How to maintain a lasting friendship with your spouse, Vol.1

Welcome to my new, how to more effectively manage every aspect of relationships by the numbers blog. Today will be, drumroll please….

The three most important ways to maintain a lasting friendship year in and year out in your marriage. Most blogs on marriage focus on how to maintain the tingle factor in marriage. Gravity defying sex, romance, and date nights. Oh, we’re going to do that, but we’re not going to lead with it.

Friendship is where we start. Friendship is the bricks of the walls that make up your home… toe tingling can be seen as the mortar. Friendship is what keeps us close enough to reach one another when the ceiling falls in. Friendship keeps us connected through the beautiful insanity of child rearing… the gloriously human condition! It’s what gives us the ‘want to’ when a child is diagnosed with cancer, a financial downturn turns to bankruptcy, or a ‘right as rain’ spouse loses their underpinnings and forgets who they really are. I think friedship actually makes the marriage.

So, what are the building blocks of nurturing an incredibly strong marital friendship? Number one isn’t all that tough to nail down, in fact, it might be number 1,2 and 3. It’s mutual respect. Without deep and abiding mutual respect, a marriage is really just two high school kids trying to figure out how to not break up. Let’s tear into what makes up real mutual respect.

I think a really good working definition of mutual respect is “due regard for the feelings, wishes, rights, or traditions of others.“ It’s regarding another’s feelings, wishes, rights, or traditions, as having as much value as your own. It may sound simplistic, but this is the bedrock for processing each other’s different feelings, wishes, rights, traditions, and gender differences. It’s as if two people are saying to one another, “your feelings, your family traditions, your rights, your wishes are important to me as MINE are to me. Instead of promoting yours over the other; you are promoting the others over your own. Now hang on, I can hear the oldest argument known to man that bounces around every counseling office in the land. “But if I do that, what ever it is… Decide to get a fake Christmas tree instead of the live Christmas tree that I’ve had since childhood, start cooking dinner for my spouse and the kids so you can start that sustainable kumquat farm you’ve always dreamed of, or just spend 30 seconds really listening to each other instead of assuming I know what they’re saying.

It’s what I call preemptive change. Not waiting for the other to deserve you being selfless… You do it because it’s the right thing to do and it’s going to lead to a significantly better marriage. That’s what friends do. They treat each other’s feelings, family, traditions, rights, and wishes, as if they were their own.

Now, it’s hard to get any two marriage therapists to agree to any aspect of marriage. One thing they will generally agree to is that mutual respect in marriage is easier for those who have observed mutual respect in their parents relationship. It makes sense. And if you did not observe mutual respect in your parents relationship, you will undoubtedly struggle being able to offer it in your own marriage. But that does not mean it’s impossible. It’s like the one-legged figure skater. It’s definitely harder for them, but not impossible. That’s generally one of the first questions I ask what I do premarital counseling. “Did you consistently observe mutual respect being given and received in your parents’ marriage?’ If after I explain the building blocks of mutual respect to the toe tingling lovers, and I get blank stares… we go to work rebuilding the missing chunks of foundation.

There are a lot of people who believe that it’s impossible to change behavior after 25 years old. I think that’s just an incredibly lazy approach to marriage. Giving and receiving mutual respect feels really good. Once you begin to experience it, you want to offer it as much as you possibly can. But you do need a good marital counselor.

That’s number one, or 123, and I really want to hear what you think about that. Is mutual respect possible? Can it last? Keep your eyes open for the number two most important aspect of sustaining a really vibrant marital friendship.