It'll be fun; let's go."

We walked and talked the two or three miles to find a pay phone, where we made arrangements for the locksmith to pick us up and take us back to our car. Sitting on a curb, we waited, saying nothing. Les was fiddling with a stick he'd picked up on our walk when I realized several minutes had passed and neither of us had said a word. It was an easy stillness, though; a kind of eloquent voicelessness where we were content, comfortable, to not talk.

I think it was there and then, quietly sitting on a curb next to a phone booth under a cloudy sky, that the thought hit me like a ray of light. I had captured true love. The thing I'd been chasing ever since I was old enough to know it could be sought was now in my possession. I had married a man who loved me deeply, just as I loved him. We committed ourselves to love together, forever. Love's ethereal mysteries were now unfolding before my very eyes. Its elusive qualities were fading. True love was no longer out of reach. The very opposite, in fact, was true. While I stood by doing nothing, love was enveloping my being. I'm not talking about the dizzying effects of falling in love that happen in the early starry-eyed stages of a new relationship. Les and I had dated for nearly seven years before we found ourselves married and honeymooning on the Oregon coast.

The love I'm talking about experiencing that day was clear-eyed and grounded. There was no sunset on the horizon, no piped-in background music. This was reality and I was simply taking it in, relishing the silence and stillness of having no other purpose than that of being together. Husband and wife. We had created a marriage. And it was good. So good was this love we had at the beginning that we could practically live on it. And we did, for a time.

Can We Keep a Good Thing Going?

Like most couples deeply in love, Les and I longed to find ways to make our love endure even before we were married. Part of the impetus for our vision came from reading A Severe Mercy, the real-life love story about Sheldon and Davy Vanauken, two lovers who not only dreamed about building a soulful union, but devised a concrete strategy for doing so that they called their "Shining Barrier." Its goal: to make their love invulnerable. Its plan: to share everything. Everything! If one of them liked something, they decided, there must be something to like in it-and the other must find it. Whether it be poetry, strawberries, or an interest in ships, Sheldon and Davy committed to share every single thing either of them liked. That way they would create a thousand strands, great and small, that would link them together. They reasoned that by sharing everything they would become so close that it would be impossible, unthinkable, for either of them to suppose that they could ever recreate such closeness with anyone else. Total sharing, they felt, was the ultimate secret of a love that would last forever.

To be the watch upon the walls of the Shining Barrier, Sheldon and Davy established what they called the Navigators' Council. It was an inquiry into the state of their union. More than once a month they would intentionally talk about their relationship and evaluate their activities by asking, Is this best for our love?

It's a great question. Why not raise the Shining Barrier as Sheldon and Davy did? Why not create a shield to protect one's love? After all, who hasn't seen the soul of a marriage perish because the couple took love for granted? Ceasing to do things together, finding separate interests, many couples turn their "we" into "I" as their love becomes lifeless. Even before we were married we observed a subtle separateness creeping into some marriages with barely a notice-each of them going off to their separate jobs in separate worlds, while their apartness was quietly tearing at their union. Why let this happen to us? Why not raise the Shining Barrier?

Something about guarding against losing the glory of love struck a chord with us-just as it does with every couple on the brink of marriage. But is it possible? Is it within the realm of human capability to keep love always protected from harm? And even if it were, is love enough to sustain a marriage? The answer, in our opinion, is no. And the Vanauken story proves it. Sheldon and Davy did everything possible to preserve their love, but in the end, they couldn't. Death stole their togetherness as Davy lay dying in a hospital bed.

We'll say it again. Love cannot protect a marriage from harm, and love, by itself, is not enough to sustain even the most loving couples.

Exercise 1: Taking Inventory of Your Marriage

Before progressing further into this chapter, we urge you to take inventory of the good and the bad in your relationship. This initial exercise will set the stage for the work you do in chapters to come. The exercise is found in the accompanying I Love You More Workbooks (note that there is one workbook for husbands and another one for wives). The exercise will help you and your partner identify what is currently making your love life tougher than it needs to be and what is already helping you make it better.

Love Is Not Enough to Make a Marriage Good

It's a rare week when our postman in Seattle does not deliver a wedding invitation to our door. Because we work with so many engaged couples through our teaching, seminars, and counseling, we get invited to more weddings than we can ever attend. And the ones we do attend always remind us how glorious the beginning of lifelong love is. We stand up with this individual and make a declaration in front of friends and family concerning the convincing nature of our love and how it will endure a lifetime. We vow right then and there to dedicate the rest of our lives to the pursuit, discovery, testing, enjoying, and continual renewal of this love. We are so convinced of the enduring quality of this good love that we stake our very lives on it. We vow to love "until death do us part."

Without love there would be no wedding, and certainly no marriage. Love is the catalyst for commitment. Love is what insures that every marriage starts out good. But sooner or later every good marriage bumps into negative things. And that's when honest couples discover that love, no matter how good, is never enough.

