5 Daily Defenses to Guard Your Marriage

-Date Your Mate-

-Prioritize Your Partner-

-Grant More Grace-

-Cultivate Your Character-

-Listen With Love-

As men we understand the language of provision and protection. We don’t have to be told how, or why, it’s in our blood. However, there are some areas where we tend to let down our guard, and we need to rebuild the defenses quickly. If your marriage is in a rut, or you feel like you’re on the hamster wheel spinning ’round and ’round, then these 5 daily practices will help propel your marriage forward…

1. Date your mate

Far too often, once we’re married, we put our relationship on cruise control. We say I do, and before too long, we don’t. We’re busy. We’re starting careers and a family. Many couples find themselves more like roommates than loving partners. She knows I love her. I married her, didn’t I? Why do we need to date?

Affection is like a flame. If we don’t tend to it, over time, it can dwindle and eventually extinguish. As you grow older and as life changes, you both change. Make sure you still know who you are married to. Make a habit of dating your wife. Dating your spouse is a way to intentionally fan the flames of affection.

Extravagance or decadence is not the aim. Make plans for the big getaways or expensive dates when it is feasible to do so, but those should be few and far between. Loud concerts, movie theaters, or high attendance parties are not ideal for intimate connections. Instead, focus on the simple and affectionate quality time. The memory making moments you can do right now. Regularly plan time together doing things you both love. Make sure the atmosphere lends itself to conversation and intimacy. Take a walk in the park, around your neighborhood, or on the beach. Sit and sip coffee while bird watching. Enjoy your spouse’s favorite hobby with her. Have a lazy Saturday breakfast in bed. Order a pizza and set out a picnic blanket in the backyard to watch the sunset together. You can even order date night boxes online! A well planned night, or a spontaneous adventure. It doesn’t have to be impressive – just intentional.

2. Prioritize your partner

Your kids are important. Your job is necessary. But remember, your relationship with your wife came before your children and it will last long after they move out of your house, and years into retirement. Many people are vying for our time, and the best of intentions to provide for our family or spend quality time with our kids could result in the unintentional consequence of disregarding our spouse. Often what happens is that work, kids, and friends get our best energy, and our spouses tend to get what’s left.

One of the best gifts you can give your children is the example you set by prioritizing their mother

The truth is you don’t “fall out of love” or “drift apart” from your wife. You develop rhythms that shape your affections. Affection is just the perceived energy that we put into the people (or things) we care about. If your daily rhythms are all focused on your kids, or your work, you may find that so too are your affections. Jesus spoke of our affections toward what we value in Matthew 6:11– “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” Time and energy are valuable resources, like money, that if left unchecked will be spent wastefully on the wrong things. You prioritize your checkbook and keep a positive balance by depositing more resources to cover the bills. Deposit more time and energy in your wife. Once you’ve put in the proper time with your children and paid your dues as dad, you should prioritize your partner and make sure her love account is still positive and not overdrawn. Communication and connection daily is key. Commit yourself to prioritize her above everyone and everything else (aside from God) and make it a second nature response. How?

Know your wife’s “love language” (Check out the book ” The 5 Love Languages” by Gary Chapman). Be a student of your wife, and recognize her various body language cues, feelings, styles of communication, and preferred ways of connection. Develop intentional rhythms of connection with your wife. This might be as simple as checking in each night as you drift to sleep, drinking a cup of coffee together, or taking the occasional walk together. Take on more of the household chores or leave affectionate notes for her to find. Where dating should be intentional and frequent, this should be a daily response emphasizing your wife’s love language. My wife feels loved through acts of service and words of affirmation. So cooking dinner, cleaning the kitchen, and leaving affectionate notes while brewing a fresh pot of coffee for her to wake up to when I leave for work, goes a long way in filling her love account.

Live out the husbands role in honoring the woman in 1 Peter 3:7. One of the best gifts you can give your children is the example you set by prioritizing their mother and loving her through intentional acts of service, kind words of value-giving affirmation, personalized gifts, physical displays of affection, and quality alone time.
(If you are divorced and re-married, you should still honor their mother as best you can with dignity and grace, and prioritize your wife so that your children see the most important women in their lives being honored and loved)

3. Grant more Grace

Remember that time she did that thing that made you so angry? We tend to hang on to those things, even when we’ve said we’ve moved on. After all, I was right and my facts doesn’t care about your feelings. However, choosing to hold on to ways our wives have hurt us builds resentment and, as Nelson Mandela once said, “Resentment is like drinking poison and then hoping it will kill your enemies.”

