Every relationship requires maintenance, most especially the most important relationship in your life.
Photo by: Vladimir Pustovit
“I’m wondering what it means exactly when you say to ‘work at’ your marriage. This phrase gets tossed around so much, and I don’t even know if I have experience with working at a relationship so I’m quite lost about what it means.”
Cathleen and I had a great time with this question this weekend. We talked about it on Saturday, then had a wonderful evening alone together. I made the video embedded below on Sunday. We watched it together, then had a wonderful evening alone together. The best way of working at your marriage is doing stuff alone together, but talking about how best to work at your marriage can be very rewarding stuff to do alone together just by itself.
We’re coming at this as philosophy, big surprise, but I’ve addressed the practical praxis of working at your marriage at length over the years. Those kinds of ideas are present in everything I do – my marriage is my second highest value, after all – but here are a couple of different ways of thinking about making your marriage stronger:
1. Sex: Making more love more often in your marriage.
2. Devotion: An illustrator’s guide to making your marriage last a lifetime.
I’m not in love with the ‘tips-’n’-tricks’ model of practical advice because it presents too much risk of becoming a cargo cult: If I look like a loving man, my wife will feel loved. But both of those links offer a host of practical illustrations of what a loving marriage looks like when it’s working. The gestures won’t conjure up reality by magic, but the reality will be composed of authentically loving thoughts and deeds.
The sexual revolution has been an unrelenting disaster for all of humanity, but its greatest success can be found here, in the destruction of the second highest value in any adult human being’s life – the committed, life-long matrimony that makes for a full, fulfilled, fulfilling, joyously thriving human life.
This is what each one of us is grailing for – and what too few of us find. Here’s why it matters:
