A Christ Centered 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 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

          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

         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

          In Chapter 4 of Gottman’s book that we read this week, I really found the story of Rory and Lisa’s relationship to be incredibly interesting. At first, I read some of the things that were going on within that relationship and I was appalled! How could Rory be so consumed with work that he does not even know the name of the family dog?! As I continued reading, I realized that part of the reason why I didn’t like the things I was reading as much as I did was because I have seen how sad this very behavior is in real life.           In the home of my aunt and uncle, common knowledge of the home and what is inside, the lives of my cousins, and the emotional state of my aunt is something that is completely foreign to my uncle. Growing up, my sister and I were very close with one of these cousins and would spend and great deal of time over at their house. In talking to my cousin, probably 16 at the time, she told us that she has never seen her parents kiss in her enti

          Perhaps the most important thing that I heard from this week’s content was Elder Wirthlin say that sometimes the greatest acts of love are not like the things that poets and writers talk about, but rather the small, loving acts of kindness throughout the day that make the biggest and most profound difference in a marriage. It was interesting to take this thought and carry it into watching the “Fireproof” clips. It was the small glares, eye rolls, and snarky comments that really caused and escalated problems and fights in their relationship. If there was an issue, “sprinkling” it with these small, but negative acts made it 10 times worse. Seeing just how much these small negative acts affected their marriage, wouldn’t it be interesting to see how doing frequent, small, kind acts affects a marriage as well. If doing these small, mean things can almost bring marriages to the ground, doesn’t the opposite surely have the capability to build it up to be the strongest

          Elder Bednar’s talk, Marriage is Essential to His Eternal Plan” has always been a favorite talk of mine because of the truthfulness of its contents. Perhaps the thing that stood out to me the very most in this talk was when he talked about just how important it was for us to be married. When I reached the age where I started thinking about marriage, I found that I put a lot of my focus on the excitement behind marriage like the wedding, the dress, the engagement, etc. Though I felt this way for a long time even into the later stages of my husband’s and my dating experience, I found that I still had those petty things as my primary focus most of the time. It was about a month before my wedding that I went through the temple with my husband to receive my endowments that I really looked at marriage in a much different light than I had before. For that month, in particular, leading up to our marriage, I found myself thinking much more about the temple, the blessing

          “The greatest guardians of any and all virtues are marriage and family. This is particularly the case with the virtues of chastity and fidelity in marriage, both of which are required to create enduring and fully rewarding marriage partnerships and family relationships.” This was probably my most favorite phrase out of Elder Nelson’s address that we read this week. We talked a lot about divorce last week, and I can see how closely that ties in with this phrase as well. He mentions “chastity” and “fidelity” in this talk and, in my mind, I always just used to think of both of those things as a simple way to say, “not cheating on your spouse sexually, physically, etc.” I wanted to see what exactly Elder Nelson meant by this, so I looked up the word “fidelity” online and according to the dictionary, “fidelity” is: “Faithfulness to a person, cause, or belief, demonstrated by continuing loyalty and support.”