Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:01 Hello, and welcome to our first podcast on Strengthening Your Marriage. My name's Jeremy Ward, and I'm married to Haley Haley's joining me now. Hello. And, uh, we just wanted to share, I guess, some things, uh, about how you can strengthen your marriage coming out of this season of c Ovid 19 and realizing that there are particular pressures that everyone has been facing. And rather than looking at that negatively, I think this is a season that presents us with great opportunity for change, uh, to pinpoint areas where we may be finding our relationship, difficult areas of tension and working constructively, um, towards change. Now, Hailey, you'd mentioned reading something that you were, uh, kind of, that was thrown your direction to, towards the start of Covid restrictions coming in. Do you wanna share a bit about that?
Speaker 1 00:00:59 Yeah, it was just a, a Mama Mia article. Basically, it was saying that they're predicting most marriages would come, most people would come who were married, would come out of covid 19, either pregnant or divorced. So yeah, I guess that kind of situation, pressure cooker of being home all the time together had the potential to either drive you together or push you apart. Mm-hmm.
Speaker 0 00:01:24 <affirmative>. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. And that reminds me of some friends who went through a, a really tough situation some years back, uh, who spoke of cracks in a relationship. And the way they talked about external pressures kind of pressing in on them, uh, was that it pushed those cracks further apart. And I think that's, uh, the way any kind of hardship goes, it has that, that potential to move us in in one of those directions.
Speaker 1 00:01:51 Yeah. And that's definitely been the case for us as well. We experienced probably one of the highest pressure times while you were studying at college and with a young family who had, um, one toddler and I was pregnant with the second one. And, um, yeah. Had that baby during that time, and that's probably been the catalyst for a lot of changing our marriage.
Speaker 0 00:02:16 Hmm. Yeah. So I guess in this kind of introductory episode, we're just wanting to, I guess, share personally some of our story. And our hope is that, that if you're tuning in, perhaps there's only one of you, you're in a relationship and, and you are tuning in and your partner's not, uh, let me encourage you to tune in with your partner. It's gonna be so much more beneficial if you're listening together. Uh, and we hope this is a helpful catalyst for discussion of how you can strengthen your own marriage. When I think of our marriage and that season that Haley's raised, I just say, I guess I wanna put my hand up and say, I've struggled with marriage. We're not people who have it altogether. And we've been through these darker seasons. We've been married, you know, um, nine years, coming up to 10 years in October this year. And I think probably you'd say maybe the first two or three years of married life, or maybe, maybe even longer, maybe up to five years, were fairly bleak and, and hard experience of marriage. How would, how would you describe them?
Speaker 1 00:03:19 Yeah, I think probably the end of our honeymoon didn't end well. And it felt like from there things were, yeah, a lot of difficult things came up reaching a bit of a peak while we were at college, and we were trying, we were both trying to make things work. We really wanted it to be a good marriage. And I remember thinking, how can it be that two people really want this to work, love each other, but it's just not working. And the more we try and talk about it, the worse things get. It was difficult. And I think it, it took us getting to that point of realizing we can't do this on our own. We really need help. I think that was the, the starting point of a lot of change, and it's been a process from there. Yeah. But we've definitely come a long way from that point.
Speaker 0 00:04:01 Yeah. Yeah. So I mentioned the word struggle before, and I guess, um, I've developed some resources with our church, and I guess I feel that there might be a bit of pushback against that kind of language, but I guess for me, I just wanna give some context to that word, if that's an issue for you. For me, I, I kind of see myself as a bit of a bler, a struggler. Lots of things in life don't come naturally to me. I think of raising our three kids, and people often say that kids don't come, uh, with a, an owner's manual to tell you what to do. And there's an awful lot of things that haven't come naturally to me intuitively as a parent. I, you know, I, I think like an adult and I tend to communicate like an adult to them. It's been a real effort for me to learn how they think at different developmental stages and being concrete thinkers and what that means for I relating with them.
Speaker 0 00:04:51 And I just feel like that kind of across the spectrum in life, that, um, time management, all all sorts of areas, areas that I have to work really hard at. Uh, but I think the Bible had holds out to us this idea that being in a place of being weak, being vulnerable, admitting you don't have it together, that that you are needy, uh, is actually a really good place to be. Because, uh, it's when you are in that posture, uh, that, that God's help comes in to your situation and, and, and you realize that you need help outside of yourself, you need resources outside of yourself. So I guess, yeah, we are, we are Christians. I just sort of put that out there, but if you're not a Christian, you're listening, I'm hoping that this will be really beneficial for you as well. I guess kind of the heart of our experience has been that we were not able to fix things, uh, without some external perspective.
