My publisher has decided to run a month-long sale on two of my ebooks!
The “What’s for Dinner?” Solution: Quick, Easy, and Affordable Meals Your Family Will Love is on sale for $2.99. Click here to purchase!
Image borrowed from Elisa’s post
Also, we’ve picked our five winners from our 5 Books to a Better Marriage series. Congratulations to Tracy, Rachel, Sarah, Missy and Heather! We will be in touch with you soon and you should have your books in no time.
Thank you everyone for leaving such great comments and for joining us each day!
Don’t miss this: 10 Hot Date Night Ideas for Married Couples is FREE on Kindle!
Let’s get the conversation started
…sex isn’t bad
…sex isn’t dirty
…sex isn’t shameful
It’s not an easy topic to have a conversation about. We have been taught a lot of things about sex, but how often do we talk about how God created it and that it’s a GOOD thing? Listen now to this episode as Kathi and Erin discuss their new book Hot Mama: 12 Secrets to a Sizzling Hot Marriage
Join the conversation where we encourage each other to have a better sex life!
Erin MacPherson lives in Austin, Texas with her husband Cameron, her sons Joey and Will and her daughter Kate. She is the author of “The Christian Mama’s Guide Series“, a staff writer for Dun & Bradstreet and a freelancer for publications like Thriving Family Magazine, MOPS MomSense, FamilyLife Magazine, Daily Guideposts and BEMag. She blogs about her life, her kids and her faith at ChristianMamasGuide.com.
“Earlier this year 37-year-old Maggie Gyllenhaal revealed in an interview with The Wrap Magazine that she was denied a role opposite a man almost 20 years her senior because she was ‘too old’.
‘There are things that are really disappointing about being an actress in Hollywood that surprise me all the time,’ she said. ‘I’m 37 and I was told recently I was too old to play the lover of a man who was 55. It was astonishing to me. It made me feel bad, and then it made me feel angry, and then it made me laugh.” DailyMail.com
I love Maggie Gyllenhaal’s evolution of feelings when it comes to being judged as “too old” at 37 to play the love interest of a 55 year old actor.
First, she felt bad.
Then, it made her angry.
Then, it made her laugh.
When one of us is made to feel badly about ourselves, for our age, our weight, our sags, our lines, I know very few people who embrace such a body positive image that we’re able to just laugh straight off. Just as there are seven stages of grief, I believe these are the three stages of self-acceptance.
As a woman who is trying to make sure that I’m doing all I can to feel great about myself and my marriage, the world is definitely not making it easy on us.
[Tweet “How to be a HOT MAMA in your 40’s #bettermarriage5”]
And so at 40-something, when I start to feel bad about the criteria the world uses about how I look, about my sex drive, my energy level, I realize I need to move from stage one to stage three pretty quickly. (For my sake, and for the sake of my husband.)
Because the sexiest things about a wife are confidence and the ability to laugh at yourself – and fellow forties friends – this is where we have it all over our younger sisters.
We mamas in our forties know a few secrets that our younger friends may have yet to discover:
Our teens think we’re hard of hearing because we play the TV so loud, (but really that’s just to cover up the sounds of our nooner on a Saturday after lunch.)
We realize that naps aren’t just for sleeping anymore. (Daytime sex is awesome, especially since most of our kids aren’t so “little” anymore. When they stopped taking naps, we started.)
We love Meghan Trainor’s song “All About That Bass” (and buy lingerie with some structure so we too can keep “all the right junk in all the right places…”)
We understand that while the visual is important (that’s why, even at our “advanced” age, we’re STILL going to the gym,) that the pat on the butt and the “Can’t wait to see you tonight, the kids are staying with friends overnight…” as he’s going off to work can have a pretty daunting effect.
So as I work at being a Hot Mama in her 40’s, I want to give you a real glimpse of what it looks like:
My Hot Mama Marriage: Recently, I had breakfast with Elisa Morgan, the founder of MOPS. Elisa and I have known about each other for a long time, but hadn’t spent any time together until this breakfast. After the food had been placed on our table, she turned to me and said, “I want to know about you. Well, what I do know about you from Facebook is that you are madly in love with your husband.”
