I’d like to recommend you read my article Marriage Honesty TODAY before or after this, makes little difference, but do please get into it.
Build A Beautiful Marriage Day by Day
Every Day Marriage Tips Are
A Series of Short Articles
Intended To Help You
Change Your Life For The Better!
Dr. Stephen Newdell
There are many articles online and in books about marriage counseling
Your big challenge is finding the good stuff and avoiding poorly written material, or materials written by obvious amateurs just looking to earn 50-bucks as a freelance writer producing quick articles. (There are too many of those nowadays.)
My effort here has been to find the best from psychologists, marriage counselors, and church leaders who have been really interested in this study, and pull together the best materials I can find to benefit you, adding in my own knowledge, God-inspired wisdom, and improving writing style as I go alone.
It may be that non-writers take no notice, but for writers who aspire to be great in the craft, every word, every phrase and every sentence is carefully considered. When I see “horrid writing” I improve it or entirely rewrite the material. Great writers admit, there’s nothing original in the world. Everything is a mix of what the author learned and used for his own “rebuilding” of articles and books.
Why We Must Participate in the Mundane to Build the planks of understand that build a beautiful marriage day by day.
The seeds of greatness are planted in the daily grind.
Most of us fall victim to a similar struggle. Our modern world does not value a process but rather wants immediate results. Sometimes the most important part of the journey is not reaching the destination, it is what you experience and learn along the way.
We want results. The younger generation has been deceived to believe they MUST “make an impact upon the world” and do not realize they have been given a lot of mis-information.
Being “a start” is nice for your 15-minutes of fame, but the journey to become a star is dedicated and arduous work and will continue after someone gives you recognition. The “hero’s” of society are the people who get up every day, self-discipline to get washed and dressed, fed and out the door in time to show up at work every day on time. Without those heroes there would be no platform or audience for “the stars.”
You have a social responsibility to stay healthy, get the job done, and bring home a decent pay-cheque so the family can stay housed and fed, and so forth. Without YOU getting your hands dirty every day, everyone will starve. YOU are the hero!
Few GREAT things come easily or quickly. If you want a great piece of furniture or a great business or a great physique or a great marriage, or even to be a fabulous lover, you have to study and learn and practice and work on it every day. It just won’t magically appear!
Adam Grant, author, organizational psychologist, and professor at Wharton wrote: To understand success, pay less attention to the final product and more to the mundane process. It’s way more fun to read Harry Potter and see Hamilton than it would be to watch jk Rowling and Lin Manuel write. Well…I’m sure they’re right but sadly we, dear reader, are one of those who have taught yourself to concentrate and read. But the seeds of greatness are planted in the daily grind. {I guarantee those authors worked years at becoming great writers and still work on it every day!}
These sprouts of greatness generally come up slowly. At the end of a lifetimes we say, “The next one who continues the work stands on the shoulders of giants.” That implies you must become one of those giants. It didn’t happen overnight, and truthfully, a great marriage is built over 10, 20, even 40 and more years of honesty and trust, respect, consideration and kindness.
For younger people who have been coddled all of their young lives and told they can achieve anything, even communicate across the world with a flat 3” x 5” electronic miracle in their pocket, the idea of being “considerate” is actually quite revolutionary! I see videos teaching young men how to make a good first impression on a woman and it all burns down to being comfortable and confident about yourself and being considerate of the woman you think might be a great partner.
Understand, if you start at “considerate” you’re on a track continuing being kindly, decent, God-Fearing and considerate for the rest of your life. This show of good will can’t survive just 3 weeks and then nosedive into the ground. That’s dishonest.
Men want to know how to be a great lover. The beginning is all day and all week before and all year before! She needs to feel truly safe and loved.
Again, you must be considerate of her needs and desires. She needs 20 – 30 minutes of “warm-up time.” She needs to feel secure, loved, wanted and needed, not used and abused! I had a patient who felt safe with me and one day she told me, “My husband comes home every day at 5 and expects me that moment to drop everything and have sex with him.” This is a guy who should have understood women before he married. That’s a marriage destined for distress.
So this message from Adam Grant also included this cartoon. The illustrator shows you what we see on the surface and what we don’t know had to happen before the wonderful “something” finally came into view.
