Love and War - Part 4

It's been a few days since I've continued the "Love and War" series, for a few different reasons. First, I need a mental break. Practically every paragraph or page of the book is chock full of valuable information, and it's hard to wrap my mind around even just 45 minutes of it enough to produce a blog. Also, because I wanted to break to write about some other issues I was thinking about.

However, we are back to Love and War today! Today I finished up chapter 4 and moved on to chapter 5. The main theme was basically "How we can avoid screwing up our marriage by taking care of our personal needs elsewhere," lol.

They said the greatest gift we can give to our spouse is to have a real relationship with God. Through our relationship with Him, we have someone we can always go to for unconditional love, support, comfort, strength, and help. Their message was that this frees up our spouses from having to carry an unnecessary emotional burden - that of being our all in all. No human can ever be your all in all, and it's unfair to expect that of even our spouses.

They also spoke of having activities that you each do apart, either alone or with other friends, as well as the importance of having other friends. They said that no matter what, a wife cannot provide what a guy gets in relationships with other guys, and a husband cannot provide what a woman gets in relationships with other women. This is simply due to the fact that we are wired differently (and if that's news to you, please go read "Men are From Mars, Women are From Venus").

This also goes back to the point of working on our own personal issues. A lot of those personal issues that have nothing to do with our spouse result in us expecting things from our spouse that they either A) cannot provide or B) shouldn't have to be responsible for providing.

All in all, I agree on each of those three points. I agree based on my marriage experience, not just in opinion only. This portion of the book started to make me think that maybe with the right formula and fair and realistic expectations, marriage CAN work and be wonderful.

But, I still haven't been full re-won over to the idea just yet ;) All I have to say is that if any man ever wants to marry me in the future, he's going to have to read this book first! And agree with it! In fact, if he just wants to go get mentored by John Eldredge, that would be ok too :)