Saving Your Marriage Before It Starts: Seven Questions to Ask Before -- and After -- You Marry

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Saving Your Marriage Before It Starts Seven Questions to Ask Before — And After — You Marry By Les Parrott, Leslie Parrott ZONDERVANCopyright © 2015 Les and Leslie Parrott All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-0-310-34628-9 Contents Workbook Exercises, 9, Before You Begin, 11, Question 1: Have You Faced the Myths of Marriage with Honesty?, 19, Question 2: Can You Identify Your Love Style?, 41, Question 3: Have You Developed the Habit of Happiness?, 67, Question 4: Can You Say What You Mean and Understand What You Hear?, 87, Question 5: Have You Bridged the Gender Gap?, 111, Question 6: Do You Know How to Fight a Good Fight?, 133, Question 7: Are You and Your Partner Soul Mates?, 155, Appendix: Discovering Your Personality Dynamics, 175, Acknowledgments, 183, Notes, 185, CHAPTER 1 Question One HAVE YOU FACED THE MYTHS OF MARRIAGE WITH HONESTY? * * * We have been poisoned by fairy tales. Anais Nin Tom and Laura came to see us just nine months after their wedding. They had swallowed the happily-ever-after myth whole and were now feeling queasy. "Before we got married we couldn't bear to be apart from one another," Laura confided. "We did almost everything together, and I thought that's how it would be in our marriage, even more so." She paused for a moment. "But now Tom needs more space. It seems like he's not the guy I married." Tom rolled his eyes as Laura continued: "He used to be so considerate and thoughtful before we were married —" "Oh, and I'm a total slouch now?" Tom interrupted. "Of course not. You — or maybe we — are just different now." Nervously twisting his wedding band, Tom looked at Laura: "Marriage isn't what I expected either. I didn't expect it to be a big honeymoon or anything; I just thought you would try to make life a little easier for me. Instead, when I come home from the office, all you want is to go out or —" "I make dinner every night for you," Laura interrupted. Surprised by their display of unrestrained emotion in front of us, they stopped silent and looked to us as if to say, "See, our marriage isn't what it's supposed to be." Tom and Laura entered their marriage believing that happiness would abound. They had heard that marriage was hard work, but they didn't expect it to be a twenty-four-hour, seven-day-a-week job. The belief in a happily-ever-after marriage is one of the most widely held and destructive marriage myths. But it is only the tip of the marital-myth iceberg. Every difficult marriage is plagued by a vast assortment of misconceptions about what marriage should be. In this chapter, however, we consider only those ideas that are most harmful and most common: 1. "We expect exactly the same things from marriage." 2. "Everything good in our relationship will get better." 3. "Everything bad in my life will disappear." 4. "My spouse will make me whole." The goal of this chapter is to take the mythology out of marriage. For too long, marriage has been saddled with unrealistic expectations and misguided assumptions. Liberated from these four myths, couples can settle into the real world of marriage — with all its joys and sorrows, passion and pain. MYTH ONE: "WE EXPECT EXACTLY THE SAME THINGS FROM MARRIAGE" What we anticipate seldom occurs, what we least expect generally happens — especially in marriage. Saying "I do" brings with it a host of conscious and unconscious expectations that aren't always fulfilled. Neil and Cathy, a couple in their late twenties and married for four years, each had a clear image of what life together would be like, but they had never discussed their ideas. They, like most newlyweds, simply assumed the other had an identical picture of marriage in mind. Nothing, however, could have been further from the truth. Cathy: "I expected married life to bring more stability and predictability to our lifestyle. To me it meant working in the garden together." Neil: "I wanted our marriage to be exciting and spontaneous,