Did you ever watch guys building a house? They make a horrendous mess and finally when the job is about done they carry the trash away, smooth the earth and plant grass and at last it’s an inviting house saying, “Make me into a home!” The same happens with relationships. Sometimes you end up with a mess before at last the two of you can finally say, “I don’t want to imagine life without you!” ahhh, at last!
I’m really not going off on a tangent here. It applies to this discussion very clearly. We celebrate what we see without an appreciation for what we don’t see. Our young people who are ill-educated or Un-educated have no appreciation for what a long educational effort requires. It took me 9-years to graduate all the college studies to become a combination Chiropractor, Massage Therapist and Nutritionist with a BS in physiology, a specialty in nervous system physiology and additional studies in orthopedics. And then I moved to the wrong community in South West Washington State because there was an offer for me to buy a clinic at a low price! (What a mistake I made!)
Half the people there had no education and consequently imagined I learned all of this in two weeks reading a little booklet I found in a Cracker Jax box! That area by the way has no culture or manners and the nation’s worst statistics for domestic crimes, child abuse, drug and alcohol addiction, and spread of sexually transmitted diseases. You can buy a divorce at the country clerk’s office without a court hearing! The divorce rate is so rampant the courts just avoid hear cases whenever possible!
This happened to 75% of a community of close to 20,000 because they shun God and His ways and learn nothing. A good life requires you use the brains God gave you! You cannot be successful operating on emotions. You MUST develop a habit of learning and thinking analytically. Gather information, look it all over and decide the best course of speech an action.
Many expect to see the final product but do not see the behind the scenes or under the surface work that leads to greatness, particularly in marriages. They don’t read and don’t analyze their own actions and misbehavior and then their marriages collapse.
Please understand, I’m not saying younger people are inherently bad. God knows I love ya, and I’m trying to help! People born after 1960 are often misguided and deceived by television, movies, wicked movies, and an American schools system that needs a complete return to what was done in 1940.
Things get a bit difficult in a relationship and many people expect they should just give up and find another “lust buddy.” That is exactly the wrong path and the one to avoid.
Usually younger people just want the final, great product without all the effort required to get there. They grew up in a convenience society. They never knew by experience that greatness comes after many days of the mundane daily grind. It comes through the small things we do every day to maintain a home and a loving life. It comes from the myriad small things we do for one another — to assist one another through life.
I cook, and clean up and help with other house-keeping chores, because half of that dirt is mine! And I help with child care, and I often put my wife to sleep with a full body massage on our bed. Would she keep me just for these reasons? Probably not but they add up to remembered favors and create an overall background picture of a loving man caring for his wife better than any other younger, taller, more attractive man might.
My first marriage out of college was to a psychological basket case and after 5-years we agreed to part amicably. Several women drifted through my life, mostly disturbing my peace and sometimes my career, and finally I moved to South East Asia and found someone who really would appreciate me and wanted a marriage that would last for life.
Her background at home and mind for the future is mature. She didn’t expect perfection. She went into this relationship wise and well “sighted.” So here I am. You can be sure I will apply all the kindness, consideration, and God-given wisdom I can to make this a successful marriage. This is my last attempt. If this gal dumps me I’ll live with a cat! Or, maybe I could paint a face on a basketball or a coconut and talk to it!
Would YOU be kind and considerate too – even learn Swedish massage and practice every day on your partner? If your answer is “No, It’s all about Me me me me and me” then you’re never going to be happy about anything. You must decide to change and then take action to make those changes and make them so that they permanently improve your behavior and your life.
If you’re a watcher of the music audition shows on TV or on YouTube, you can see something important. Occasionally someone auditions who has no idea that you learn to be a great musician or singer through many years of study and finally music-college and more practice and playing before small audiences.
It’s quite unusual for a rank amateur to be so good by their own observation and self-teaching.
I promote music study because doing it causes you to self-teach. When I studied music between ages 7 and 19, I saw my improvement in small increments day by day, hour after hour. It doesn’t come quickly. It taught my sisters and me to be patient about all of the life development skills we needed “to make an impact.”
