Pothole Marriage or Paving Marriage: It’s Your Choice

There are no perfect couples. Every marriage has bumps and bruises.

Maybe you and your spouse are mature enough to ease thru the potholes. You change tones, think it, but don’t say it, or just drop the whole conversation. You’re easing thru it.

You both realize that speeding thru them leads to more damage — bent feelings, alignment problems, new issues, and so on. So you don’t scream or yell. No cursing or belittling because this will make it worse. You choose the easier road. Let’s go slow and ease thru it. You just move on.

Seems mature, you’ve learned how to navigate difficult waters, made it thru it. A “hurray moment”, right??? The band is playing, the crowd is cheering. Y’all got this, look at y’all. The devil keeps throwing problems, you keep easing thru!!! Gone with ya bad self!!!

But this is not healing, neither is it effective. Because looking back at the road you’ve created together, it’s filled with potholes. It’s a really, really, bad road. A non-ending cycle of potholes that you’ve learned how to ease thru.

What makes it’s worse, this road is private. Not accessible to the public. Public sees your social media pictures, wedding anniversary photos, they see your smiles and hugs because this all you show them. Got to be strong for everybody else right? “Oh the needless pains we bear.”

Marriage Is A Give And Give Relationship. Life, so the saying goes, is all about give and take, where we get along by trying to balance our giving and taking.
All relationships, it seems, have this element of striving for balance. Unfortunately, in many cases we give a lot when the other doesn’t give enough.

The hard places in marriages don’t need easing thru, it needs paving!

We’re not good at paving, we’re good at easing thru! Paving requires humbling and honestly, we’re not as humble as we think we are. Paving requires reflection – but we deflect instead of reflect.

And whatever reflection may occur, it is upon the spouse, not the mirror. Paving requires apologizing – apologizing for what, your spouse is the one wrong.

Paving requires listening – You’ve been talking, the spouse never listen. Meanwhile the spouse is like, “No, you’ve actually been ‘talking at’ not ‘talking to’.

Paving requires you seeing the problem from your  spouse’s perspective. Then it requires seeing the problem from God’s perspective. There’s no bias there. No emotional attachments, no bargaining, no partiality. Just Him impressing upon your heart, “This is how you pave!”

On your anniversary every year, the Good Lord willing – when you both look back at the road you created together, will it be a paved road, filled healing, and growth, or just another year where you’ve learned how to ease thru?