Check out the podcast episode “How Your Words Can Build Or Destroy Intimacy”
Your words either build or destroy intimacy. We often times don’t think of that, but it has a huge impact on our marriage and our intimacy.
My daughter came home from a friend’s house one night last week and really wanted to talk. She is pretty young, but the fact that she noticed this and said something, made it really stand out to me. She thanked me first for having a good marriage and being a good example of what a loving marriage looks like. She has just come from a house that the parents yelled a lot at each other and it affected her because she’s not used to it here, and she was just really grateful that we spoke to each other with kindness and with love, even when we are upset.
We know that everyone has different personalities, and some people like to yell in marriage.. in our marriage, yelling is not acceptable, and we have chose to argue and fight in other ways. Is there raising of voices sometimes? Yes of course, but we could be admit that in all of our almost 20 years, we have never yelled at a point that someone was intimidated, scared, or hurt in any way emotionally.
Sometimes it is easy to get mad and raise your voice. That is completely normal, but the way you do it, the time you do it, and how often you do it, really affects all aspects of your marriage. It important to be careful of the things you let come out of your mouth, you can’t ever take your words back. The way that we treat our spouse, our children are watching.
They are really really paying attention and watching our every move as adults, even when we don’t think that they are. I never realized that she was paying such attention to the way we treat each other.
Treat your spouse the way that you want your daughter to be treated in her marriage.
Don’t just treat your spouse with love for the benefit of your children, but also for your spouse’s benefit. Your spouse deserves more love than anyone on this earth. You can never take anything back. I guarantee that there’s things that we say as spouses that we don’t forget or or things that are said to us is that we hold in for a long time.
We need to be really careful how we talk to our spouse, it really does have a big impact on how your emotional physical intimacy together is affected in your marriage.
We get comfortable with the people we live with so sometimes it is easy to lash out at them and show we are angry or stressed. It is healthy to have the kind of relationship that you can vent when you are frustrated or mad, but we need to make sure that we lash out in a respectful way. Sometimes in families, we share and express our feelings in ways that we normally wouldn’t do around other people and it should really be the opposite. Our families and spouses deserve the most respect of anyone.
The power of respect
The way we talk to each other either shows love or lack of love and respect.
Scenario one. I walk in the house to see that the dishes are not done.. again. I say to my husband, “I have done the dishes the last 6 days and you can’t ever see that the dang sink is full. I say to him “why the heck am I the only one in this house that does anything around here? The sink is completely full and you are completely blind! Sheesh!” with a mean tone of voice.
Scenario two. I walk in the house to see that the dishes are not done…again. I say to my husband, “honey, I would really really appreciate it if you could do the dishes today because I did them last night. Do you think that you could do that for me sometime soon?” In a nice respectful manner.
The chances are that your spouse would be more willing to say they will help if you ask them the nice way. The difference is huge and it is all a simple choice to make before you say it. Make the words come out in love, or anger. We realize that sometimes as humans we just get upset and bugged. That’s ok, but if we try just a little harder to talk to our spouse more often in a loving way, the mutual respect and love will deepen and it will become easier and easier to talk kindly more often.
Once that respect with words in established in a marriage, even when you are upset with each other you will be able to communicate with love.
If you take the angry approach, you will stay in a bad mood, you will put your spouse in a bad mood, and most likely lash out about something else and start an argument. When this happens, things will just escalate downward. Then everyone ends up pissed off the rest of the day, until someones decides to give in an apologize which doesn’t usually happen right away. This little phrase that was said can turn the situation into a full blown fight. Sometimes the path of contention affects the kids and the rest of the family too.
Not just the way that we ask things in our marriage, but the tone of voice can sometimes speak louder than the words.
The book, 80/80 marriage that we read was a fantastic book! It talked about so many amazing ways to communicate with love and respect. It was a great resource we recommend.
If you think about how natural and easy it was to be kind, and talk kindly to your spouse when you first met and fell in love, and then how easy it is to kind of slip out of that during the years…we get used to each other and comfortable around each other and it gets easier to get upset at each other. If we approach our relationship the way we did when we first fell in love, it would make a huge difference in our marriage and our communication.
Focus on the positive and not the negative things your spouse does.
I think it’s so easy in marriage to look at all the little things that may bother us or the negative things that our spouse does. Instead we should focus on the positive and how do we look at things? Do we look at the glass half full or half empty? If you’re looking at the negative things, you’re surely going to find them.
I have a great example. We have someone really close to us and you look at their life and you’re like, wow they have pretty much everything going for them that people try to accomplish. Financially they are in fantastic shape, health wise they’re in really good shape. Everything this person has, most people are trying to achieve in their life, they have a great marriage, a wonderful spouse, most people would dream of being in their situation.
But this persons attention is solely focused on that one negative thing they have going on in their life and you can see it affecting every other aspect of their life. It has completely affected their marriage and intimacy greatly…. and sadly.
We all have problems in our life, we all have issues, we all have things that were going through. If we can focus on the positive things that we have, that in itself is just going to completely change our attitude. Try focusing on the positive things that your spouse does, say positive things to them and it doesn’t mean you just forget about all the negative things, but just be mindful of how you talk about and bring up the negative things.
Talk about the negative with love and kindness and deal with them in a respectful way. Solve the negative things so they can leave your life and marriage.
Gratitude. Thank your spouse.
Instead of nit-picking at the little things that bug you about your spouse, tell them thank you once a day for something they did that you did appreciate. If your spouse makes the bed, tell them thank you. If they did the dishes, tell them thank you. Thank them for working so hard that day, or for putting the kids to bed.
Being ungrateful might be one of the worst sins (in our opinion). Ingratitude to our spouse, or to God or whoever. If we can be more grateful for the things that we do have, and the things that our spouses do for us in our marriage, and our life can change our life.
Just changing our perception of how we see things clearly, can change our attitude and the way we look a life in general. Our marriages will be happier. Our spouse will be happier and we will be happier in general.
Understanding is at the heart of a loving relationship.
It’s really important to realize that when we have some kind of disagreement in our marriage that we need to kind of look at where spouses coming from. We need to try to see their point of view and that can really change things instead of it always being all about the other person.
Alot of times we don’t understand how our spouses day has been, or what they’re going through in their life and so its good to talk about what what each other’s going through, how your day has been and just really having that open line of communication.
If you’re in the situation where the wife or the mom is home all day with kids, and the husband’s gone working and he comes home and he stressed and he’s tired, the house is kind of a mess, dinner’s not ready… the husband could come and think, holy crap, what the heck happened here? What have you done all day?
But the mom could have had a really rough day with the kids, maybe someone was sick, maybe there was an emergency, maybe she’s just not feeling good or the kids just were hard that day. Instead of blowing up at her, say: “it looks like you kind of had a rough day, is there something I can
do to help? Should I go pick up dinner somewhere tonight to make it easier?
I mean there’s so many there’s so many easy ways to approach it and just communicate with love.
The way you communicate is going to really have a huge impact on that connection you have as a couple.
Your words either build or destroy your intimacy and when you talk to each other without that love, that the last thing you want to do is usually touch each other or go be intimate with each other. So it really is a big power of how you are treating each other and talking to each other in the tones that you’re using with each other. Makes a huge difference.
The best gift that you can ever give your Children is to give them a good example of a good marriage.
Don’t forget to download the free ultimate intimacy app to bring passion, romance, connection and communication back into your marriage! ultimateintimacy.com
