Occasionally it’s good to evaluate our marriage progression. Today I want to share five ways in which we can identify marriage growth and maturity. Don’t be discouraged if you feel overdue in any of these areas; just realize maturity does take time and personal revelation for change.
1. Seeing the need of your spouse as more important than your own need. Number one is a sure-fire indicator of a maturing self-concept. To move toward the need of another before your own provides a clear sense of good will, pure heart, wisdom and, not the least, servanthood.
- Celebrating, embracing and enjoying your differences. When you stop fighting over your differences and start realizing your need of one another’s gift mix, a significant hurdle in a marriage relationship is realized. Embracing the difference for the good of the whole is an amazing and freeing team concept. We all married someone different from ourselves and when we learn to embrace those differences as a positive, we will experience tremendous growth in our marriage relationship.
- Seeing the need to work on personal wholeness rather than wishing or demanding your spouse change first. It is often said that you cannot change anyone but yourself. Marriage brings truth to that statement like no other relationship. When you realize it’s you that needs to grow, to change, to mature, you reach a healthy state of mind.
- Realizing you are best friends. You are in that place of desiring to serve and help one another. You are one another’s safe place. You trust each other explicitly. You share the honor and respect you both desire and deserve.
- Asking God first. You have come to the place of releasing demands and expectations of each other as you have learned to simply ask God – pray first. You have come together in prayer, knowing there is Someone to whom you are accountable and are in desperate need of for continuing marital growth.
We are settled. We do not have to always agree, but rarely do we disagree. Steve is Mary and Mary is Steve and we desire the very best and the highest goodwill for each other. We are not competing with one another and we are not jealous of each other. We will not settle for mediocre in our relationship and we will not allow a spirit of discontentment to show its ugly head. We both know that through the grace of God and His goodness to us, we gained something…or someone in marriage. When we said “yes” to one another, we said “no” to every other possible partner out there. We have no regrets.
You’ll find those six words, maybe nine, in chapter thirteen, the final chapter of 
Before you were married, did anyone advise you that your marriage would need room for failure, forgiveness, loss, brokenness, disagreement, or even sin? If not, a full and honest disclosure was missed, and you may have entered into marriage a bit naïve or ill-advised. Marriages fail because we fail God, each other, and ourselves. We fail to love, we fail to honor, we fail to forgive, and we fail in keeping at bay our own personal struggles with selfishness. And that’s where prayer can come in.
In 
We seemed to have reached a desperate part of our meeting with a middle-aged couple pastoring a small church in New York. In tears, the wife declared, “We’re not intimate!” We asked what she meant by that statement. She said without hesitancy, “We don’t do fun things together; we don’t hold hands; we don’t sit close any longer; we rarely have sex; and our conversations have become predictable, boring, and too infrequent. It’s like we’ve taken a break from closeness, from our friendship…from intimacy.”
How does a couple stay sexually active when there are jobs, a family, household responsibilities, and civic commitments, along with children’s sports and school, and then local church involvement? All of these good things can rob us of intimacy as married couples and can even become priority over our sexual thoughts and desires. Sometimes life gets a hold of us, and all too often we’re too exhausted to take a hold of one other.
On your wedding day, you spoke something called vows that probably sounded something like this: For better or for worse; for richer or for poorer; in sickness and in health; ’til death do us part. Rarely do we imagine having to face such issues. But truth be told, we will face some of these things and, perhaps, already have. If you think about it, these vows prepare us for reality long before reality sets in; they help prepare us for inevitable disappointments in marriage.
Infidelity can affect all of our marriages because we can all be tempted. We are all potential vow-breakers. If we think it can’t happen to us, we can become sloppy and less guarded, not alert to the enemy’s schemes. In 
We sat down to interview Jon and Amy (names have been changed), a couple we have encountered who have a pain-filled story. With their permission, we are about to share with you their loss, brokenness, hope, and redemption.
If your goal was to tear apart your marriage, money arguments would certainly help. But marriage is not about me and mine; it’s about us and ours.
We will ask you to complete a budget in 
We made a major discovery early in our marriage. When it came to conflict, we could choose to “fight and argue,” or we could “pray and agree.” Disagreement is powerful, but agreement is even more powerful.
It astounds us to discover how many couples do not know why they are married. This is the question this chapter will probe—what is your mission together as a couple? For what reason(s) has God called you together into this union? Those who once were two have been called to move as one.
Prior to marriage, we spend hours communicating face to face and, when apart, by phone, text message, e-mail, and Facebook. We study one another and practice our listening skills to really hear each other’s hearts. We attempt to win the other through our attentiveness, our affirmation, our words of love, and our body language of acceptance. One couple told us communication was so easy and came so naturally to them that they could not understand what the big deal was about the subject of communication within marriage.
What happened? Were we faking it? Were we trying to expose only our good side? It was fun having our heads in the clouds and not needing to worry about all that could go wrong. Reality during engagement is different from reality during marriage, neither of which is necessarily good or bad. So, what’s the issue?
Steve Prokopchak 