Growing Into a Mature Marriage: from Kindergarten to College

By Delyce Collins

Marriage is an interesting trip. Never think that you're by yourself on the journey. Married people all over the world are having the same frustrations, questions, and challenges that led you to this book. The goal is not to insult your intelligence by minimizing the complications of life and marriage through comparisons to elementary schooling. I have been inspired, however, from a lifetime of working with children and teens as a young wife and mother; and being flooded with revelation of an undeniable connection between the standards and lessons set forth in the school system with those of an evolving marriage. I am ever indebted to the students and teachers who have taught me invaluable lessons and for being a doorway to a higher level of learning. Regarding educating ourselves into successful lives with our spouses and children, the cost of such an education is priceless and will leave you in positive cash flow rather than student debt. Great relationships refine the world. Learning how to better relate to ourselves and others will bring the peace we desire. Even if we focus only within our own circle of relationships, improving them will be a stimulant to influence change in the world-one marriage at a time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Covenant Books, Inc.
• Release date: Jul 16, 2020
• ISBN: 9781646702244

Book preview

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Growing Into a Mature Marriage

from Kindergarten to College

Delyce Collins

ISBN 978-1-64670-222-0 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-64670-223-7 (Hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-64670-224-4 (Digital)

Copyright © 2019 Delyce Collins

All rights reserved

First Edition

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Covenant Books, Inc.

11661 Hwy 707

Murrells Inlet, SC 29576

www.covenantbooks.com

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Preface

Preschool

Kindergarten

First Grade

Second Grade

Third Grade

Fourth Grade

Fifth Grade

Sixth Grade

Seventh Grade

Eighth Grade

Ninth Grade

Tenth Grade

Eleventh Grade

Senior Year

College

About the Author

Acknowledgments

To the most important man in my life, my husband, Jonathan. Thank you for always being there to guide my visions and keep me on a path of productiveness. Without you, I might be all over the place trying to organize the many amazing ideas that flow through me on a daily basis. Like a ground to an electrical current you are for me. Flowing through me, your spirit of joy and determination to figure out life keeps me holding myself to a higher standard as a person and as your wife.

To my favorite son, my only child, Jayden. Thank you for reminding me of the lessons I imparted to you when I need them most. You reminded me that life, like this book, could use an outline, and that advice has made this book a reality much sooner than had I continued to toil through my many thoughts and notes.

To my daughter-in-law Moriah, thank you for your amazing input as I was writing. The evidence of being raised in a home that supports and stands for marriage radiates from your soul.

Mommy, thank you for doing everything in your power as a single mother of three to make sure your daughters would understand their power and their ability to make the choice to do better and be better every day. We are only in competition with ourselves, striving to improve upon who we were yesterday.

I love you all with all of my heart, soul, and mind!

Preface

It is very nice to meet your acquaintance. Thank you for supporting this effort to bring about more fulfilling and purpose-driven relationships! If I have communicated the experiences of my marriage effectively by the end of these chapters, my hope is that you too will soon be experiencing a better life with your spouse. I pray that this book will be a great marriage tutor. In marriage, as in life, we each play both the role of a teacher at times and a student at others. The dynamics and complexities of relationships reveal to us, through maturity, that at many times, we operate in both capacities simultaneously. The beauty of this duality is the realization that if you can be taught and be teaching at the same time, you have mastered an art.

The amount of humility, dedication, maturity, and true love it takes to elevate from the elementary stages and phases of marriage on into graduating the college levels can be attained by the deserving ones who chose to continuously improve and grow. The amount of work we have put into our union and the lessons of the relationships of life as a whole have contributed to the pouring out of my heart onto these pages. I would like to thank my husband for inspiring me and for making the decision to fight for our relationship no matter what!

It is important for me to stress the meaning of the words mature marriage. In this book, mature does not mean dull, boring, or too sophisticated to have fun. Maturity, in this book, means the absence of the presence of selfishness, confusion, miscommunication, disrespect, and emotional immaturity with an ever-growing presence of selflessness, clarity, understanding, respect, love, loyalty, peace, and joy—all attributes of the emotionally mature.

Discovering the truth and power of controlling your emotions opens the door to a marriage better than you could have ever imagined. It is time to get out of your feelings and get into your purpose and the maximum potential of your marriage.