Yep – after the fact that I’m a Jesus girl, that’s the most important piece of information you could know about me. But it hasn’t come without a lot of struggle and pain.
Two divorces (one his, one mine,) two kids, two step kids, and two exes. Debt, death, and did I mention exes?
It hasn’t been an easy road, but now, in our forties (OK he’s in his fifties, but he acts like he’s in his forties – in the best way possible,) we have the gift of having a few years under our belt and being supremely and utterly comfortable with each other. It’s such a gift.
My Hot Mama Bedroom: OK – you know how all those romance books tell you to reserve your bedroom as a sanctuary for your romance?
For me? Not so much.
I run a business from my home, and grand central is a corner of our bedroom. BUT, one of the advantages of being in my late forties? Pretty soon all the bedrooms in our house will be vacant and I will have my own little office. I will be able to dedicate our bedroom just to bedroom activities (which include sleep, Seinfeld reruns, and sex. In that order.)
My Hot Mama Exercise Routine:
I was trying to be a runner.
Keyword: trying.
Until the scourge of Planter Fasciitis hit. And now I’m a walker. (But at least I’m not using a walker, so that’s a good thing, right?)
So while I’m not “crushing it”, I’m taking exercise more seriously than I ever have before. I’m walking a mile every single day, and have walked two 5Ks. I’m trying to challenge myself in new ways. And part of the reason is I can feel the difference when I exercise like never before. When I don’t move? I feel it for the rest of the day. That’s even more motivation than looking great – feeling great.
My Hot Mama Clothes:
I spend more money on my clothes now than I did when I was younger, but I’m also way more confident in what I look good in, and what I should avoid at all costs. And remember – confidence is sexy.
My Hot Mama Nights:
Monday through Friday? I love to cook a good dinner, and after a long, long day, relax with my man for an hour or so, (I get up at 5 AM, so the hour between 7 and 8 PM is the best one I have,) where, if Roger had his druthers, I would spend the entire time scratching his back (and sometimes, that’s exactly what happens,) and then Roger goes back to work in his office (his team is India) and I wind down for bed.
Hot – right?
But that connecting during the week pays off on the weekend when we go out with friends or travel on the weekends. It’s a comfortable routine, with a little hot thrown in on a regular basis.
My Hot Mama Sex Life Challenges:
Let’s be honest – if you’ve hit the forties, you’ve noticed some changes in your sex life. Physically, things have changed – for you and for him.
It’s at this point, you can’t be shy about talking to your doctor. There are meds, there are over the counter helps. Don’t be shy! Your great sex life depends on it!
My Hot Mama Confidence:
I am absolutely more confident than I was in my 20’s or even my 30’s. In your 40’s, you stop trying to please the world and start working on pleasing the ones that are important. In my case, that’s God, my husband, and in my forties, I can finally say, myself.
Are you a hot mama in your 30’s? Then head on over to Erin MacPherson, my co-author’s post about hot to pull off being a Hot Mama when you still have some kiddo in the house… http://wp.me/p33YCp-Kz
Want to up the heat in your marriage, no matter what your age? Check out Kathi and Erin’s new Book Hot Mamas! http://shop.kathilipp.com/product/hot-mama-12-secrets-to-a-sizzling-hot-marriage/
Hey friends- this is Kathi. I could NOT be more thrilled to have Shaunti Feldhahn on the blog today. This woman changed the course of my marriage with her book For Women Only – Understanding the secret Lives of Men and now she’s done it again with her latest book. Keep reading! And don’t forget to comment at the end and be entered in to win all five of our books featured this week!
Ladies, did you know your man has a secret? It may not even be an intentional secret, mind you, but a very personal burden that often stays hidden by default. Nearly all men face it, but few feel able to really talk about it with their wives. Yet if we know how to talk to our husbands about this and show them that they can talk to us about it, we will learn so much more about each other and go to a new level of intimacy we didn’t realize we were missing.
When I first started doing research about men, I was stunned to realize that this applied even to men who were very trustworthy, even to men who worked to keep their thought lives pure, even to men who adored their wives and wanted to honor their wives (and God) in their choices. And it wasn’t just other men – it was my man! I started to realize that there was big part of my husband’s life, including how his brain processed the world every day, about which I was completely clueless.
