Why I wrote the book From Mountains to Molehills, Overcoming and Celebrating Your Differences in marriage: “You can’t live with ’em, and you can’t live without ’em” is an often expressed sentiment in many marriages. In some marriages, though, that “You can’t live with ’em” aspect can turn into conflict, then combat, and then a full-blown war. In this article, we will look at tips every married couple needs to know.
The Number One Major Adjustment Every
Married Couple Will Face
One reason I wrote the book is that discovering your differences is a major adjustment every married couple will soon face after they are married. This can be anything as simple as which side of the bed they prefer to issues as complex as spending habits and finances. But with the proper tools, married couples can learn to overcome, and even celebrate, these differences.
The TRUTH About the Idea that Opposites Attract
We know that it seems like opposites attract. We’ve often been told that, and it is often true. The reason is we look at someone who has an opposite personality trait, and we admire the strengths they have. We especially do that when we wish we had those strengths ourselves.
The same is true in the area of spiritual gifts. When someone has a different spiritual gift from ours, we often admire the positive aspects of that gift. Opposites do attract. Before we are married, we often focus on those strengths. But then after we’ve been married for a while, we began to realize that with every strength there is an accompanying weakness. We focused only on the strengths before. But after marriage, we discover those weaknesses. It doesn’t take long till we might start focusing upon the weaknesses.
Why We Think Differently – Tips for Beginning Married Couples
This book helps us understand why we have different ways of thinking. In it, we discuss contributing factors such as personality traits and personality differences.
We also see how birth order affects how we think. Being a first-born, middle child, or youngest shapes our thoughts and actions.
Then for those of us who are Christians, we discuss the characteristics of different spiritual gifts. These gifts can also have an effect on how we view and act in our relationships with others.
The Real Reason Why We Sometimes Resort to Combat
When we encounter differences in our marriages. We often want to advocate for our own positions. That is when combat comes in. Also as we encounter those differences in our marriage, we form a perception of them being extremely different. In our minds, it’s like trying to climb a mountain to overcome those situations.
By looking at the disagreement from within ourselves, it can appear insurmountable. We always want to feel like we are right in our wants and desires. After all, we’ve spent a lifetime developing them. Taking the time to step outside ourselves and view the conflict from another point of view allows us to see more clearly.
What Every Couple Needs to Remember About Fireworks
So when we celebrate on the Fourth of July, we often see glorious beautiful fireworks. But sometimes we forget that those fireworks are born out of a full-blown war. When we fail to deal properly with our differences in marriage. We can advocate for positions so strongly that it comes to an area of combat in marriage. That can end up going into a full-blown war too.
We want to get to the point where our differences can result in celebrations for us to consider instead of firing mortars at each other.
The Blessing of Understanding
I encourage us, who are married, to continue to study that complex creature to whom we have committed our lives. As we do that, we will discover not only the strengths we were attracted to at the beginning, when we were dating. But, we will continue to discover many, many more wonderful traits as we go through our journey.
We just need to do our best to understand each other as we engage in this wonderful thing called marriage. We also need to understand that very often our differences are not in the category of one being better than the other. One is not better than the other. They are just different. When we learn to approach our differences in that fashion, that technique helps.
Here is the book.
If you would like to go look at it on amazon.com, click here. On the way, I will invite you to sign up to receive information by email if you desire.
Right now, if you’d like more marriage tips like these, you can click on the marriage tab at the top of the page. You can see video tips too by clicking here.
I will close by inserting a couple of paragraphs from the book:
“When we allow each other to be who we truly are, and when we learn to limit our liberty and show deference to each other, we can come to the point of having a tolerable marriage. Then, as we perfect this process, we can laugh at our differences. We can ‘cut each other some slack.’ We can pursue our own interests while allowing our spouses to do the same. We don’t want to lead completely separate lives, so we want to support our mates in their unique interests. We want to learn about those and spend some time sharing in those areas. Now we’re getting into the “how-to.” You will see more of that in the pages of this book.
“So, when faced with our differences, we can become combative, or we can step back and find different ways to deal with those differences and the frustrations they may cause. We can support our partners in their unique interests and personality traits; realizing one is not necessarily better, but just different.
When we do that, instead of engaging in combat, we can come to the point of tolerating and moving on to celebrating our differences. We will move from engaging in combat to watching glorious fireworks. When that happens, we will have turned our ‘Mountains’ into ‘Molehills.’