New Relationship? Here’s some advice.
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We’ve been happily married more than 25 years. Along, the way we’ve collected some pretty good advice, but, this one’s our favorite.
Listen up guys. This is the best piece of advice I can give you. If you are in a new relationship, new marriage, new engagement, new dating relationship, even.
And I want to share it with you so it can spare you some agony. It’s called setting precedent. So when you’re first in a relationship, you need to set precedents with every new experience, every new interaction. Do it the way you want it done the rest of your relationship. If you were married for 75 years, how do you want to wash the dishes together?
How do you want to argue? How do you want to make decisions about money? Do it the first time. Here’s an example. When Michael and I were young, we knew we had friends. That the girl would just dote on the guy. She would cook his meals. She would do his laundry. Everything for him. Then when they got married, she’d stop because who wants to do that their entire lives to be a slave?
And I’d ask girls, if you don’t want to do that the rest of your marriage, why are you doing that now? And they would say, oh, I love him. I just want to pamper him and show him how much I love him. And of course, the guy is like, what happened to the girl I dated? Where is she?
Why is all of a sudden she’s not cooking my meals and not doing my laundry? It’s a funny story. But truly, if you. I know. If you’re. If you’re blue, if you’re a blue personality type, which means you have a heart of gold, you are the emotional connector. You see life as a series of emotions. If you have a memory, it’s attached to emotion.
That’s what one personality testing called a blue. Touchy feely, Shepherd’s heart. Those aren’t bad things. It is a personality type. And that type of person wants to pour out love and affection, right? In those ways. But it’s not sustainable for 75 years. It’s not sustainable for five years. So please, my advice to you is if you don’t want to spend the rest of your life doing that.
Don’t do it from the beginning. Show love, but do it in appropriate measures because it’s not fair to the other person. If all of a sudden you’ve gotten married and no longer has that on the table, the same thing. If the first time that you argue, the first time that you have a disagreement. Disagree in the way that you want to do for the rest of your marriage, because it’s very difficult to break pattern once they’ve become established.
Fight fair. Don’t wound each other in the fighting in the disagreement, because then you have to come back and heal from that. Treat each other with love and respect. The the other benefit to setting precedence while you’re dating is that you can then find out if you both have the same values, because if you don’t have the same values of respect of growing together in the Lord, then it’s very difficult to make that work.
You can overcome a lot of different things, different personality traits. Absolutely. Different worldviews. Absolutely. But if you don’t have the same values and especially the same spiritual goals, spiritual values, that you both love the Lord above everything and you’ll do whatever he says. It’s very difficult to to go that road and to make it a beautiful thing when you are both growing together.
If you’re both, if you’re both of you, your eyes are upon God and you’re both growing towards God, then you’re also growing towards one another. If you’re each have your own, spiritual agenda or your own life agenda, then it’s going to take you in separate directions until before long. You’re incompatible. My husband and I are complete and total opposites, but from the beginning we set precedence.
Every situation that we came to. We did it. The way we wanted it to go. And of course, you have missteps. Of course you don’t know. But you stop and you talk about it and you work it out. Was that exhausting? Yeah. Absolutely exhausting. But did it set us up for success? Absolutely. It set us up for success.
So there is no one better piece of advice I can give you than that? Thank you. Bye bye.