A mature marriage will minimize and eventually deplete drama and chaos in the lives of thriving and evolving couples. Regardless of the state of the chaos around us, we can still thrive in a functional developing relationship with ourselves and our spouses. The decision to educate yourself in an aim and focus of achieving a state of peace and understanding in your marriage is a very commendable and rewarding adventure. Anything of value is worth fighting to keep and improve continuously, to have and to hold until death do you part.

I am so honored to be a part of your journey, and because we know how difficult this path can be, my husband and I want to encourage your persistence in attaining the knowledge, understanding, and most importantly the application of what you come to understand from this book. Godspeed!

The Power of Discovering an Exceptional Marriage

Lying beneath the rubble of a collapsed marriage is the opportunity to rebuild on a fortified foundation a structure that can withstand the most terrible of storms.

Whether you are preparing for marriage, a newly wedded person, or someone looking to improve and develop a marriage of many years, I would sincerely like to thank you for reading this manuscript and, more importantly, for having real faith that you can and will succeed in creating a joyful, fulfilling, selfless, peaceful, exciting, and exhilarating marriage! Although this book is written in correlation with academic grade levels, it’s important to note that you can find your marriage and experiences in any grade level and at any point in your relationship, no matter how long you have been on this journey. This book is progressive by chapter, paralleled with my personal experiences, both in my own marriage and those of many friends and family members whom I have counseled, encouraged, and from time to time, been counseled and encouraged by.

Don’t read this book as a rule for where you should be in your marriage in comparison with the exact grade levels or as a rule for the specific progression of your own marriage. There are many paths—some riddled with potholes and construction detours while others less bumpy and winding. Your personal path will vary from others’, but the common cord that runs through us all is that despite our challenges, we all want to experience more bliss in our relationships. My purpose in sharing the knowledge we have gained is to make the road ahead less perplex and exhausting and much more peaceful as you and your partner enjoy the views from your new vehicle of stability and stop often to smell the flowers on your journey.

While some of us may find our marriages to be at a kindergarten level in certain areas and a college graduate in others, the point is to identify where your relationship needs improvement. Our hope is that the stories and themes in this book will help you and your spouse learn to grow into a mature marriage from the honeymoon stage of kindergarten through the bumps, bruises, misunderstandings, and possible miseducation of elementary school—all the way through the determined and focused years of college.

Using socioeconomic classes as an example, there’s no doubt that the wealthy have a different mind-set and viewpoint of the world, people, relationships, and where they fall into each picture. Many of us, whether poor and struggling or belonging to the comfortable middle-class, tend to think that these higher-status people were born to be rich or wealthy and that they were predetermined, either by birthright or destiny, to have an upper hand in life. Thinking that one person has a destiny to excel in life while another is doomed to fail or predestined to only attain limited heights is to also think that some marriages are just predestined to work while others aren’t. I don’t know about you, but I will not allow that thinking to keep me from reaching for the limitless possibilities of achievement in marriage and in life overall, regardless of the cards I have been dealt.

I will continuously choose to correct within myself a tendency to think from a poor or struggling marital mind-set and correct the view of my world to see through wealthy eyes. I implore you to do the same. As you learn another way to view your marital struggles through different eyes, you will learn to create an environment of peace where your marriage will have no choice but to thrive and grow into a rich and wealthy relationship.

Your marriage can be a class apart from society and the excepted norm if you believe it can be. Be willing to literally change your own mind, allowing it to morph into a brain transplanted with one of superior thought.

Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. (Romans 12:2, ESV)

When we meet new people and explain how it came to be that we have been married for seventeen years at only thirty-three years of age, it’s always interesting to witness the unique reactions, questions, and comments. Some people react cynically, some silenced by their loss for words, and others respond in complete reverence and admiration. The reaction I particularly appreciate is when people are open to and accepting of the possibility that young or old, love and marriage can be everlasting and successful.

Considering that we all as individuals, male and female, have an innate purpose and value to contribute to our family, community, city, state, country, and possibly effect change in the world, we must first come to identify our flaws that we may improve ourselves and move into the next level of reward. In school, each progression of grade level brings with it a new level of responsibility. Embracing more responsibility brings more reward and more knowledge, which gives us power to create the results we want to see. When we are stuck in our own inability to move forward, we miss the opportunity to be of use to everyone who could benefit by our own discovery and use of our God-given gifts. We also keep from ourselves the benefit of getting out of our own way in accomplishing our goals and being enlightened by a new world of possibilities.