[Tweet “The Secret He Secretly Wishes You Knew by @ShauntiFeldhahn #bettermarriage5”]
And if I was missing a big part of my husband’s life, wouldn’t there always be a limit to how close we could be? I didn’t want him to carry a burden on his own only because he didn’t know how to talk about it – or didn’t know if he could trust me with it.
So I started to ask questions, tentatively at first. (“Um… What do you think, when you see something like that hot woman in the skin-tight shirt who just walked past us at Target?”) And he started to give some answers, definitely tentatively at first. (“Uh… why do you want to know…?”)
But as I showed him that I wasn’t going to bash or condemn, but truly just wanted to understand (“Honestly, honey, it’s because I love you and just want to understand what life is like for you”) he began to open up and share things we’d never talked about before.
Some of it was hilarious. (“She must have paid a lot of money for those.”) Frankly, some of it was hard to hear. (“Well, OK, to be honest, sometimes when I see someone almost undressed, there’s this micro-second flash of wanting to picture what she might look like if she is undressed. And then I have to immediately stop that flash and think about that work email instead.”) There were times I was sad, or hurt, as my husband shared certain struggles he’d had on and off over the years. But I tried so hard to not let those feelings control me and instead tried to show my husband that I wanted him to be able to share what was going on inside him.
Because as I began to do more of the research on the male brain wiring, I began to realize: men’s brains are actually designed by God to be visually stimulated in this way, because the only revealing image a man was ever supposed to see was of his wife! And yet today, this culture is filled will very public images that were only supposed to be seen in private. Our men and boys are living in a visual minefield.
[Tweet “Men’s brains are designed by God to be visually stimulated.”]
Some men make rigorous choices to look away, look down, take those thoughts captive. Others have grown weary of that struggle and have given into the temptation to look at things that they shouldn’t have, and many feel great shame in doing so. Still others—although a much smaller number – have become trapped or addicted.
Yet many of them have one thing in common: they wish they could talk to their wives about it. They wish they could open up about their struggles. They wish they could come in from a particularly bad day at work and say, without fear of condemnation, “Wow, Kerri at the office missed doing up those top two buttons on her shirt again and I couldn’t focus on a thing she was saying.” Or if they are trapped in looking at porn, something deep inside sometimes wants to come into the light and get help – and yet the self-protective side says “no way!” So all of it stays hidden. All too often, a man handles all of this on his own.
But I think lots of us as women wouldn’t want our men to handle this all on their own. That was one of the main things that spurred me to do the research that became my book For Women Only and later, my new book Through A Man’s Eyes. I wanted my husband to know that I was safe to talk to about this, even as he also knew that if there were any real issues (which, thankfully, there hadn’t been in recent years), I would expect him to get help. And once we started talking about this, once he saw I wouldn’t freak out or condemn, we found that if we could talk about this in a healthy way, we could talk about anything.
I urge all my sisters out there: show your husband that you are safe to talk to. Even if you are hearing some difficult things, show him you love and support him anyway and you’ll walk with him through it. Learning how to talk about those things you’ve never talked about before will take your marriage to a whole new dimension of intimacy. A place where you have no secrets and where you know and love each other fully, regardless.
Sounds a lot like what marriage was supposed to be, all along.
Do you want Shaunti to share life-changing truths – including helping women understand men – at your event, church service or network? Inquire about Shaunti speaking, here.
Shaunti Feldhahn is the best-selling author of eye-opening, research-based books about men, women and relationships, including For Women Only, For Men Only, the groundbreaking The Good News About Marriage, and her newest book, Through A Man’s Eyes. A Harvard-trained social researcher and popular speaker, her ?ndings are regularly featured in media as diverse as The Today Show, Focus on the Family, and the New York Times. Visit www.shaunti.com for more.
Hey friends- this is kathi. you are going to love my friend sheila wray gregoire and her thoughts on sex (yes – it is for you, too!) I love how she honors marriage, wives and husbands all in one fell swoop. don’t forget to comment at the end and be entered in to win all five of our books featured this week!
Today’s post is taken from Sheila Wray Gregoire’s new book, 9 Thoughts That Can Change Your Marriage.
