Ingredients for Strengthening Marriage: Part 1

To strengthen marriages, the ingredients for spicing and keeping the unions strong are many and varied. However, I chose to reflect on six – Communication, Commitment, Forgiveness, Intimate relationship, Respect, Trust, Conflict resolution, Sex, and Love. No human being lives without communication. Even the dumb communicate. Animals and other living things also communicate. Even plants communicate. Therefore, the one powerful ingredient that oils and strengthens the marriage bond is communication. The couple that forms the habit of sharing thoughts from the important to the mundane, become one and live inseparably as brother and sister. It helps to increase understanding, build trust, intimate relationship, respect and pave the way for the other ingredients. Each of the ingredients sound independent, yet they are connected to each and one another.

All the ingredients are important but communication is the building block for all. A couple that plays down or sidesteps communication is opening the door to mistrust, disrespect, strained relationship, cold shoulder to love, loss of interest and denial of sex and a host of other challenges.

Conflicts and Resolution

Conflict is an inevitable fact of life. It is borne out of differences and will arise in any situation where people are required to interact with one another as in a home. When a husband and wife strongly disagree on how to handle a particular situation, a conflict can be said to have arisen.

 Conflict is generally regarded as an impediment to progress. However, it is not always a bad thing and can be a creative force if managed effectively. Conflict can assist in making changes but if it is not resolved, conflict can lead to unhappiness, dissatisfaction, depression, stress and hopelessness. These feelings can manifest themselves in behaviour such as aggression, violence, emotional withdrawal, breakdown in communications and personal relations.  

Conflict has been in human relationship from the beginning. Eve put Adam in trouble by listening to the serpent to disobey God. They lost the peace and serenity of the Garden of Eden and with it, human suffering began. Conflict in marriage should not be considered strange. After all, a man and the wife are from different families. They were raised with different orientations, so susceptibilities are bound to clash as they begin to live together. When conflict or disagreements arise, they can easily be thrashed out and overcome. Conflicts may arise from finance, sex, children, relations of the man or wife or both, lack or loss of respect, suspicion of infidelity and sundry reasons. Conflict is not the major challenge. The bigger challenge is how you both handle the conflict. You resolve conflict by discussing the issue at stake. You don’t keep praying ceaselessly and keep going to sleep before the Blessed Sacrament praying for your domestic problem to be resolved. No. Pray and work on resolving the conflicts. Pray for the grace to let down your pride and talk it over with each other.

Other causes of conflict in marriages include the following:

1. Lack of a spiritual outlook on life. There is this popular chorus we’re all familiar with – “with Jesus in the family, happy, happy, home; happy, happy, home 3x….” When the central position of God in the family is given to another thing, even little things can bring about conflict.
2. Interference by the family of husband or wife, more often the wife's relatives or friends, who can't let their daughter or friend lead her own life.
3. Jealousy or lack of trust on either side.
4. Persistent selfishness and lack of sympathy on the part of one partner.
5. Repeated lies and deception, whether about some outside illicit affection, or financial or family matters.

These and others, are causes of conflict.  Most of these situations would not arise if from the very first day husband and wife worked together to make a successful marriage. Such a marriage, free, wholesome, unselfish to others, yet intimate and devoted within the family, tolerant, enduring, is the result of patience, ingenuity, tact, faith and perseverance.

But the difficulty is that two people are involved and sometimes they are sadly unequal in strength of character, in ideals, in self-control. Only too often one is trying desperately hard, and the other is not trying at all; one is giving to the utmost and the other complacently receiving. Well, even in that sad situation, one party at least can be gloriously faithful. Remember, it was "for better, for worse." The result for that faithful partner, who sticks through thick and thin, will be a Christian character and the friendship of God. Is that too meagre an exchange for the married happiness he or she once sought?

Couples should learn to discuss and resolve their conflict without rushing to bring in third parties, even if they are your relatives. You may have come from the same family with those third parties but their individual experiences of life differ and may not help your case. My wife and I will mark the 43^rd anniversary of our marriage this year. To me, she is the greatest woman ever created by God for my sake. To date, I can tell you all before God, that we have never quarreled nor raised our voices at each other. I don’t know why it has been that way. However, I remember very clearly that from the beginning of our union, we made I Cor. 13 our marriage gospel. If that is the reason that God has come to our aid, I don’t know. Until our marriage witnesses/sponsors passed to glory over time, we never had reason to bother them with any conflict because we didn’t have. We also had no reason to disturb our priests with any domestic problem. I am human and imperfect and so is my wife. I don’t expect her to be perfect and she does not expect the same of me. I look into her face always for any message bothering on unhappiness. I don’t waste time to ask her if there’s any problem. She tells me if there is and what it was and we discuss and put it behind us. When we marked the silver jubilee of our marriage, our senior children told everybody present that since childhood, they’d never heard their parents exchanged harsh words. We’ve never had reason to quarrel.

Husband, find a mother in your wife to open up to her; and wife, find a father in your husband to open up to him. That is how you treat issues and reduce conflicts to the barest minimum. If the complaint is that of lack of respect; was it that way from the start of the marriage? If not, at what point did it rare its ugly head and what gave rise to it? Search your conscience. Suspicion of infidelity? What happened to give room for the suspicion? What was the response to the complaint at the initial stage? The challenge of the suspicion of infidelity is exacerbated by what I choose to call the social media revolution and rascality. Women suspect that their husbands are keeping secret relationships by not letting them read their WhatsApp messages. Men feel the same way when women get calls and leave the presence of their husbands to go and answer such calls and password their phones so that their husbands cannot read their chats. The question is; what satisfaction do you derive from wanting to search your husband’s or wife’s phone for any possible infraction on fidelity? If you suspect such, then search your conscience to know if your lifestyle and outlook which attracted you to each other has waned.

If the conflict is denial of sex; what gave rise to it? There are different causes of the problem in different homes. By the way, you are not supposed to deny each other sex unless on the ground of ill-health, (which both husband and wife should know because you live together). Another reason is agreement for temporary abstinence for proper spacing of children. The mistake many people make is that they use the example of a conflict in one family as a criterion for the same problem in another. That is not right and conflicts cannot be resolved that way. There was a time I had the privilege of attending a meeting of one of the women groups in the Catholic Church somewhere. After collecting the usual dues and reading minutes of previous meeting, the rest of the meeting featured the reported problems being allegedly caused by men. Men this, men that, to the extent that some of the executives said and I quote: “Don’t allow your husband or any man to cheat you. If they give you, give them back so that the world will hear you. People will always support us women”. At a time, I asked for permission to talk. I asked them one question like this: “You are all excited discussing and roasting the husbands of the three women who brought complaints against their husbands. Have you found out from those women their part in the conflict and the efforts they made towards resolving them”? They all kept quiet including the women who reported their husbands to the meeting without first making effort to resolve the problems. To save face, the Chairperson who criticized men most, said “Brother, it seems you are here to defend men. You know that men do all the things we are saying?” That was not an answer. In any case, I took some time to analyze the complaints before them and the fact that every issue takes two to be one.