Video Transcript: Love Busters Part 4

Well, the rule that I have is carefully worded: never do anything without an enthusiastic agreement between you and your spouse. ou'll notice that there are, there are no issues of morality in there. It's that you have to agree or you don't do anything. This is because you're married. This is because everything you do in life is going to affect each other. And if you can't agree, you have to go back to the drawing table. You have to negotiate some more before you can actually implement a plan that either one of you wants to do. Now, I spend much of my time helping couples understand how they could possibly implement that rule in a marriage where they're both going in terribly different directions, but in that particular question, what if your family is right and your spouse is wrong? I would say you have to frame the question differently. Your family has one opinion, your spouse has another. Whatever it is your family wants, which may be well and good for whatever reason, isn't to the liking of your spouse, and you have to find a solution to the problem that gets your wife's enthusiastic agreement. She's got to agree. So it may very well be that you don't go to your family for Christmas. It may be that you don't go to the church that your family wanted you to go to. It may be that you don't name your child something that your family wanted you to name it. You basically have to make a decision that you and your spouse can agree on, even if your family is the wisest family on earth, having all the answers to every problem that anybody could possibly have, you have to come to an agreement with your spouse. The alternatives to that, where you say, 'just do what I tell you to do, and someday you'll know that I was right, and you'll really appreciate my great wisdom,' will lead you to a loveless marriage. The point is, don't let your family and friends come between you.

Now, the second area of conflict that we can talk about is career choices and time management. They come together. It's in the same basket, and that is, what are you going to do with your time? How are you going to budget your time? And one rule that I have about time is that you have to have 15 hours a week of undivided attention ,where you and your spouse are alone meeting four emotional needs: affection, conversation, sexual fulfillment, recreational companionship. You do those things 15 hours a week, just the two of you. You give each other undivided attention. That's 15 hours. I recommend another 15 hours a week for what I call quality family time. You and your family are together as a unit, 15 hours a week, where you are teaching your children the most important values that there are in life, and you do it by example, and you do it in the activities that you and your spouse have. You have a job. You have other things that you need to do. Families today have to budget their time just like they have to budget their income,  their money. And my feeling about a husband and wife is that they've got to sit down every week and go through the week and look at every hour that's being spent. Do we agree enthusiastically about the way we're spending that hour? So a career choice is going to determine the schedule for the week. The career choice may, in fact, prevent you from having 15 hours a week of undivided attention. It may prevent you from having 15 hours with your family a week. It may prevent you from doing what I consider to be the most important things that you could be doing with your time. Why have a career that's going to ruin your marriage and your family? See? So I'm always saying time management & career choices are a big deal. You need to find a career that meets your time management objectives. What is the most important thing to you? Put them in your schedule. Make sure that important things are in your schedule. Make sure you're in agreement. And the question is, your career may end up having to go. You may need another career in order for you to achieve the things that are most valuable. It's really interesting. As a marriage counselor, I notice that there are certain careers that lead to very bad marriages. What are they? They're careers that separate a husband from a wife, and the longer you're separated, the more likely the marriage ends up with infidelity or divorce. And so the basic idea is that time management is a big, big deal. Every Sunday afternoon, 3:30 in the afternoon. Get your schedules out, plan your week. Make sure that everything that's in that week is something that's been agreed upon with enthusiasm. And make sure that you're spending time alone with each other. Make sure you're spending time with your family, and then everything else supports those two objectives.

Tthis is very important. It seems as though things got quiet,because all of a sudden people are saying, Wow, that's 30 hours. Yep, there's going to have to be some change in my life if I'm going to find this, you know, that type of a thing. But here's the thin: Are you really wanting help? Are you really wanting your marriage to thrive? Do you really want to enjoy? What we're introducing here is not law. What we're introducing here, something very practical that will help you to journey towards the marriage you've always wanted. There are so many things that you've introduced into your marriage and into your lifestyle that have been robbing you from what you've desired most, that's come between you and yourself. 

it's come between. It's preventing you from having the marriage that you want, right?

This is just some real helpful stuff, and it's going to require something from you,

It'd be wonderful if you could just snap your finger and say, I have good intentions. It's going to happen, but I go back to the physical exercise and wanting a new body and a new look, it takes time in the gym. It takes it takes time to change your diet so you get the outcome that you want. We're saying to have the marriage that we know will make you the happiest while here on this earth, it will take the time. I just want to insert, it's not 15 hours in one block of time. You know that, right? We've actually had people say, what, 15 hours in one chunk of time? How can this be? 

It's every week, every week, right? 

