Drifting is natural, it happens sometimes without giving it much thought. Add to that our human propensity to get bored with the familiar rather quickly. Once the romance wanes in our relationships, we can be tempted to drift. We attempt to convince ourselves and our life mates that we’re not drifting, but we both know we are.
My daughter and I were out in a bay once when our boat lost its anchor. She went swimming after it. We barely noticed how far and how quickly that boat drifted away from us with the outgoing tide. It was just right there beside us a few minutes earlier.
What are the ingredients to a marriage that drifts? All too often we experience unmet expectations. Our disagreements become more intense and we seem to have conflict more often. Perhaps even old, destructive life patterns reemerge. Or, maybe we get behind financially and can’t seem to catch up. We’re working more hours, away from home more hours and unhappy for more hours. Now we’re feeling unfulfilled and it is so easy for marriage boredom to increase.
We didn’t mean for it to happen but life is full with our schedules, our children, yes, even our ministry. We’re missing one another, we’re not communicating as we should and we left certain disciplines that help to maintain a healthy marriage. Now we’re both feeling the sting of unmet needs and mumbling under our breath the negative things that bug us about our partner.
It can change; there is hope. We can reverse the effects of drifting. Here are seven steps we can take.
- Confess it to God and one other. Confession brings it into the light. It puts the subject on the table so to speak.
- Get back to dedicated times of communication about the personal and the nonpersonal. Get back to sharing everything in conversation with feelings and real-life intimacy.
- Pray while you communicate. Speak to God about your drifting from each other. Share your heart with your heavenly Father and ask Him for solutions to the drifting issue. Expect to hear those answers and then implement them.
- Get back to spending quality time together. There is no compromise; we need time together to relate, to have fun and to be friends again.
- Stop waiting on feelings. If you wait on feelings to return, you’ll never act. Act first because right actions bring about right feelings.
- Write out your mission statement. If you have one, find it and read over it once again. If you do not have a couple mission statement then you are missing out on writing down your reasons for marriage, your why. Get busy and put into writing your marriage mission statement.
- Dream again about where you desire your marriage to go and to grow. Vision is a focus for the future for the two of you. That focus runs adrift when we lose sight of us.
Rest assured, drifting can occur with each of us. But it is not our game plan to stay there. We must take steps to counteract the drifting that has taken place.
Journalist and author Mignon McLaughlin once said, “A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person.”
Someone once shared with me these words, “I’ll respect him when he starts respecting me.” Still another said, “When she starts acting respectable, I’ll show her respect.” Really? Since when is respect conditional upon another respecting you?
I love how author Gary Thomas weighs in on this very subject, “As our partners and their weaknesses become more familiar to us, respect often becomes harder to give. But this failure to show respect is more a sign of spiritual immaturity than it is an inevitable pathway of marriage.” He also notes, “When there is mutual respect in marriage, selflessness becomes contagious…. If you want to obsess about them [weaknesses], they’ll grow, but you won’t!”
Marriage minefields are fields where we have buried or hidden devices (memories) just below the surface. We actually move forward in life by frequently looking backward. Most day-to-day life is not filled with new revelation but memory. Memory helps us to find our way home after work. Memory is used daily in order to live life. Life without the ability to recall even the slightest, most mundane details or important ones would be disastrous.
Some of our memories contain lies or misbeliefs and still others are inaccurate. It was not uncommon for John and Elizabeth (not their real names) to experience knock-down, drag-out arguments. In sheer frustration late one evening, John looked at Elizabeth and said, “That’s it; I’m out of here!” Immediately, Elizabeth went silent and fell to the floor in a fetal position, where she sobbed uncontrollably. Even though John ran immediately to his wife, knelt beside her, and desperately tried to console her, it was as if he had left. Elizabeth didn’t or couldn’t hear his voice or acknowledge his presence. John later discovered that when his wife was six years old, she overheard her parents fighting. Her father’s words rang out as he screamed, “That’s it; I’m out of here!” Elizabeth never saw her father again
Elizabeth was no longer fighting with John; she was wrestling with pain-filled memories planted in a minefield just below the surface. Was it the argument they needed to resolve, or was it Elizabeth’s past hurts that needed to be healed? From many stories like this one, I have come to believe that most relationship issues in the present have a connection to the past; therefore, what seem like marital issues are often individual issues. I am convinced that when Jesus heals our individual issues, sins, hurts, and disappointments, marriage relationship issues can also be healed. *
Many years ago, a wiser, older, more mature couple taught us this phrase: praise in public; construct in private. By that phrase they meant to always provide a word of praise for your mate when with your family, at your work place, with your friends or in any social setting. They also encouraged us to never, ever put our mate down, shame them, humiliate them or correct them in a negative sense in public. We took this counsel to heart and have adapted it for our marriage relationship.
Perhaps lechery is a word you are not familiar with. If you look into its meaning the dictionary states, “…unrestrained or excessive indulgence of sexual desire.” I have come across this “desire” within some marriages. Usually, it is the man who relentlessly pursues an inordinate desire for sexual relations, but this is not always the case.
Recently we took our five-year-old grandson with us for a weekend away. It wasn’t uncommon for him to say, “I’m bored” or “This is boring.” I forgot how much entertainment a young child needs. It makes me think about how boring and predictable our marriages can become. So much of life is routine oriented, repeated each and every day like that old movie, Groundhog Day starring Bill Murray.
Recently Mary and I celebrated 44 years of marriage. Quite honestly, there have been those
The glue that holds all this together? Prayer. Learn to pray together. There is no better way to communicate, resolve issues, gain wisdom or “cast your care” than to pray together. You will find the intimacy you have only dreamed of if you’ll pray together. You will discover answers to lifelong problems, to long-term financial disagreements, to present frustrations and to future visions and goals. Prayer is intimacy of the highest degree in marriage as together we reveal our hearts’ desires to God and to one another.
Steve Prokopchak 