Happily Ever After
We all know the phrase “happily ever after,” but real marriage often looks very different from the fairy tale. What if our expectations of marriage are shaping our experience more than we realise?
The Honey-Do List Standoff
What to do with the Honey-Do List standoff, where a spouse (e.g. wife) has a list of expected tasks for her husband to complete? Often, the Honey-Do List turns a home into a battle ground of competing needs — something neither spouse wants.
How to Be a Great Dad, Even When You’re Doing It Alone
Through consistent love and the support of other wise men, single dads can walk in confidence and leave an impact that lasts generations. Here are five essential principles—three “do’s” and two “don’ts”—that can help single fathers navigate this important calling.
Embracing Hope in Our Marriage
Marriage is a sacrament, a path to holiness where we’re called to mirror Christ’s selfless love. Yet expectations turn it into a transaction: “I’ll love you if you meet my standards.” Hope, on the other hand, is like holding our desires with open hands. It’s rooted in trust, not control.
Origin Families and Their Impact
Our family of origin makes leaving and cleaving complicated! When we marry, we each bring an inherited mental picture of what a spouse ‘should’ be. That makes things interesting...
You Get What You Look For
What do you believe about your children? Are you speaking and acting in a way that will build and train the children that you really want?
How Expectations Set Us Up for Trouble
When we look back on our early romance, we note how quick we were to trust each other, even recklessly so. We dived into the relationship with ready abandon and little thought for the risks of rejection or disappointment. Since then, our trust levels have strengthened in many areas, and declined in others, as we’ve experienced ups and downs in our relationship. It leads us to ponder: what builds trust between ...
Incompatible Expectations
I wasn’t expecting that! We’ve explored how our formation in our family of origin continues to play out throughout our marriages. There are typically three ways in which our formation can pose challenges for us and today we explore the first of these: incompatible expectations. Growing up, Francine’s father was a retail pharmacist, with her mother working full-time raising the family and volunteering in the school and parish community. It was ...
Like Parent, Like Child
The most powerful influence on a couple is their family of origin. Good or bad, our experiences in our childhood prepared us for marriage. The young couple sitting opposite us had been married only a few years. They were experiencing some health challenges, but this is not what brought them to us; they were locked in a perpetual low-grade argument that never seemed to end. They were so ‘wired’, almost every ...
Three Ways to a Resilient Marriage
We’ve been hearing from many of our SmartLoving leaders around the world looking for help in supporting couples under stress. There’s certainly a lot of stress going around with pandemic-induced changes and uncertainty. It got us reflecting on marital resilience -- the ability of a relationship to endure and persevere through difficulties. There is quite a bit of information on personal resilience, and it’s a buzzword in education these days, but ...