If you have children, I believe the BEST thing you can do for that person’s future is to FORBID idiot online games and put him or her to learning to read music and play piano or some other instrument. (Do it gently. It’s not intended as punishment!)
Even if she doesn’t become “great” there will be satisfaction gained and skills learned that will never fail her.
He learns to play drums well (not an easy skill) and She learns to play keyboard or flute or violin or guitar. Whatever it is, classical training and skill development will change that person for the better forever. The same can be said for Ballet study for girls or perhaps martial arts or sailing or gymnastics or wood working or metal working and mechanical study for young men. Choose something that interests the child. The child must be encouraged by you to self-discipline to stay with it even in the difficult times. We don’t accept giving up and failure!
The worst thing to do is allow that person to waste his/her life (and scramble his brains) with online games and the evil trash it “downloads” into their minds! Really, that stuff should be nationally banned! It’s not only games. Some of it teaches murder, rape and pornography. It’s paying Satan’s minions to come and take up residence in your home!
In an instant-gratification and convenience-everything society, we expect quick results without much effort. Success never comes that way in life, in business or in a marriage! Now we even have 3-dimentional printers and some of the industrial kind will produce a tool (like a wrench) suitable for molding good quality steel. The day when my elderly German friend worked at a machine as a tool maker are fast fading. He would work there grinding, feeling the tool for balance, working it a bit more, and when it was prefect it was ready to be finished and sold. Those days have ended. No one learns such fine skills any more. I remember him telling me, “When computers began making tools I knew it was time for me to retire.” How skilled was he?
When he retired he built a 40-foot fiberglass hull sailing yacht. These are normally built bottom up and then the deck put on when the boat is flipped over after the cabinetry is lowered into place or built in place.
Somehow he followed the plans precisely and built the hull and all built in bulkheads and furniture while the craft was upside down. They flipped it, and he added the ballast into the keel and the engine work then finished the deck. It was remarkably beautiful floating furniture, and a yacht inspector valued the vessel at $250,000. Now that sort of skill doesn’t come instantly, nor without serious study! Don’t expect it young man. It won’t happen.
LIKEWISE….
There is Mundane Work Required for an Amazing Marriage
When I read Professor Grant’s message, we are reminded of marriage and relationships. We want the great marriage but we don’t realize we must do some hard work to have it.
In this series of articles, other authors and I intend to teach you to have it. Don’t wait until your marriage is on the reef before you try to get it afloat again! Learn now how to make a good idea into a Beautiful Marriage by building planks of understanding day by day. Those planks make a bridge across time and with these understandings the two of you (and your kids) can walk successfully across time into the future.
Anyone who owns a home knows there is maintenance work required to keep the house functioning properly. One must keep a careful budget, even work two and three jobs to meet expenses, and bills must be paid on time.
In the same way, to build and maintain a great marriage, the work must continue every day. And the work isn’t glamorous. The small things we do, day after day, build a great marriage. As Professor Grant’s tweet said, it’s the mundane process in the daily grind that leads to greatness.
There are no shortcuts. EVERY couple can get there with some work, and it is worth the effort. The more time I spend around great couples, the more time and effort I realize is necessary to build a great marriage.
Before we end off today (with just 3-more paragraphs) let’s consider a small “homework assignment”.
As we continue you’ll get practical tips you can use to develop your improved marriage every day. To start, consider some ways you’ve expected quick results without much effort. Start by writing down answers to these questions. I recommend you get a spiral note book, make a page for each question and write and add to it occasionally, and then as new ideas reach you, add another page and add more of your ideas and self-critique teaching yourself to be a better husband/wife, parent, helper and lover. Keep the book, review it at least once every 6-months and add to it as you develop new ideas and new understandings.
Answer these two questions for yourself:
- In what areas of life do you expect quick results without effort? How about related to work, marriage, parenting, fitness, financial security, and friendships.
- Write down one thing you can do in the next hour to let your spouse know you love him or her? Go do it!
Now you’ve begun. There’s much more. Others have spent years learning and I’m here writing for you, and charging you nothing. So do yourself a favor and your spouse and me the honor of reading these short portions comprising this series and more articles within this magazine’s “Marriage” section in the Articles Library.
Go Here For Article 2 (soon)
548 total views, 1 views today