[Tweet “Sex is for you too! @sheilagregoire and how to make #sex and your #marriage great! #bettermarriage5”]
My husband and I have been married for 24 years and happily married for 21.
Most of our early problems were with sex. It was uncomfortable, icky, and awkward. The more Keith wanted it, the more I felt he only loved me for what I could do for him. So I would pray, “God, please help him see how much he’s hurting me. Help him just to love me again.” I’d pour out my heart, certain that the God who wipes away tears would hear me and answer me.
I did everything I felt the church had told me to do: I prayed. I cast my cares on God. I drew close to Jesus. Yet my prayers didn’t work. Keith still wanted sex! And he still got grumpy when I wasn’t frisky.
I wanted a marriage where my husband understood and cherished and valued me. Didn’t I deserve that? So what was Keith’s problem? And more to the point, what was God’s problem? I was doing my part, after all.
After I had prayed for two exhausting years that Keith would start caring about me, God put a thought into my head: Do you believe the only one who can fix this relationship is Keith? Don’t you have something to do with it?
I didn’t particularly like that thought, and so I vehemently argued with myself–and with God–about why changing was impossible. Even if we only considered sex, how was I supposed to enjoy something so gross and uncomfortable?
Then another thought hit me even harder: If God says that sex is good, and the whole world says that sex is good, maybe you should start figuring out how to make sex good.
[Tweet “God showed @sheilagregoire that she needed to figure out why #sex wasn’t good. #bettermarriage5”]
I was stunned. If that thought was right, then the responsibility fell on me to do something about my struggle. I had to stop thinking sex was awful and start thinking, Sex is great—I just don’t have it all figured out yet. The problem may have started in the bedroom, but it wasn’t a problem with sex. It was a problem with how I was thinking.
A lot of us in church have awfully lousy thinking about sex. Maybe it’s for good reason–we were sexually abused or assaulted; we grew up thinking sex was shameful; we are burdened by a promiscuous past.
But then there’s the added burden that the Christian message about sex throws at us, and it goes something like this:
Just do it! Men need it, and if you don’t satisfy him, he’ll be super-tempted and might fall.
Wow, has anyone ever considered how totally UNsexy that message is? Just have sex–or your husband will cheat on you! Definitely not cool.
And also definitely a misunderstanding of what God created sex for.
You see, what I learned in my sexual journey is that there is a vast difference between just having sex and making love. Having sex has to do with the body; making love is an intimate joining on so many levels–physical, spiritual, and emotional. And actually, the closer you are emotionally and spiritually, the better the physical feels anyway!
The church is getting so concerned with things like porn that sometimes we give the “Just Have Sex” message a little too much, without elaborating on WHY we should just have sex. So let me share with you some of the things that I needed to learn about why sex is great for me, too (and not just for my husband!). When I started thinking this way about sex, then suddenly I wasn’t searching for my “No Trespassing” flannel nightgown anymore:
We women have a non-stop to-do list in our brains every minute of the day. But sex is a way to turn all of that off and just feel. You don’t have to think. You don’t even have to do much of anything. You just get to experience your husband.
With sex, you can’t be a control freak. You have to let it just happen–or it won’t feel very good. That chance to turn off your brain, for just a few minutes, is a real gift.
How many times have you said, “not tonight, because I’m just too tired,” only to toss and turn all night because you know your husband is disappointed. And then the next day you’re so defensive you push him away?
But the nights that we do make love I fall asleep almost immediately and sleep so deeply! So now when I’m tired, I say, “Come put me to sleep, Baby!”
When Keith and I haven’t made love in a while, it drives me nuts that he bites his nails. On the days after we do connect, though, I don’t even notice.
Making love truly covers a multitude of minor annoyances.
When you connect, you feel closer. You feel like, “everything’s okay.” We’re a team. When you don’t, then you’re always a little defensive about the relationship. And that’s why we tend to get more ticked off by little things!
No one else knows the things about me that Keith does, because this is something we only experience together. And the longer we’ve been married, the more “wild” I can be. It’s like everything that we do can become truly sacred, because we’re doing it together.
I feel this most after a fight. After we’ve let words fly perhaps a little too fast, and we’ve emptied ourselves emotionally, suddenly we’re so drawn to each other. We’ve become so vulnerable with each other that we need to connect even more.
It was the same the night that our son died. There we were, in total and complete anguish, and we turned to each other. Not because we were turned on in any way, but because there was this gaping hole that only the other person could fill. And we needed that intimacy.
Our culture–even our Christian culture–has made sex seem like it’s just for men. And it’s reduced sex to something purely physical. But it’s not. Making love is so much more. You empty yourself. You bare yourself. You truly see each other. And then, after all that, you can truly relax and find peace. That’s a wonderful gift!
And if sex can do all that, and you’re not experiencing it yet, don’t settle for that! Make this the most fun research project you’ve ever done with your husband. God made sex to be amazing. When we start believing that, and stop believing all the gross things we’ve heard about sex, then maybe, just maybe, we can truly make love, too.
Sheila Wray Gregoire is the author of The Good Girl’s Guide to Great Sex and 9 Thoughts That Will Change Your Marriage. If you feel stuck in your marriage–and even your sex life–9 Thoughts will help you see the options God has available to you–and help you see how God wants to help you get unstuck! Sheila blogs daily at ToLoveHonorandVacuum.com.
What is your first reaction when you hear, “Argument-Free Marriage?”
We see your eyes rolling! And you are not alone!
But what if we told you it IS possible?
What if we told you that an argument-free marriage DOESN’T mean you have to agree with everything your spouse says?
Listen as Kathi and Erin ask Fawn Weaver, author of The Argument-Free Marriage: 28 Days to Creating the Marriage You’ve Always Wanted with the Spouse You Already Have, the questions you have about what the book is all about.
Fawn Weaver, a USA Today and New York Times and bestselling author, is an investor, marriage advocate, TEDx alum and the founder of the Happy Wives Club, a community of nearly 1,000,000 women in more than 110 countries.
The Club’s website, HappyWivesClub.com, is an upbeat blog dedicated to positively changing the tone about marriage. Twice named the Best Marriage Site on the web by About.com, HappyWivesClub.com is the go-to place for women wanting to read about the “sunny side” of marriage and get tips on taking a marriage from good to great and from great to extraordinary.
Friends- this is Kathi – I’m thrilled to have Fawn Weaver NYT best seller and president for the Happy wives club. You all know that I saw fawn at her TEDx talk about the argument free marriage- and I begged her to come here on the blog and share her secrets. You’re going to love her…
Titling an article, “The #1 Secret to Ending Arguments in Marriage” takes a whole lot of guts. Especially, when the person writing it is not a family therapist, marriage counselor, and has no “D” behind her name (PhD, MD, etc.). But I do have something I hope will, at the very least, cause you to want to read to the bottom of this page.
I have an amazing marriage.
I have loved every moment of being married since 2003.
The sound of my husband’s voice still gives me butterflies and the happy dance I began doing the day I fell in love with him continues on to this day.
Here’s the thing. And it’s going to sound crazy, I know.
My husband and I have never argued. Never. And before you begin to think that one of us is a doormat, or sweep things under the rug, let me assure you neither of us is wired that way. We’re both incredibly strong willed individuals with great conviction about what we believe.
There is, however, one thing we have consistently done to communicate better with one another from day one: we stick to the original emotion. In my recently released book, The Argument-Free Marriage, this has -by far- been the number one thing readers have asked me about so I like to share this story.
Several years ago, I came home for lunch in the middle of my work day and did something I’d never done before. I sat on the couch and turned on the television.
I am a believer that all things happen for a reason.
My usual departure from running around the kitchen, stuffing something into my mouth and then heading back to work was –I believe- so I could share this with you.
[Tweet “The #1 Secret to Ending Arguments in #Marriage”]
On my television screen that day sat Rosie O’Donnell on the couch that made Oprah the “queen of talk.” Attempting to make reparations to her image, Rosie talked about the huge fight between her and iconic journalist Barbara Walters, which resulted in O’Donnell leaving the Emmy-award-winning show The View.
Oprah asked, “Do you regret that moment?”
“Yes, I do,” O’Donnell responded. She said she regretted using her words as weapons and how her out-of-control rage “scared” Walters.
