10 Strategies for Improving Your Marriage in 2010
By Dr. Gloria Morrow
1. Invite God back your marriage to stay in 2010. Make your home a place of prayer, praise, and worship.
2. Celebrate the fact that you survived 2009 as a couple, and give yourselves permission to forgive one another for past mistakes, faults, and failures. While you’re at it, take responsibility for your own faulty thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.
3. Schedule for yourself a mental, physical, and spiritual check-up and be prepared to do the individual work to become healthier. Unhealthy individuals create unhealty marriages.
4. Learn to use love languages to communicate with your spouse. Gary Chapman recommends that couples become acquainted with the five love languages (affirming words, quality time, gifts, acts of service, and physical touch) and determine which are most important for communicating with your spouse.
5. Develop goals and objectives for yourselves individually and as a couple. Couples should always have both a common vision and an individual vision in order to walk in harmony and to be fulfilled as a person. These two visions should never be in opposition with each other.
6. Develop new rules of engagement to enhance your level of communication. Stop majoring in the minors. Remember, you are not each other’s enemy.
7. Give yourselves permission to negotiate the inevitable differences that exist, and agree to disagree.
8. Become spontaneous in the bedroom. But you must first develop intimacy by activating the love languages outlined in #4. Love making begins in the mind, so when you romance the mind, the body will say THANK-YOU.
9. Use humor to enhance your bond. Learn to laugh with one another, and not at each other.
10. In 2010, make the commitment to stop seeking marital advice from your unmarried friends. Seek wise counsel from seasoned and healthy Christian married couples, or seek the help of a trained professional.
HAPPY NEW YEAR!