Let's make this clear: We all entered marriage confident our union would not simply survive but thrive. Our confidence was built and bolstered by our love. But here's the kicker: One cannot completely guard one's love against the things that diminish it (not even Sheldon and Davy could do that). What's more, love in itself is seldom sturdy enough to support a couple when they inevitably run into bad things. In fact, the loss of love is given as a major reason for marital dissolution. Love, while being a good catalyst for marriage, cannot sustain it alone.

We have counseled countless couples who cling to the sentimental romantic notion of love expressed in songs, movies, and novels. It is a notion that leads most of us into a destructive marital myth that says, Everything good in this relationship should get better in time. But the truth is, not everything gets better. Many things improve because of marriage, but some things become more difficult. Every successful marriage, for example, requires necessary losses. For starters, marriage means coming to terms with new limits on one's independence. It means giving up a carefree lifestyle. Even to people who have dreamed for years about getting married and who think of themselves as hating to be alone, marriage still cannot help but come as an invasion of privacy and independence. No one has ever been married without being surprised at the sheer intensity of this invasion. And so, for many, they run into their first real challenge to love. But it will not be their last.

Like two weary soldiers taking cover in a bunker, every couple is bewildered by constant assaults to their love life. Marriage is continually bombarded by unpredictable instances that interfere with being the kind of lovers we want to be. We are torn apart by busy schedules, by words we wish we could take back, and in short, by not giving all that love demands.

"Love asks for everything," writes Mike Mason. "Not just for a little bit, or a whole lot, but for everything." And how hard it is to give everything! Indeed, it is impossible. We can establish a Shining Barrier or make a symbolic gesture of giving all, even declare it quite dramatically at a wedding ceremony, but that is just a start, a mere message of intention. It is only when we move beyond the "moon of honey," as the French put it, that our love is truly tested. And no one, no matter how loving, can stand up to the test of not only giving everything one owns but everything one is. Be certain of this: You and your spouse will fail at love. Why? Because no mere mortal can ever live by romantic love alone.

Husbands and wives get hurt in love. Bad things happen. Nevertheless, for the couple who is able to accept that not everything good gets better in marriage and who matures together in love, there is a great surprise in store: their marriage, though bandied about by a myriad of bad things, can remain good, or at the very least get good once more.

What Makes a Marriage Good?

Ask most people this question and you'll undoubtedly hear something about love. But ask those who have given it serious thought, who have dedicated themselves to study and research of the topic, and you'll hear a different answer. Better yet, ask this question of couples who have a good marriage in spite of everything they've encountered, and you'll hear the answer that matters most. That's what we did, and it became the reason for writing this book. Here's what they told us: A good marriage is built by two people's capacity to adjust to negative things. In survey after survey, when we asked couples to crystallize their thoughts on what makes a marriage successful, that was their answer. And when we pushed them to flesh out that answer, we learned the secrets these smart couples hold.

A good marriage is made up of ... two people who take ownership for the good as well as the bad. They are a responsible couple.

A good marriage is made up of ... two people believing good wins over bad. They are a hopeful couple.

A good marriage is made up of ... two people walking in each other's shoes. They are an empathic couple.

A good marriage is made up of ... two people healing the hurts they don't deserve. They are a forgiving couple.

A good marriage is made up of ... two people living the love they promise. They are a committed couple.

Exercise 2: Exploring Your Marital Armament

If you are like most couples, it may help to measure where you and your partner stand on each of these five traits of a good marriage. Are you more optimistic than your partner, for example, while your partner is more forgiving than you are? This exercise in your workbooks gives you an opportunity to assess each of these important qualities in yourselves.

From all that we can gather, these five qualities are the armament used to protect good couples from destruction: ownership, hope, forgiveness, empathy, and commitment. And it is these five qualities that we devote later parts of this book to, giving you practical ways to cultivate them in your own marriage. Before we get there, however, there is an important question that needs consideration. It is one that lingers in the mind of every couple whose love has bumped into negative things. And how you answer it will determine how well you learn to protect the love you cherish. Why do problems occur in good marriages? We explore possible answers in the next chapter.

For Reflection

1. As you consider the beginning of your marriage, do you recall a time when you felt "enveloped" by love? How do you describe such an experience, and how likely is it in later passages of marriage?

2. Do you identify with Sheldon and Davy Vanauken in their pursuit to protect their love from harm with a "Shining Barrier"? What have you done, in concrete terms, to guard your love for each other?

3. What do you make of this idea that to survive bad things, a good marriage needs more than love? Do you agree? If so, why? If not, how do you support your position?

4. As you begin this study of good marriages bumping into bad things, what hopes and fears do you carry with you?

* * *

Take away love and our earth is a tomb.

Robert Browning

(Continues...)



Excerpted from I Love You More by Les Parrott Leslie Parrott Copyright © 2005 by Les and Leslie Parrott. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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