Husband and wife have a solemn responsibility to love and care for each other.
President Kimball said, "While marriage is difficult, and discordant and frustrated marriages are common, yet real, lasting happiness is possible, and marriage can be more an exultant ecstasy than the human mind can conceive. This is within the reach of every couple, every person."
What is a Foundational Process? Foundational processes are actions couples take in relation to each other to help their marriage flourish.
Process #1: Personal Commitment to the Marriage Covenant
Intentional personal dedication
Exclusive cleaving and unity
Practice spiritual patterns
Process #2: Love and Friendship
Get in sync with your partner's love preferences
Talk as friends
Respond to bids for connection
Set goals for couple interaction
Process #3: Positive Interaction
Positive emotions toward one's spouse are vital to a healthy marriage. Negative emotions, if they occur frequently and allowed to deepen, can threaten a marriage. Couples doing well have 5 positive interactions during conflict to 1 negative. To enhance positive interaction in marriage, focus on your spouse's positive qualities and make and share lists of the things you admire and appreciate about each other. These can be personality traits, talents, something you especially like about him or her, a feature of your relationship that you like, or something positive your spouse has done.
Take this list choose two or three qualities and rehearse them in your mind. Put them on an index card and place them where you'll see them often. Look at them daily. Rotate through the qualities. This way couples can override the temptation to be negative toward one another. Couples who nurture their fondness and admiration for one another in this way are better able to accept each other's flaws and weaknesses and prevent them from threatening their relationship.
Process #4: Accepting Influence from One's Spouse
Share influence in all family affairs
Ways to accept influence
Process #5: Respectfully Handle Differences and Solve Problems
Prevention
Eliminate destructive interaction patterns
Calm yourself first
Bring up the concern softly, gently, and privately
Learn to make and receive repair attempts
Soothe yourself and each other
Reach a consensus about a solution
Process #6: Continuing Courtship through the Years
Attend to the little things
Be intentional about doing things every day to enrich the marriage
Spend at least 5 hours a week strengthening your relationship.
Elder F. Burton Howard: "If you want something to last forever, you treat it differently. You shield it and protect it. You never abuse it. You don't expose it to the elements. You don't make it common or ordinary. If it ever becomes tarnished, you lovingly polish it until it gleams like new. It becomes special because you have made it so, and it grows more beautiful and precious as time goes by. Eternal marriage is just like that. We need to treat it just that way."
*Remember this information is not my own. I got it from Successful Marriages and Families edited by Hawkins, Dollahite and Draper.
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