God is the ultimate authority, and by functioning according to His purpose for your life, you will have ultimate power to create the life you want.

Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. (Matthew 6:10, ESV)

If you believe that you were placed on this earth to be a functioning member of society and a purposeful member of God’s kingdom to make earth more like heaven, then you also have to accept that there is a better you in your marriage. Great marriages produce great children who grow into impactful and functional adults in society, which produces a better world for everyone. Whether you have children or not, when you help people change for the better, you have been fruitful and multiplied, and you are a part of the process of bringing heaven to earth. In order to be a part of bringing change, we first have to change ourselves. Emotional intelligence, emotional maturity, self-awareness—these are all different ways of saying you have acknowledged the flaws in your character, made adjustments, and actually do care how others view you as a person.

In elementary school, it is important for parents to remind their young children that it does not matter what other kids think and say about them. This is because the other kids also lack emotional maturity and may not be giving a good analysis as to who they are as a person, and the way your children are seen by other kids may be skewed by their own immaturity at this age and stage of life.

In complete contrast, it is important to think about how the people around you view you in the adult stage of life—namely, your spouse.

Have you ever asked yourself why, when you were single, there didn’t seem to be as many issues with who you were as a person, but all of the sudden after marriage you have someone in your life pointing out every character flaw you didn’t know you had? This is a time to care about the way you are being viewed by your circles of family, friends, and coworkers. The people in each level of familiarity with you will be able to reveal what improvements you need to make, and of course, the person you are the closest to and spend the most time with will have the most complaints about your character flaws because they are most impacted by you, your attitude, and your decisions.

The problem we all encounter is we get hung up on the shortcomings of our spouse and hardly look into ourselves to bring self-correction. The highest form of government is self-government. In other words, the most powerful governing body to affect each individual is the individual body, him or herself. You chose what type of husband or wife you will be, which directly affects your world and the impact you can have in the world of others.

The highest form of government is self-government.

Chapter 1

Preschool

When I stopped being angry with my husband and I started focusing on changing my own actions and reactions, my husband miraculously started to change too!

Absorb to Exude/Know to Do/Study to Act

But he who looks into the perfect law of liberty and continues in it, and is not a forgetful hearer but a doer of the work, this one will be blessed in what he does. (James 1:25)

A wise person lives by what they first came to know and then, secondly, worked to understand. Knowledge or academics alone of any concept or subject matter is not enough to change circumstances. Knowledge or information has to morph into understanding through focus and study so that one may understand in order to do! Doing the action is the most important step in the process of maturity and wisdom. Many of us know people who are considered very smart by worldly standards because they have attained much academic knowledge, and even more genius are those who have memorized much in order to regurgitate. But the highest level of intelligence is called wisdom, otherwise known as the application of the understanding of the attained knowledge.

For the Lord gives wisdom, and from his mouth come knowledge and understanding…Then you will understand what is right and just and fair—every good path. Wisdom will enter your heart, and knowledge will be pleasant to your soul. Discretion will protect you, and understanding will guard you. (Proverbs 2:6, 9–11, NIV)

The point is to get the information first but not to stop there. A beautiful mind many times morphs into a crazed mind because it is absorbing information yet rarely exuding the information into energy, a movement called action! Start moving, making choices, and acting! Choose godly action based on obedience to God’s Word rather than inaction or incorrect actions fueled by emotion.

Genuine repentance, changing for the better—exchanging dysfunction for function—blocks self-pity and depression. A clear and honest view of our true personal shortcomings, not a distorted, defensive and denying view, will allow for emotional intelligence and self-awareness to flourish—character traits which are required in order to create a wonderful life and marriage. In terms of schooling, there are prerequisite courses in attitude adjustment if you want to work toward graduation. The ceremonial cap and gown of marriage are the apparel of a couple who have moved through the assignments and tests set before them with confidence and determination to make it work, regardless of the personal learning challenges associated with different subjects and our personal variances of learning styles.

Stop trying to change him. Stop trying to change her. Change you!

Taking action in life, walking out and applying what you know about improving your marriage is the ECE (early childhood education) level of your marital schooling. If you aren’t reading and studying in order to act, you are simply storing knowledge without purpose. Dormant knowledge will eventually create many adverse side effects. Imagine knowing the combination to a safe filled with diamonds but not understanding the procedure and steps to turning the dial and applying the combination of numbers you know in order to open the safe. That is the frustration and imbalance created within a person’s mind and resulting emotions when they know something, but they don’t work to understand, or they choose not to act on it.