Exactly. But again, what we're talking about is the investment. These are the deposits, things that are and it will reap a harvest of righteousness, it will reap a harvest of joy. You see, what we're trying to do is benefit your life. I'm not trying to put rule and regulation over you. What I'm really trying to do is help you, to get back on the right track. You're living with some destructive habits and those are the things that are robbing from you,  just just like eating bad food. The problem is, you're ingesting food that's actually killing or robbing from you, making you sick. You've created, and you've brought into your marriage, habits that are actually destructive and they're hurting. We need to break those and begin to replace them with some habitual, intentional discipline. You know that we're going to begin to create and build the marriage that we want, and then all of a sudden it will become effortless. There will be effortless victory, and you'll live a life at rest in peace. 

A lot of people will tell me that what they want to do is feel better about their spouse. They want to stop hating their spouse. They want to start loving their spouse. They want to know what they can do to change their attitude. And my my point all the time is that it's the way you're living, it's the habits that you have. It's what's going on in your schedule. It is your lifestyle that is affecting the way you feel. If you want to change the way you feel about something, you have to change what you're doing. And a lot of people, they think, I know I don't want to change what I'm doing. I want to continue doing what I'm doing. I want to continue with the lifestyle I have, I want to continue with the friends I have, I want to continue with the job I have. I just want to feel different. I tell them, that's not the way it works. Psychologists know that you're not going to feel different by doing the same thing. You're going to feel different by changing your behavior, changing your spouse's behavior, you're going to have to start depositing love units instead of withdrawing them.

Now the next area of conflict a lot of people have is not just time management, but financial management, financial spending. How do you make your decisions regarding your finances?  Policy adjoint agreement, never spend any money unless you're in enthusiastic agreement about it. That means you're going to have to budget. You're going to have to sit down with each other, you're going to have to figure out what you can afford. Here's my income, here's my expenses, and you're going to have to agree on every item, and you're going to have to honor those agreements, you're going to have to stick to the budget that you have. Now, in a lot of marriages, a person will say, Well, I'll let my spouse take care of the finances. My attitude about that is that it's a risky thing to do Don't turn the blind eye. It's a risky thing, because your spouse needs your opinion about the issues. Otherwise, your spouse will get all the things he or she wants, and you may get what you want. You'll start sneaking things, you'll start writing checks, you'll start spending money your spouse doesn't know about. You need to get into a routine where everything you buy, every investment you make, every time you deposit money, every time you withdraw money, every time that it's a joint agreement that you have in all of your financial decisions, your checkbook needs to be an open one. It needs to be open to your spouse. Your spouse needs to know about all your investments, you need to be able to make sure that your spouse is on board with everything you buy. 

Yeah, the fourth area, let me just step in here, okay, if you find yourself in debt, all right, not having enough, if you're not making it in this area, really get some help, right? If you really are finding yourself in a deficit, get somebody to help mediate this for you. I have seen great success in that way. I have some great financial planners and people that are really good with money. Let them help you. Let them teach you. You know those kinds of things, because you can get out of debt. You don't have to live this cycle or this tension and help them begin to paint a picture of hope for you because the two of you, you might be seeing a stack of bills and all you see is impossibilities. Get somebody else to give you a fresh point of view and say, You know what? It's not impossible, okay, it will really, really help,

And as well, during the economic seasons that we're in right now, things are tight. We come together, we need to tighten our belt on a few things. Make sure you're tightening both belts. It's not just restraining the one, it's the mutual, enthusiastic agreement on this and we're going to do this together.

And joint agreement is less likely to get you into debt. Now it is true that a husband and wife can both agree to go broke, but the point is that joint agreement is usually going to be a little more conservative than what either one of you would have done. And let me point out something else, that if you have joint agreement and you go broke, you're not gonna be withdrawing any love units, you're united, with nobody to blame but yourself. That's the way it goes sometimes, but you see, if one of you makes a unilateral decision, and you go broke, then the finger pointing comes out and the blame comes in.

The next is children discipline. How do you discipline your children? What are you going to teach them how to do? How are you going to train your kids? That should not be done unilaterally. One of you should not decide the punishment for your child. One of you should not decide the rewards for your child. You should make those decisions together and separate from the children. One of the biggest areas of conflict in marriage is that one spouse decides that he or she is going to is going to discipline a child for something that he or she thought was was wrong. The other spouse doesn't agree, but doesn't know what to do if you intervene. Then you're picking sides in front of the child, which greatly weakens the position that you have. If you go along with it, you feel that you're hurting your own child on something that you think your spouse is wrong about. So as far as any discipline you do for your children, all of your child rearing goals, all of the things that you feel are important for the children should be decided apart from the children, separate from the children, and with enthusiasm before you do it. So don't do anything. Let your kids run wild until you have enthusiastic agreement.