Speaker 0 00:05:47 And I, I think it's a bit of a radical idea, I'll put it out there, but greatest hope for our own marriage and where we've seen the most flourishing, the most thriving is actually this idea that God doesn't wanna leave us where we are. He's actually committing committed to, to changing our character, to transforming us. So that in small ways, little bit by little bit, we start to relate in ways that, that reflect him and what he's like. Uh, and so our hope is that he actually wants to do that for me. He wants to do that for Haley. And when that's both happening together, it actually makes for a very rich relationship, a very rich marriage. So that's been our experience along the way. Uh, we're gonna be talking a little bit about a resource we've been benefiting from ourselves recently. Paul Trip has four marriage seminars available on his website. Hayley, do you wanna just give some more fleshing out maybe to how things were for us? So when Hayley's talked about me going to us going to college, that was Bible college move from our hometown in Newcastle, where we had quite a bit of family support to Sydney to a new place, and quite a big college community there, but found there was just a lot of change happening at once. And Do you wanna tell a bit more of that story?
Speaker 1 00:07:08 Yeah, there were a lot of external kind of things going on that added to the pressure. So being, yeah, being away from family support with a young child and being pregnant, and then a second young child, and just a prolonged series of broke, um, time of broken sleep that left us both very low on resources, I guess. Um, then you were under a lot of pressure with the workload at college, and we were living on campus, so there were expecta a lot of expectations around community involvement in the wider community there, which added to the pressure with the young family, and it wasn't necessarily very compatible. So yeah, we're under a lot of pressure, and I guess that sort of brought to a head the things that we were already experiencing in our marriage. So some of our patterns of relating and dealing with stress, it felt like neither of us were really feeling loved.
Speaker 1 00:08:05 We were both trying hard to make each other feel loved, but somehow we just weren't crossing wires. And we'd have conversations, remember having late night conversations and going to bed feeling more upset than before the conversation and struggling to sleep <laugh>. Yeah. Yeah. And we, we got to the point where we say, we're not getting anywhere we need to invite someone else into the conversation. We ended up speaking to my parents, which might seem a bit strange, but, um, just the nature of our relationship was such that we were able to do that. Did you wanna say
Speaker 0 00:08:36 Some more? Yeah. So they offered us some hope and they could see good things maybe that, at least from what they'd heard from Haley when they, when Haley's dad chatted to me more independently, could see some good things happening there that, that maybe Haley wasn't seeing. And so they could give us, uh, a clearer perspective on maybe on what we're facing and share, I guess, personally from their own experiences. Some things that had found helpful also gradually worked through Paul Tripp's book on marriage at that stage. And there were various helps that we sought out. We saw a, a psychologist for a season, and I guess one of the key helps that came through that time was to do with bedtime routines with our kids and getting the kids to bed at a reasonable time, which gave us some quality time together of an evening, which we just, we just didn't have a habit or a way of making that happen where we could talk freely where it wasn't kind of super late and we weren't just exhausted and ready to collapse into bed.
Speaker 0 00:09:30 And so that, that had its place as well. Yeah. So I guess as Haley described, there was that our particular cracks were widening in that season of how we responded to stress. And I guess there were expectations that we both had of our relationship. You're talking about being loved and what we'd imagined marriage to be. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. And the fact that what we're experiencing was actually quite different from, from that picture we'd gone into married life with. And we're feeling that disconnect, feeling that disillusionment and disappointment, and yet this irony that we still had good desires and that aiming at something good. I guess the benefit of reaching that place where you want help and you are, you are open to have someone step in to what you're experiencing and speaking into that is that you're not just stuck in that endless cycle. Just chatting with a friend who's commenting.
Speaker 0 00:10:21 His observation is marriage is generally we have those expectations, both husband and wife have expectations of what the relationship should look like. Uh, but there's just this underlying disappointment, expectations not being met. And this ending up settling for just surviving in marriage, you try and appease the other person, meet whatever requests or demands you think they're looking for. Um, but at the same time, by doing that, and just only relating at that level is this sense that you're not really thriving in marriage, cliche of surviving instead of thriving, um, that we're actually made for greater intimacy and closeness in marriage. And perhaps you wanna share a little bit about some of the things that we began to discover in that season that were helpful, that, that helped us develop closeness.
