Friendship in Marriage

This week in my marriage class we read a few chapters from John M. Gottman’s book the Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work. In the first few chapters he talks about the importance of being friends with your spouse and sharing a sense of meaning. These topics really spoke to me. I think that both of them are important when creating unity in your marriage.

Being friends with your spouse is so important, we see it all the time that people started out as friends. This is because you have a basis for your relationship in that friendship. I was friends with my now husband a little over a year before we started dating. My husband and I met on our service missions for The Church of Jesus-Christ of Latter-day Saints. We were both serving in Texas together. We served together at the end of my mission and become really good friends. I came home 14 months before he did, but we actually emailed each other over the 14 months and became really good friends. When he got home, we hung out a few times and then started to go on dates. This helped us to get to know each other well before we started dating! This also helped us have a strong foundation in place before we were together.

Having a strong foundation together is very important. This means that you and your significant other are on the same page, you have a sense of meaning together. In his book Gottman says “In the strongest marriages, husband and wife share a deep sense of meaning. They don’t just “get along”—they also support each other’s hopes and aspirations and build a sense of purpose into their lives together.” I loved this quote from his book because it doesn’t say that you have to have the same hopes and aspirations as your spouse, but you should be supporting each other! I have seen this in my relationship with my husband.

My husband and I have very different interests. Our biggest difference that we have is in our taste of music. Music has always been a big part of both of our lives. I come from a very musical family, and my husband has always used music as a stress reliever. My husband likes country, rock, and heavy metal music. I mostly listen to Broadway Musicals, and occasionally pop music. My husband and I both like to listen to music in the car, and it can be difficult for one of us to give up listening to our music. However, we give up our wants to be able to support the wants of the other. Now this may not seem like the biggest hopes for a person. But when you care about music the way my husband and I do; it is actually a big deal to us. It is important to recognize that you won’t always see eye-to-eye in everything, but that you can still support them!