This was not written by a child, because if you try to get your children to do something where you're not in agreement, children are smart enough to divide and conquer. They smell that a mile away, and they will get stronger and stronger as you and your marriage gets weaker and weaker.

It's interesting. You come into a marriage, and then you have children, and then then you think about how you're going to discipline them, not realizing or discussing how were you raised. What was the discipline in your household, and is it like how I was raised and the discipline in my household, or is it totally different? Bill and I came from rather different backgrounds, and so we had to discuss and decide what was going to be the course of action regarding discipline, and together, we came up with a good solution. We have two beautiful grown children.

I'm very liberal in my in my views. Joyce is very conservative. But between the two of us, we were able to come up with something that was fair, and the kids knews it. And the kids turned out great,. And I think that that there are a lot of different styles of rear of raising children, using different styles than we did. Each pairing will make for a different formula down the road. 

A different style works for different kids too. When two parents can come to an agreement about how to raise their children generally, that is the wisest decision for that particular child. My feeling is that psychologically, you're more powerful. If you can both agree enthusiastically, you're probably smarter. If you can agree enthusiastically, your kids will end up benefiting. If you do it unilaterally, separately, not only are your kids going to suffer as a result, but your marriage will suffer. It is what I call a Love Buster, because you're making an independent decision without the agreement of your spouse, which is going to withdraw love units.

This is very, very important. One thing that Audrey and I have enjoyed more than anything in our marriage together is our children. Our children have never been a pain. Our children have never been a problem. Why? Because we've never seen them that way. They're a joy and they're a gift. You view your children as a pain and a problem, they will be, let them be a gift to you in your home. Okay, we need to go to our fifth and final one.

IIt is sex. The question is, do you and your spouse enthusiastically agree about the way you have sex together? It is the fifth of the important conflicts that couples have in marriage, and if you don't get that one resolved, there's going to be a lot of pain and suffering in your marriage. Sex is an important emotional need. It has to be met in marriage. If either spouse says that they are unfulfilled, as far as I'm concerned, it should be a problem on the front burner. It should be something you discuss regularly. As we said earlier, you should not make demands. You should not say anything disrespectful. You shouldn't get angry. That will make it less likely. What are your alternatives to put on the front burner? We need to discuss this. We need to come to an enthusiastic agreement. We need to negotiate about this until we do come to an enthusiastic agreement. And when you have an enthusiastic agreement about sex, not only is the problem solved now for life and you have a great sexual relationship, but instead of withdrawing love units, you're depositing them. There you go in massive quantities.

It is this area of sex, and we live in a different time where sex is just smeared. It's for young people. It becomes a form of recreation. You know, those types of things. We bring those into our marriages, and it is the most intimate, most beautiful, most fulfilling, the most safe time that couples need to have with one another. And if you're not, feeling that, then, let's, talk about it, let's get some help. Audrey and I,  most people know our story and infidelity entered into our marriage, and man, did it cause problems,  to say the least. And do you think we had issues with sex? You bet. But guess what happened now and as a result of this, guess what? We talk about it. Never talked about it for 17 years. I don't want a crisis to enter into your life before you start talking about it. You don't need that kind of a bomb to blow things up; to be able to begin to realize and you know you really do. And it's even better when you know, as Dr Bill says Be enthusiastic about it. Scripture says to be able to be naked and unashamed. A lot of couples carry a lot of shame, and they want to hide themselves and to be open and vulnerable and transparent and honest and intimate. You know, in these areas is very, very difficult for many times. Well, just start.Introduce it. I think you have set some extremely important guidelines and guardrails of safety and protection. It's nothing that we require, it's nothing that we demand, it's nothing that we insist on, it's not. Would we prefer the other? We're going to talk about this, all of these areas, not because I'm right and I want to correct you so that you agree with me, but we're going to come together. We're going to mutually agree and create some enthusiasm to put the sizzle back into our marriage so that we might enjoy the life that we've always wanted. You guys got me all cranked up here. I am just reiterating everything they said. But it is so good. Thank you so very, very much. Again. I appreciate it. Okay, we need to go and don't go anywhere. We got a few more minutes left, but the book is love busters. We all have them, and we're all discovering them, and we're going to diminish them, we're going to diffuse them. We're going to remove their power in our marriage. We're going to begin to deposit love in one another and begin to experience the marriage that we've always wanted. This is available from us here at New Day ministries. I encourage you. Would you please get a copy for yourselves? Read it through, wrestle through. Begin the conversations that are so vital and important, we'll be back to close the program right after this. You.