Walking your talk brings peace and flow into your life, unless of course your words are negative and counterproductive to the world you really desire to create for yourself. Knowing better yet choosing to stay in bondage out of comfort or sheer laziness is choosing slavery over freedom. Ask yourself, do I want to feel enslaved in my marriage or set free? Anything worth having is worth going into battle for. Contrary to popular belief, the marriage battle lies within oneself, not with your mate.

Fighting yourself to change you can be a bloody civil war. Blood, sweat, tears, body, mind, and spirit are all parts of which it takes to create a blissful marriage. When I say bloody, I don’t mean physical violence nor abuse (though that is an unfortunate reality for many) but rather an internal battle with oneself to change the characteristics of your bloodline, generationally speaking, that cause pain and trauma in your life and in your marriage. Because we learn in preschool to keep our hands to ourselves, we will discuss physically abusive relationships in this chapter.

Anything worth having is worth going into battle for. Contrary to popular belief, the marriage battle lies within oneself, not with your mate. Fighting yourself to change you can be a bloody civil war.

The Interview

Many of the most important questions to be asked in the preschool stages of a relationship are never asked or even thought of. It is a sad occurrence for two people to marry and realize after the fact that they do not share the same plans and goals for the future. It is very frustrating but nevertheless an unnecessary and avoidable dispute. Regardless of your level of continuity with your partner, after you have made the choice to commit for life, not having congruent goals is still not a reason to end your marriage. You may be asking how two people on two different paths can possibly make things work together and be happy—keep reading.

My husband and I have a vivid memory from when we were around fourteen or fifteen years old of a conversation detailing what we wanted for our futures. It was late at night, and I had the long-coiled cord of the housephone stretched through my room. I’ll never forget that phone. It was clear, and the internals lit up like a rainbow when a call came in, so I could have the ringer on silent and still know when a call was coming through. I hid the phone under my covers so I could talk to John and keep the bright light from awakening my nosey little sisters who would undoubtedly run into our mother’s room and tell on me as soon as they discovered I was on the phone with my boyfriend, whom I wasn’t supposed to have until I was sixteen, past eight o’clock, in my bedroom hiding under the covers.

It was one of the most exciting conversations for me because we talked about what we wanted out of life and where we saw ourselves going as we grew into adulthood. We took turns talking about our goals, and as the discussion grew more serious, we talked about things we would never stand for in our relationship—the deal breakers. We could only reflect on what we had been exposed to in our very short time on earth, but short time lived and young age being of no consequence, we had an impactful experience that night on the phone that sowed a seed for the beginning of a very fruitful tree of life in our marriage garden.

"I want to be an actress and maybe do a little modeling, so of course, I want to move to California. No, I am moving to California as soon as I can. I love California…" I went on and on about the sunshine state, John was a little disappointed that I saw myself as a future resident in the City of so-called Angels. California was a normal part of our usual conversation. I knew I liked him enough to care that he understood where I wanted to go. For me, the experiences I had every time I was in that state near the beach linked my most exhilarating, motivating, and uplifting moments to that environment. I saw myself being successful as long as I could get to the beach on a regular basis to be inspired. Environment plays a crucial role in the phases of our lives. In a marriage, you have to find the best way to combine two desired environments. For some couples, this is an easy and exciting effort while it can be frustrating and emotionally daunting for others.

Intentional courtship—knowing what you expect from a relationship, what you will work with, and what behaviors you consider completely unacceptable will make your preschool interactions with a potential life mate purpose-filled and a good investment of your time.

John took the conversation from a fourteen-year-old girl’s bubbly demeanor filled of dreams for her future to an unsettling yet utterly necessary level. "People should never touch out of anger. I am not okay with people putting their hands on each other out of anger. That is never okay, and I would never stay in a relationship with someone who ever put their hands on me out of anger!" It was a topic that I never would have thought needed discussion, yet valuable and necessary nonetheless. I had never seen my mother be physically abused by anyone, so that topic was not in the forefront of my thoughts and concerns for my relationship. But John had, and he needed to put that deal breaker on the table. I was taken aback by the tone and split-second change in the upbeat swing of our conversation, but I respected his maturity and was at peace with his insistence on communicating such an important matter.

If you are in an