First Aid for Your Emotional Hurts: Marriage: Marriage

By Edward E. Moody Jr.

Does a happy well-functioning marriage seem out of reach to you? This booklet offers hope and direction towards a lifetime of love and meaningful connection. Dr. Moody shares valuable insight into improving your marriage. He guides you through steps leading to a genuinely fulfilling relationship. Readers will discover effective ways to communicate and deal with problems common in marriage. It is vital for you to understand the quality of your marriage impacts every area of your life. This book is a valuable tool to strengthen and save marriages that are struggling.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Randall House
• Release date: Jul 10, 2018
• ISBN: 9781614840923

Edward E. Moody Jr.

Edward E. Moody Jr. has been a counselor educator at North Carolina Central University since 1995. He is a professor of counselor education and associate dean of the school of education. He also serves as pastor at Tippett's Chapel in Clayton, North Carol

Book preview

FIRST AID FOR MARRIAGE

This is not the future we envisioned.

Miranda Lambert and Blake Shelton announcing their divorce

Does your marriage need first aid? Maybe your marriage is not working out the way you planned it, as the couple above noted.¹ You looked forward to your wedding ceremony with great anticipation. Perhaps it was even a storybook wedding, the kind you see in a feel-good movie or read about in a novel. As you look back, can you identify with Linda when she first met her future husband?²

I’d seen him across a long concert hall and before I met him, I said, ‘I’m going to marry that man.’ I just knew it … We were students together for four years and best friends … by our senior year, we realized we would probably want to spend our lives together. We had the same values and enjoyed all the same things … he proposed on my birthday of our senior year and then we were married in July of that same year.

Linda

A woman who later found herself in an unhappy marriage

It was love at first sight for Linda and her future husband. Later, their marriage went awry. Perhaps you can relate and are looking at your own marriage and wondering, How did I get here? You and your spouse bicker all the time, have very little affection for each other, and the level of intimacy is dwindling. There may be infidelity and talk of a word you never imagined you would hear as you planned your marriage—divorce. Even worse, perhaps the one you have married is abusing you. This is not what you expected your marriage to be. Consider the characteristics below.³

Is your marriage characterized by any of the following …

___    Isolation

___    Arguments over little things that erupt into big fights

___    Complaining over everything

___    Bickering and bitterness

___    Feeling that you and your spouse are on opposing teams

___    Fighting about the same things repeatedly

___    Believing you can’t tell your spouse what you think or how you feel

___    Wondering whether you made a mistake by getting married

___    Feeling you should have married someone else

Do any of those statements apply to you? What happened? Where did it all go wrong?

There are a lot of reasons a marriage can get off track. It seems the longer our marriage goes on, the more familiar with one another we become. Our work and other obligations keep us from having time for each other. Politeness can become a distant memory, and rudeness becomes the norm. Too often, we have not prepared to keep our marriages fresh. We stop dating one another, especially when the kids arrive.⁴ Then again, maybe it is harder to be married today. We are expected to be better communicators and managers of conflict, and we are not always on the same page about our marriage.

You may look at your spouse and conclude that you have a different attitude on the need to improve your marriage. Without work we can drift apart and come to a place where our marriage needs first aid. Dr. W. J. Doherty has compared marriage to a boat on the Mississippi River. The boat will naturally drift south with the current of the river unless there is something that propels it to head north. There is a current in the culture pushing us apart from our spouse. Unless we work on our marriage, we will drift apart from one another.⁵

At this moment, a happy, well functioning marriage may feel out of reach to you. If that is the case, it is not just bad for your marriage, it is not good for you personally. The quality of your marriage impacts every area of your life. Being in an unhappy marriage makes us more susceptible to job problems and psychological problems. It also inhibits the ability of our immune system to fight off disease.

The Bible teaches us that words can be like poison, and that anger rots the bones. When we have discord in our marriage it wreaks havoc on us physically as described in the Scripture below.

They make their tongue sharp as a serpent’s, and under their lips is the venom of asps.

Psalm 140:3

A tranquil heart is life to the body, But passion is rottenness to the bones.

Proverbs 14:30 (NASB)

We see this in research on marriage as well. One study examined women who were in poor relationships. Poor relationships were defined as an atmosphere of put-downs, criticism, and sarcasm. These relationships were associated with increased levels of stress hormones that have been known to lead to health problems later in life.⁶ Another classic study has indicated that unhappy marriages increase one’s risk for illness by 35 percent and may shorten one’s life by four years.⁷ The bitterness and discord that can come to dominate a marriage not only poisons the union but impacts the body like venom from a snakebite.

How bad is your marriage? You can gauge the quality of your marriage by considering how happy you are. Take a moment and rate how happy you feel at this moment in your marriage.

In addition, to happiness, think about how well you are functioning as a person. Ask yourself, Does my spouse make me a better person? This is the question Ann Patchett asked in her book, This is the Story of a Happy Marriage.⁸ In other words, does your spouse make you happy, more capable of achieving your goals, and more effective? If your marriage is deteriorating, you might respond with an emphatic, No! You may begin to wonder, What am I getting out of this marriage? Then, thoughts like, I deserve better, can arise. Sometimes at the end of this chain of thoughts, you may wonder, Should I even bother trying to aid this marriage? It is easy to get carried away with this kind of thinking.

When Thoughts Are Left Unchecked

Where are you currently in your thoughts about your marriage? As you think, consider how the environment or the current of the culture impacts your thinking. Increasingly, marriage is out of style. For the first time in human history, marriage as an ideal is being criticized,⁹ and the marriage rate is the lowest at any time on record in the United States.¹⁰

If you talk to some people about your marital difficulties, they may encourage you to get a divorce without really thinking through the consequences. Increasingly, our culture views marriage as unnecessary. Some might say, Marriage inhibits autonomy, independence, growth, and creativity. Some even assert that marriage is bad for the health of women, as was claimed in an old sociology textbook.¹¹

As you drift in this societal current, you may begin to think your marriage was a mistake. Since your marriage is not going well, would you be better off unmarried or with someone else? Sometimes it sounds like the quickest route to happiness is to find a good divorce attorney. Is that thinking