Living with another human being feels almost impossible at times.   We can continually deal with questions like: Will she ever change? Can he ever see beyond himself? When will my needs be met? Since when is our credit card bill more important than me? But here’s part of the deal… Marriage points out our selfishness rather clearly. Marriage kicks individuality in the butt. Marriage holds us accountable. Marriage exposes our commitment to God and our faith. And marriage has a way of exposing our immaturities.

All of the above can be seen as a huge negative or a huge opportunity for change. Once we realize the truth about this partnership called marriage, we have two choices. We can either dismiss what is being exposed within us or we can embrace it and begin to put into place mechanisms for change. For some, “dismissing” is going to the extreme of ending the marriage and looking for another partner only to eventually be confronted with the very same self-conflicting issues.  But for others, marriage provides an opportunity for God-stretching truth that exposes what’s on the inside of us.  It’s that “inside” part that scares us sometimes and we’d rather keep it hidden. We can accomplish that during engagement perhaps, but not when we spend over fourteen hours a day together.

I suppose it’s that “real us” we’re afraid of letting out. However, God already knows about that real us intimately and most likely so does our spouse. So, go ahead, be real while listening for that voice of change causing you to become a more mature life partner.

The belief that one in two marriages end in divorce has been debunked regularly, but still today touted from pulpits and academic broadsides as truth. It is not true and NEVER has been true or statistically factual. Next we heard the one in four marriages end in divorce and that stat also being true in the local church. Is that your experience? I haven’t seen 25% of true believers divorcing.   It’s just plain scary to think about marriage in these terms. Would you get on a plane if one in four crashed? What is the truth about divorce statistics?

Shaunti Feldham in her book, The Good News About Marriage found during eight years of research of divorce statistics that the divorce rate overall may be around 31%, but for couples who regularly attend church it drops to 15 to 20%. One pastor she cited tracked 143 couples for 25 years and less than 10% had been divorced. We need to know this because the truth instills faith and gives us hope especially as couples go through rigorous premarital counseling and follow-up with postmarital throughout the first few years.  Consider these ten ways to divorce proof your marriage:

1. Be committed to accountability and oversight for your marriage to a spiritual leader. Answer to someone(s) outside yourselves.
2. Be committed to a local church where you not only receive truth, but where you serve together in ministry.
3. Create a marriage mission statement that declares why you are married and what you are called to within marriage. Find your co-mission.
4. Never, never, never mention the “D” word = divorce. Decide that divorce is not an option and neither of you will ever consider it.
5. Receive marriage counsel as needed. When you run into a roadblock maturely enlist the help of others and admit your faults freely.
6. Pray together creating the most intimate communication you can create.
7. Create a budget and be committed to follow it so that finances do not come between you. Find the strengths of each of your financial personalities and utilize them to generate unity.
8. Know that marriage struggles will serve to strengthen you as you maturely deal with them, rather than avoid or run from them. The deeper the struggle the deeper the growth of your marriage as it is worked through.
9. Praise in public and construct in private. Never put your spouse down before others. Speak life to one another and use language that builds one another up rather than criticizing one another.
10. Seek God first and become intimate with Him so that He can continually change you. The marriage is not the issue, rather the two people in it are. Change and grow yourself and your marriage will also change.

Finally, my personal bonus: Incorporate the nine most important words in marriage regularly: I am sorry; I was wrong; please forgive me.

We make decisions on a daily basis according to our personal life values. Our values are the key to our priorities and will greatly affect our lives and our marriage. Identifying those values can help you and your spouse bring your most important beliefs to the table for discussion. Many of our differences are actually rooted in our life values. For example, one of us might highly value being out of debt while the other sees certain types of debt as acceptable. What’s the difference? The difference is often found in our financial values.

Here’s a key: When we discover such differences it is actually an opportunity to find “us,” our value, rather than just his or her value. Finding us is crucial to growth and maturity as a couple. Finding our deeply rooted beliefs and how we will walk them out is a portion of the glue that holds us together. My wife and I struggled with the values of saving money versus spending money early on in our marriage. While that looks like polar opposites at first, it actually forced us to find our value. As we looked closer at the differences, what we discovered was that I was saving for a future need and she was giving to others for a present need. Combining those two values and keeping them in balance has been life changing to our relationship and to our finances.

Take some time as a couple to look at your “opposing” values and you might just find a new normal that wisely incorporates the best of both for “us.”

I lied.  Not exactly, but here are five more ways we realized that we missed in the first ten. Adding one more blog on the same subject is risky, but it all keeps adding up. It seems marriage is threatened in so many ways today, that to read anything which offers help and hope is encouraging. So, we submit to you our final five marriage priorities that Mary and I realize were so important to us plus a bonus.

1. What we experience today is a direct result of how well we walked out our marriage in earlier years. We are now in our 60’s and realize that how we prioritized our relationship in our 20’s, our 30’s and our 40’s directly reflects upon where we are today. What seeds we sowed then are being reaped in our relationship today. Sow good seeds.
2. Procrastination will kill a relationship. Taking care of issues as soon as is possible is best. Don’t wait until they become worse or compound through procrastination. At the same time, I had to honor Mary as she processed the issues before she could confront them. Meanwhile, I needed to deal with myself.
3. Make your marriage a higher priority than the issue. Issues will come and go in a marriage, sometimes daily. Make sure you keep your relationship ahead of the problems. In other words, do not make the problems more important than the fact that you are married for a lifetime. Even in disagreement, Mary and I would strive for alignment.
4. Never stop investing in your marriage. We went to seminars, read books, listened to teaching series and sought out help from those we respected to speak into our marriage. We were open with others about our mistakes.
5. There are seasons that are dull, boring and gasping for air. Persevere through those; accept them as a bit normal, but work toward providing freshness in as many ways as you can. Admitting that we are in one of those seasons is the best place to start.

Bonus: Find a challenging mission outside yourselves and your family. We lead a small group, do premarital counseling, share in seminars together, have served on mission teams and did outreach to the homeless in Philadelphia. Marriages need a mission focus outside themselves; it keeps our passion and our compassion alive.