Happiness Advice For A Modern Day Marriage

The marriage site recommended going nude in a public hot tub at a resort. I was shocked!

Today I was scrolling the internet looking for other marriage bloggers to see what they write about and how their sites look. I wanted to learn. This blogger showed up in the top ten of 2011 marriage bloggers.

Most of the ten sites recommended didn’t have a whole lot of traditional ideas but were more of: Spice Up Your Marriage. This is the new language that is being used today to sugar-coat going outside the boundaries of a healthy relationship.

I’m still trying to wrap my brain around how going nude in a public hot tub and marriage advice go together? I was thinking she was going to end her post telling the readers of how having images of other men in her head had affected her relationship with her husband negatively. She had categorized her post under ‘Happiness Advice.’

She ended he post with “I’d been liberated from the prison of my self-consciousness, and I was free.”

We could list a hundred of other ways to be happy and liberated from self-consciousness. In this pic below of my sister, Lisa had a crazy hair day with my nieces, and they had gone downtown and walked our main street showing off their creations.

You want to feel liberated, try this…I dare you. I promise you will have self-consciousness in the forefront as you walk down the street looking like a dingbat.

People smiled and laughed at Lisa and the girls, as they knew she was doing it for her nieces. Lisa is the fun aunt kids love to have.

I didn’t have the guts to join in since I was too self-conscious. Helping my nieces do their hair seemed to be more in my niche that day.

Maybe we have redefined marriage as: anything goes as long as it makes me happy. If our ancestors of hundreds of years ago could come back for a day they might be shocked to see what the average marriage looks like today.

With relationships continually crumbling in our modern day, something has gone wrong if our original goal when we said, “I do” was for life. Now more than ever if we want our marriages to survive this liberation we need boundaries that will protect our garden of love from scavengers who want to come and steal from it.

Vance and I have boundaries and goals we aim for each day to keep our marriage healthy. I will share them below in hopes that you might find them helpful too. We are not marriage experts, just two people who learned some lessons along the way.

1. Coffee with the opposite sex is only with a relative.
2. Keeping our home, TV, and phones porn-free is intentional.
3. Chatting with the opposite sex online is avoided.
4. We have each other’s passwords to all our online accounts.
5. We go on dates at least once a week to build our relationship.
6. We have coffee together each morning for 15 min or longer.
7. Speaking highly of each other to other people is crucial.
8. Flirting with our own spouse keeps us feeling cherished by one another.
9. Keeping our eyes on our spouse instead of someone else builds trust.
10. Pray for each other and our marriage is the best advice on this whole list

Our hope is to be on our deck when we are in our eighties rocking in our chairs together. We feel if we do the opposite of these ten goals and boundaries, our chance of survival is scarce.

Vance and I work on these goals and boundaries daily and seek accountability from each other and also from God: who is top notch in the marriage department.

It is tough for a marriage to survive today with social media, pornography and the ongoing sexual revolution to liberate yourself.

We want to encourage you to tend the beautiful garden of marriage daily, and do everything possible to keep it healthy and blooming 💗

And He answered and said to them, “Have you not read that He who made them at the beginning ‘made them male and female,’and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’?  So then, they are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let not man separate.” Matthew 19: 4-6 NIV