Speaker 1 00:11:14 I guess from my perspective, um, I feel like you were the first one to kind of have major breakthrough changes in perspective. And that just puts, I guess, set us into a positive cycle rather than negative cycle. Okay. So, um, some of the thinking that you did about, like with your counseling biblical counseling course, just between the difference between your circumstances and your response to the circumstances and just separating those out, not feeling like you were, um, a slave to your circumstances or Yeah. That that was determinative for
Speaker 0 00:11:57 You. Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:11:58 Yeah. Um, I don't know if you want to talk about it yourself.
Speaker 0 00:12:01 Yeah. I guess I lived for quite some time without hope and the irony of studying at a Bible college and yet God seeming very distant from the points of struggle that we're experiencing on a day-to-day level, I would say that I was depressed probably for 18 months or so, and that was part of seeing a psychologist as well, addressing the depression was on a mental health care plan. And I think a lot of that, my experience of depression, this isn't always the case, but at least for me, it was to do with my interpretation of life and what I was trying to get out of life, what I expected. Haley talked about expectations with college workload, college community, and not all of those were external. A lot of them were reinforced by my own standards and expectations of myself. And I, I came to see that more clearly, and I came to see that, that God actually met me with grace and, and kindness and offered help, I guess, relevant to the particular struggles that I was facing. And part of that was that separating out of external pressures versus actually seeing how I was responding to them in an unhelpful way and starting to, to change my responses, starting not to be such a slave to the things that were pressing in on me, starting to see where I could set limits and reign in my own expectations of myself in different areas of life. And I guess you're saying that I, that that brought a different dynamic then into our relating together.
Speaker 1 00:13:38 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I felt like that made a very, like a huge difference that really turned things around.
Speaker 0 00:13:46 Yeah. So where do you think we were going wrong in that, that season where those cracks were widened, their external pressures bringing out issues in our relationship? What, what do you think was going wrong at the heart of it all? Mm-hmm. <affirmative>.
Speaker 1 00:14:01 I think we were both, like you were saying before, we're both trying to have our needs met in the marriage. I remember we read this book that talked about how we can, um, be like ticks, but like a tick on a dog trying to get what you want. But the problem is in a marriage where both people are trying to get what they want, it's like two tick, two ticks and no dog. But yeah, his solution that he talked about was that we need to find, like, we need to have our needs met from God, which then it frees us up to love one another without seeking primarily to have our needs met by the other person.
Speaker 0 00:14:38 Yeah. I guess the idea of the tick is it's a parachute something sucking life, living off the other's. That's this kind of codependency. Yeah. But he's saying actually there's, there's something else. But I think, I think the way that that kind of idea portrayed God, it was more like, well then God was the dog and we were still ticks Yeah. <laugh>. And so we were like both ticks trying to get from God what we needed so we could be tick buddies, <laugh> Yeah. Together. That got on Well, but I guess the problem, even that paradigm was wrong because we are not ticks and God's not a dog, but that idea that he's not this, um, genie who's a, a needs meter <laugh>. Yeah. Yeah. And we were approaching him in this self-focused way. And so everything was kind of a bit skewed just in terms of picking up that idea of self focus that you were reflecting back on when we were still dating or perhaps engaged and how that dynamic was was there back then. Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:15:42 Yeah. And even, I guess I was referring to that period after we were married when Ah, yep. Yeah. When we, we felt dis we both felt disappointed. I think we felt like something was missing that we wanted in our marriage, and we were trying to rekindle that sense of excitement and romance, and we decided to lock in a date night or a date time, um, to spend time together. I remember going out to like lots of nice places and restaurants and planning lots of things. Um, but just I remember the pressure that we both felt going to those times to make it something really special and then we'd get there and conversation would be difficult. And yeah, it kind of just led to more disappointment or feeling like something was missing and we couldn't quite put our finger on it.
Speaker 0 00:16:29 Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. So I guess we've had different input and practical help suggested along the way, but those things didn't seem to be the heart of the problem. Yeah. They weren't kind of scratching where we itch. So either of having a regular date night. Yeah. I mean, we'd jump on coupon sites and book things in in advance and try and do it cost effective way, but still make it special. And that didn't actually really facilitate meaningful connection. Yeah. And we had, we hope. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1 00:17:02 Um, yeah. And then you mentioned the book that we read, the Five Love Languages mm-hmm. <affirmative>, which again, had some useful things in terms of understanding each other better. But again, I remember feeling this pressure that we were still trying to, like, we were trying to meet each other's needs, I guess, and hoping to have our own needs met in return, but it's still left something wanting <laugh>.
Speaker 0 00:17:31 Yeah. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. Yeah. So we've done something about that. Perhaps you've heard of it. It's quite a popular book, the Five Love Languages. And it's not that it has no place, we've just been thinking through our relationship with our three children and how they're different. And one of our sons particularly benefits from quality time. That's how he connects. So there's a place for that kind of thinking, but for us, that wasn't what was going on in the heart of the relationship. I think what was going wrong was this self focus Yeah. And how that played itself out in the relationship. Um, a self focus that was never going to work and make for a rich, intimate connection. And I guess what that required was God breaking down that paradigm of a self focus. Yeah. And helping us to see that he had an entirely different picture and plan for us, which was primarily about knowing him coming to him to have our needs met, but coming to him on his own terms, his terms.
Speaker 0 00:18:29 Yeah. And as we started to realize that, that gave us some tremendous hope because we saw the goodness of God. And that was kind of liberating. Uh, I know that John Piper talks about going to the Grand Canyon and this gift of self forgetfulness. No one, when they look out and see the beauty of some magnificent spot in nature like that thinks about their own greatness and bigness, but they're drawn to the beauty of what's in front of them. And for Christians knowing God as the one who made that, there's this, there's this wonder in forgetting about ourselves in that moment and, and seeing the wonder of what someone else has done. And I guess when that self forgetfulness characterizes a relationship, <laugh> as, as God enables that as self forgetfulness and seeking the good of another that's not trying to get in return, uh, just makes her a very different dynamic, a rich dynamic. And it takes the pressure off as well. That kind of pressure you described when we're going through that season of trying to do dates, um, and inevitable disappointment that that flowed because our expectations were set that, you know, we really had to connect then. And that had to be our deepest, most profound kind of moments, <laugh>. So I think that kind of captures a significant change that enabled us to move forward in a constructive direction. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Is there anything else you'd wanna say about that?
Speaker 1 00:20:03 Um, yeah, so I guess that then led to character change, which enabled the building of trust, um, which then has sort of given us a foundation of being able to have conversations which we weren't able to have. Things were
Speaker 0 00:20:19 Always,
Speaker 1 00:20:20 Would always blow up. Um, yeah. In the sense that we'd both end up very upset every time we tried to discuss something. Um, but yeah, from that we were able, we're now able to have candid conversations without getting defensive on whole. And we still do sometimes to some degree, but, um, but generally speaking, we're able, able to have conversations about, um, about our relationship.
Speaker 0 00:20:48 There's that idea of constructive conflict. Yeah. Yeah. And both of us naturally being conflict avoiders. Yeah. And so our conversation about our relationship, our marriage, things that weren't working, um, at least would tend to lead me to withdraw that bedrock of trust wasn't there. But as our character began to change, that bedrock of trust was built as the foundation for having more robust conversations about the issues and a confidence that by raising something, um, the relationship was still intact. It wouldn't crumble it <laugh>. Yeah. Or was able to withhold whatever might be raised by the other person. Yeah. Yeah. And, um, maybe more of a confidence that we are both headed in a, in a good direction. We wanted good things for one another, even if that meant having hard, hard chats, hard conversations at times. Yeah. Yeah. So I guess the big take home from this introduction is if things are difficult for you right now, I encourage you to have the courage to ask for help, to reach out in some way to someone else, uh, you know, who knows you, you're confident or be helpful in, in entering into to what you're facing and, and will offer a helpful perspective as, I guess for us, that was, that was the first step towards things moving in a more constructive direction.
Speaker 0 00:22:13 As we continue in the coming weeks, we're just gonna be doing this weekly. And, uh, we're gonna be engaging with a, a resource that we've both found helpful by Paul Tripp. He's got a series of video seminars that we've been watching recently, and they touched down on things that were helpful when we read through his book in our particular struggles in marriage. But they're continuing to be things that bear fruit now, even as we have worked through the covid restrictions and experienced various tensions with workload pressure and the kids at home. And you homeschooling <laugh>, Hailey, and I guess that sense. And one of the things that the portrait talks about is just the fact that we have this problem of sin, uh, which just essentially is, it's selfishness. We focus on our own agenda and what we want, and when that's the primary way we think, um, people are always rubbing up against what we want <laugh>.
Speaker 0 00:23:10 And that happens in closer relationships. So it's no surprise that it happens in marriage or in family life, especially when there's more intensity and closeness and, and limited interaction with others as there has been in this covid period. Uh, so we'll just be engaging with a bit of that. And our goal is just to share one key idea with you, uh, each week, and then to take that one idea and to apply it to ourselves as both me as husband, Haley, as wife, as to how that idea might take shape. Uh, and then to suggest what that idea might look like for you as, uh, the start of something that you can take away and, and work on, uh, to help build your marriage. Okay. Thanks for tuning in. Thanks.
