Patterns
A marriage relationship does not begin at the moment we say “I do.” It doesn’t start when we ask for someone’s hand in marriage. It doesn’t even begin when we start dating. A marriage relationship starts from the moment we are born and begin to learn about relationships from our family and friends. It develops as we experience it in our family as we grow up. It comes to fruition when we date, get engaged and say “I do.” And it is activated every day thereafter.
You see, a marriage relationship starts when we learn about relationships and that information is played out in a marriage. What we learn, good or bad, is what we bring into our marriage relationship and is something both parties must have to accept or change in order for our marriages to succeed and thrive. In order to work together, we have to look inward to what each person brings to the table in the marriage that is causing us to be divided and start there with working on it. This is where the aspect of “nurture” or how we were raised and how life shaped us, plays out in our current relationships. How we were parented, our coping skills, the good as well as the bad traits, traditions, and patterns we learned from our days before marriage begin to come out as we live our lives together and we get to experience the fun and the pain that they also may bring. Then we develop more throughout our life together.
Some patterns strengthen our relationship while others challenge its wellbeing. Even ‘healthy’ patterns can cause division in a relationship if we are not careful and understand how they work against the meeting of needs and functioning of our relationship. It is always important to evaluate patterns in our marriage and decide how to shape them towards being traits that support our marriage versus traits that destroy it. Often, it’s easier to see how our spouse played a role in the problems. We, more often than not, get caught up in the things our spouse is doing wrong and spend all our energy trying to change them. We will see little success and much frustration if we don’t come to realize that WE CANNOT CHANGE ANYONE BUT OURSELVES!
ACTION STEP: This week, take a humble look at some of the struggles you are having in your marriage, and assess the patterns you bring to the struggle. See if you can make changes to change the pattern for the better.