A Christ Centered Marriage

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In-Laws - Breaking the Ties HEALTHILY

I was fortunate enough to marry into a family where my in-laws are very pleasant and loving people. From the moment my husband and I started dating, I developed a very good relationship with them and really enjoyed being in their company. I began dating my husband in Rexburg and he is originally from Idaho Falls. For those of you who don’t know, Idaho Falls is just a short 25 minute drive from Rexburg. We would go there every Sunday for dinner with his family and, normally, another time during the week to do some kind of activity. I didn’t mind at all and really enjoyed having a family unity there since my family was 500 miles away in Las Vegas. When my husband and I got married, the relationship with them did not change. They were still loving, not overbearing, and gave us our space. The only thing I noticed was the number of times my husband would call his parents for advice or other things once we were married. I completely understood sta

Maintaining Healthy Familial Relationships

Feeling united in this life can seem like a daunting task even for those that appear to others to be in healthy, stable relationships. We have seen the separation that even our own, democratic society has currently and the unhealthy and disappointing divide it has caused since being created. President Eyring could not have explained it better when he stated the following: “All of us have felt something of both union and separation. Sometimes in families and perhaps in other settings we have glimpsed life when one person put the interests of another above his or her own, in love and with sacrifice. And all of us know something of the sadness and loneliness of being separate and alone. We don’t need to be told which we should choose. We know. But we need hope that we can experience unity in this life and qualify to have it forever in the world to come. And we need to know how that great blessing will come so that we can know what we must do.” Having health

Intimacy in Marriage

Growing up, sexual intimacy was always a very taboo topic in my mind. I was given “the talk” by my mother when I was about eight years old, but always thought of being intimate as something that was “gross” and not something that I ever wanted to think about or talk about. As I advanced in age and entered the stage of life where I could date, I remember all of the lessons we would have in Young Women’s about the importance of our virtue and keeping ourselves worthy to enter the temple, and clean from any sexual sin. As I came to understand the importance of keeping myself pure and free of that sin, I started to think of intimacy in a different, more important light. Though I feel as if I did not fully understand the sacredness and true nature of marital intimacy, I began to realize that it was something important enough in the eyes of God to keep the rules on. After I got married, I realized the marital intimacy is so much more than just the

Resolving Conflict

Resolving conflict can seem like a daunting task. Though we talked mostly about resolving conflict between a husband and a wife this week, I feel as if all of the things that we learned this week could also be applied to resolving conflict in a general setting as well like work or school. There have been times in all of our lives where we have been caught in the middle or approached head on by conflict. In some cases, maybe we are the ones that start the conflict. After further researching the four horseman brought to light by John Gottman, it became very clear to me that those four qualities are not just brought up around those whom we are married to, but also to those in our everyday lives like co-workers and classmates. We, as humans, are emotional creatures opposed to logical. We allow ourselves to become overwhelmed with emotion to the point where we do not or cannot think straight nor correctly and effectively map out a logical and se

Pride in Your Marriage

The pride cycle in the Book of Mormon has been a topic that I have greatly enjoyed studying as I have aged and become more familiar with the scriptures. It amazes me how time and time again, group of people in the scriptures, whether it be the Nephites, the Lamanites, or even rulers like King David, can continually make the same mistakes that ultimately lead them to the same, pending doom. As a reader of the Book of Mormon, it is very easy to look at their, for a lack of a better word, stupidity and think, “How can they not see how damaging this is to their ultimate salvation?” With that being said, I have found that it is not quite as easy to look onto my marriage and say the same thing about myself when I know I am being prideful. Upon reading in “Drawing Heaven into Your Marriage” this week, there was a particular paragraph that stood out to me – perhaps because I often relate to it: “God has graciously

Rituals

One of the most inspiring things that we talked about this week, in my opinion, was found in chapter twelve of Gottman’s book when he talked about developing different rituals of connection with one another that have meaning. Since I got married two years ago, I have come to find that even the most tedious and menial of things have become little rituals that we treasure a lot. One of the main “rituals” that we have is getting ready for bed together and going to bed at the same time. Though our schedules conflict at times, it is so nice to know that at the end of the day, we will at least get to wind down together and go to bed together. By doing this, we are always able to say prayers together and keep that goal that we made to each other right when we first got married. I never thought it was a big deal growing up because that was never something that my parents did, but I have come to find that no matter what our schedules are, we will always try to do that to