An old idiom says that mercy is God not giving us what we deserve, and grace is God granting us what we don’t deserve. When we forgive others, we are acting in line with God’s character. We grant grace to someone who may not deserve our forgiveness. If you have to wait until you feel like forgiving, then you haven’t truly granted grace to someone; you’ve only fed your own pride by trying to seem like a forgiving person. Forgiveness is not based on feelings. It’s a choice you make so you can move a relationship forward. Think about it like this. Un-forgiveness is a rope that ties you to that past hurt. You can’t move forward until you let go of the past hurt. Forgiveness is you choosing to drop the rope. You may have a right to feel hurt, but you have to decide whether or not you want to hang on to that pain, and let it hold you back, or drop the rope and move toward the hope in front of you.

We grant grace to someone who may not deserve our forgiveness…Forgiveness is not based on feelings.

As a husband and father, I believe the initial step in any reconciliation rests on me. Big or small, the offense doesn’t matter. I have been given the privilege of caring for my wife and children. If they are to flourish and grow, it’s my job as a “husbandman” to tend the garden and remove the weeds. That means granting grace when my pride says no way. That means apologizing first in order to open the lines of communication. Always. Your spouse knows how to push your buttons better than anyone. In a marriage, the hurts are usually to our pride or a devalued sense of self-worth and are typically more emotional and mental struggles than physical ones. You say something as a matter of fact, but don’t realize your tone in the moment. All she hears is you talking down to her like a child and begins to attack your character with insults. Zero to sixty in 2 seconds; a problem has just exploded between you, and she storms away upset.

Forgiveness can begin at the point that you decide to apologize. If you reach the place to say “I will be the first to apologize for my wrong actions or carelessness,” then you have already begun to extend grace to your spouse by understanding how she may have been hurt. Men, you are responsible for the well-being of your family. Any time there is a problem that arises between my wife and I, my assumption is that somewhere along the way I did or said something wrong. In order to move forward, I grant her grace by understanding her perception of things and attempt to reconcile by apologizing (with specific offenses) before resentment has time to build. She forgives me and in turn apologizes for her part in the issue at hand. By that time, the rope has been dropped and we are moving forward together. If you want your marriage to be healthy, you need to extend grace and practice forgiveness.

4. Cultivate your Character

Think about the moments you aren’t your best self. Usually, it’s when you’re tired, hungry, sick, anxious, or angry. How you are doing personally has a direct impact on how you’re doing relationally, yet many of us are really bad at self-care and cultivating growth in ourselves. However, you can’t have a healthy marriage if you aren’t healthy. Your marriage won’t mature if you aren’t maturing.

Earlier I emphasized prioritizing your wife and making sure that your time and energy are being deposited into her love account. You also need to make a few deposits in your personal account. While hers is more like a checking account that you need to make regular deposits in and stay aware of the balance, yours is more like a savings account with a good interest rate. A little investment in yourself will go a long way in multiplying the growth in the things around you; it will extend to your wife’s personal growth, your marriage, your job, your children, and others you come in contact with.

Men, you are responsible for the well-being of your family.

You make time for what’s important. Your maturity and health in the emotional, spiritual, mental, and physical realms are vitally important; these are the four pillars that keep things from crashing around you. Jesus referred to those pillars in Mark 12 verse 30 when He said “And you must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, and all your strength.” Whether it’s physical exercise, reading personal growth books, praying, meditating, fasting, improving your skills, taking up a new hobby, confiding in a close friend, seeking counseling or a mentor, being free from an addiction, etc… investing in your personal growth is an investment in your marriage.

5. Listen with Love

The inattentive husband is so commonplace it’s a stereotype. The sad truth is, often our wives are telling us what we need to know about the state of our relationships. We’re just too distracted or disinterested to listen. An unwillingness to listen intently teaches your wife that you don’t value her or her thoughts and opinions. This devaluation eventually leads to a breakdown in connection and a loss of intimacy.

To answer before listening- that is foolish and shameful.

Proverbs 18:13

Listening is hard but good work. We need to learn the habit of active listening: putting down the phone, looking her in the eyes, repeating back what she says, and expressing real concern for her concerns. Engage in conversation with her and encourage her with words of affirmation but let her guide the conversation and do most of the talking. As a man, your initial reaction will likely be to hear a problem and offer a solution to fix the problem. That’s usually the wrong reaction. The deeper a relationship is for a woman the more she wants to confide and affirm her beliefs (or so my wife tells me) with the person she is in a relationship with, whether a best friend or husband. She doesn’t need you to fix anything (she’ll let you know when she does) and she doesn’t need you to agree with everything she says. She just needs to know you’re in her corner, and that you welcome her getting some things off her chest. Don’t focus on taking care of the problem, just focus on taking care of her. Listening feels like love. So, listen well!

They follow your example…

How well will they guard their marriage?