What O’Donnell said next confounded even the talk-show host herself: “For me, at that moment, if I had been braver, I would have just cried and said, ‘You really hurt my feelings.’”
Clearly dumbfounded, Oprah clapped her hands as if having one of her famous aha moments and said, “That is so interesting! That you would say, ‘If I had been braver, I would have just cried.’ Because oftentimes crying is perceived as the weak thing to do.”
She then asked O’Donnell why crying would have been braver than yelling and saying hurtful words.
“Because then you’re vulnerable. Then the authentic feeling that I had, [which] was pain and hurt and rejection [would have come out].” Instead, as she told Oprah, she put on the same armor she’d chosen to protect her since she was a child. She shielded her vulnerability, and masked her hurt feelings, with anger.
Consider the last time you were in an argument with your spouse. Hold that thought there for a brief moment, but don’t allow yourself to become angry all over again. Now that you have the thought in your mind, let’s talk about it.
What was the exact thing that set you off? I’m talking about what you felt, not what you discussed. What was your original emotion in that moment? Was it hurt? Fear? Sadness? Disappointment? Insecurity? What portion of your underbelly was exposed?
When we become angry enough to begin arguing, especially with someone we love as much as our spouse, we have allowed the original emotion—which would expose our vulnerability—to be covered up by a more aggressive, defensive response.
[Tweet “When we become angry enough to argue, we cover up our emotions with a more defensive response.”]
Rather than exposing the softer side of ourselves, we put up a shield and pull out our verbal sword and begin swinging. We swing left, we swing right, aimlessly out of control and missing the target every time. Yes, we may slice and dice the heart of our spouse, but we miss the mark because we’ve not dealt with the true emotion we’re feeling.
My husband, Keith, and I talk about everything. And I mean everything. We don’t suppress or repress our feelings and we never say things under our breath. We don’t sweep anything under the rug. If he does something I don’t like, I let him know it. When I do something he’s not very fond of, you better believe he lets me know. From an early age, I’ve always been a bit of a fire piston. And Keith is the strongest man I know.
And yet, we’ve never argued. How is that even possible?
Most of us are taught from an early age that arguing is normal. Getting mad is how couples communicate when upset. We are shown how to guard our true feelings and emotions by protecting our hearts. We learn that it’s better to go on the offensive than to find ourselves exposed. The problem with all this in marriage is that learned behavior leads to blind conversations. You’re never really fighting about what it is you think you are fighting about.
Sticking with the original emotion—remaining in a place of vulnerability—is the crux of bypassing arguments and getting to the heart of a matter. Mutual vulnerability and respect allows you both to lay it all out on the table. Your dreams, hopes, ambitions, fears, hurt … nothing is off-limits.
We can’t keep everything bottled inside. We all need to have that one person we can be completely honest with about our perceived failures, hurts, successes, and hopes. We need to have at least one person who will love and respect us unconditionally. Who better than the one who shares your bed at night to share your deepest desires also?
As Rosie O’Donnell reminded us all through her uncontrolled rage that fateful day in Barbara Walters’ dressing room: there is great wisdom in sticking with the original emotion, if we would just be brave enough to be vulnerable.
Fawn Weaver is a USA Today and New York Times bestselling author, businesswoman, marriage advocate, regular contributor for the Huffington Post and BRIDES.com, a TED Talk alum, and founder of the Happy Wives Club. Her blog of the same name—spontaneously launched while she was simultaneously working as a hotel general manager—has garnered international media recognition and has been featured on media outlets, such as, The Los Angeles Times, New York Daily News, ABC, NBC, BBC, Fox News, SELF Magazine, Huffington Post, ESSENCE Magazine and Popsugar, to name a few. She’s been hosted on more than 35 television and radio programs in Australia, New Zealand, Spain, Canada, UK, Poland and Ireland. Her blog, HappyWivesClub.com, has attracted more than 10 million visitors, is followed by nearly 1 million people on social media and was twice named the Best Marriage site by the readers of About.com.
For a chance to win all three of the books featured this week, leave a comment below!
Hey Friends – this is Kathi! I’m excited that you’re joining us for our 5 Days to a better marriage series. Day 1 is my friend Arlene Pellicane.. You are going to LOVE Arlene as much as I do- she is all about becoming the happiest version of you that you can be. I like that in a person!
Make your marriage great! – kathi
It’s Easy Being Married to You by Arlene Pellicane
A few years ago, James and I did a Daniel fast. He had lost 5 pounds and I had lost a pathetic half pound. As he teased me, I defended myself by declaring, “I’m not doing it to lose weight. I’m doing it as unto God!” Of course to be honest, I was trying to lose weight but it felt good to rationalize.
I began stewing in my mind.
My husband hurt my feelings. He’s such a know-it-all. Everything comes so easy to him.
Things were going downhill fast. I did not think it was easy being married to James at that moment. Keep in mind that we are fasting and here we are arguing! After awhile, we weren’t even sure what we were fighting about. We both concluded that we were under spiritual attack so we prayed together.
James disappeared and I heard the garage door open. I thought he was sneaking out to buy me flowers. But a few minutes later, he came in the room holding our box full of love letters from when we were dating, engaged and newly married. He asked me to pull out three random letters to read together. Hysterically, one of the letters was from our first months of marriage. It was my response to a question he had written, “What do I do that pushes your buttons and irritates you?”
I had written two things:
Leave me alone (don’t try to improve me).
Don’t think because it’s easy for you, it’s easy for me (i.e. last minute entertaining).
It was divinely funny! I was mad that losing five pounds was easy for James, but not for me. You can see how the Holy Spirit led me to pick that exact letter out of more than one hundred notes.
Since you live with your spouse, it’s inevitable that you will butt heads, step on each other’s toes, and rub each other the wrong way. When we make our disappointments larger than life and rehearse them over and over again, we can’t appreciate the good husbands we have. That’s why I’ve found it so helpful to replace the self-talk of “You are so difficult to live with” to “It’s easy being married to you.”
[Tweet “You live with your spouse. It’s inevitable that you will butt heads. #bettermarriage5”]
What are the things you love and appreciate about your husband? You can start a running list of reasons why it’s easy to love him. Here’s the start of mine…it’s easy to love James because:
He’s a man of integrity who keeps his word.
He laughs every day.
He’s a great listener and doesn’t just endure our conversations; he actually enjoys them (or at least always gives me that impression!).
He’s a pro-active father.
I’m just getting warmed up! Now it’s your turn to think about why it’s easy being married to your man. The more positive traits you look for, the more you will find. Leave a comment about one of your husband’s positive traits.
[Tweet “What are the things you love and appreciate about your husband? #bettermarriage5”]
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How’s this for something positive? Arlene’s Ebook, 31 Days to Becoming a Happy Wife is FREE today. It’s available through eBook distributors including, but not limited to, Kindle, Nook, Kobo, and Google Play. Get it now while it’s FREE!
Arlene Pellicane is a speaker and author of 31 Days to Becoming a Happy Mom and 31 Days to a Happy Husband. She is also the co-author of Growing Up Social: Raising Relational Kids in a Screen-Driven World (with Gary Chapman). She has been a featured guest on the Today Show, Fox & Friends, Focus on the Family, FamilyLife Today, The 700 Club, and Turning Point with Dr. David Jeremiah.
Arlene lives in the San Diego area with her husband James and their three children.
To learn more and for free family resources such as a monthly Happy Home podcast, visit www.ArlenePellicane.com
Have you ever found yourself thinking, “I’m struggling. I’m stressed. Being a mom is hard for me?” If so, you are NOT alone.
You hear older women saying, “Hold on to every moment, you will miss this!” But HOW do you enjoy the moments during the day-to-day stuff?
Listen as we talk with Arlene Pellicane author of 31 Days to Becoming a Happy Mom and discuss the difference between Good Mom Guilt and Bad Mom Guilt, important priorities, and what H.A.P.P.Y. stands for in a mom’s life.
Arlene Pellicane loves to encourage women and strengthen families through her writing and speaking. Author of 31 Days to a Happy Husband and 31 Days to a Younger You, she believes that anyone can experience positive life change!
Readers love Arlene’s upbeat personality and authenticity. Arlene has appeared on national television and radio programs such as The 700 Club and Turning Point with Dr. David Jeremiah.
Arlene and her happy husband James live in San Diego with their three children.
