Part 1
You successfully married again! Love is in the air! Now is not the time to sit back and allow autopilot to take control, now is the time to stay alert and stay focused on your plan to have a better marriage than before. You have kids who need you. They need you to be there for them, but they also need to see an example of how a good marriage should look. This is your opportunity to not only have a fulfilling marriage and relationship for yourself but to teach your kids through example.
Key Foundation #1: Communication
In every type of relationship, communication is a requirement. We communicate verbally: through our words and our tone, speaking to one another and through emails, notes, and texts. We also communicate non-verbally: in our body language, our facial expressions, and our touch. What and how we communicate can have an immense impact on the people in our lives. In a marriage, communication is important not only between you and your spouse but also with your kids and/or step kids.
In a marriage, it is easy to slip into transactional conversations about the car needing to go into the shop, the bill that still needs to be paid, what is for dinner, and the upcoming school play. If you are not intentional about your communication with your spouse, you will end up with a business partnership instead of an intimate relationship.
It is important to make the space to have conversations where you share your feelings, your emotions, your fears, your hopes, and your dreams. This should be continuing to build upon the conversations that brought you together in the first place. When we share our deep thoughts, we are vulnerable, but that vulnerability opens us up to love and acceptance. It presents an opportunity for our spouse to speak life into us and encouragement and support. It creates a space of intimacy. The word intimacy comes from Latin meaning innermost and deeply. To create intimacy, you have to reveal your innermost self, even when it is messy and imperfect. Perhaps especially when it is messy and imperfect. This also means that when your spouse opens up to you in this way, your reaction will set the tone for the level of emotional safety you each have in your marriage. You are presented with a choice as well: the choice of whether you will speak life and encouragement into them or not. We hope you chose to speak life.
In a second marriage, trusting your spouse to react in a healthy and healing way can be difficult. Perhaps you were shamed or spurned by your first spouse when you were vulnerable. Perhaps you yourself learned some detrimental strategies when faced with your spouse’s vulnerability. Women may feel the need to be everything in their jobs and families, and afraid to share that they are struggling to meet that unrealistic goal. Men often struggle with revealing their vulnerabilities by internalizing cultural expectations, and women often reinforce that by shaming men by being dismissive of their spouse’s expression of vulnerability. We hope that your goal in this new relationship is to unlearn any bad habits and replace them with life-giving, loving, healthy choices. It may require some effort to retrain your responses, but if you intend to know and be known in a deep way, it is necessary.
We are confident that every person is capable of this change. It might be something you need help with, but you have the ability to change how you respond to those you love.
This can be even more complicated by the models of communication we grew up with. For many of us, we were not raised with a good example of healthy communication. Even if our parents had an overall successful and healthy marriage, they may have had some areas of communication that were not healthy. So, what does healthy communication look like? How do we know if we are on the right path or not, or when we need to adapt and change? Healthy relationships are based on respect. (This is something both spouses need, just as both need love) Respect comes in many forms, such as trust, accountability, safety, honesty, support, and cooperation.
Aside from sharing those deep feelings, another part of healthy communication is sharing your needs and desires. These needs can be as simple as wanting your spouse to do the dishes to more complex needs like seeking more sexual connection. Your spouse cannot read your mind, and as much as we wish they would just know what we want, they don’t. Their perspective is different from yours, their experiences are different from yours, and their own expectations may be different as well. Additionally, they may be operating from a place of fear-based on experiences in previous relationships.
Healthy communication is expressing your desires and needs without using ultimatums or threats to get what you need. We should avoid “always” and “never” statements when expressing our needs. Statements like those tend to put the other person on the defensive, thinking That’s not true! And it blocks them from hearing the heart behind the request. To be healthy, we should evaluate what we are requesting from our spouse to make sure it is fair and reasonable and potentially making compromises where necessary in what we are asking. We also need to learn to listen to what our spouse requests and then make intentional efforts to reasonably meet those needs/desires.
Some of our needs in relationships come from the way we naturally tend to give and receive love. Gary Chapman identified 5 common love languages: words of affirmation, physical touch, quality time, acts of service, and receiving gifts. If you aren’t familiar with the 5 primary love languages, or you don’t know what yours and your spouses are, here is a quiz that you can each take to help determine what yours is. Knowing your love language and knowing your spouses will help tremendously in knowing how to communicate love in a way they will receive as love and the same for yourself.
For those with a love language of touch, this could be a hug and kiss every morning and night. For those with the language of words of encouragement, this can be as simple as recognizing the effort they put into dinner, or being home for dinner, or putting the kids to bed. If your spouse’s love language is receiving gifts, bringing home a flower you picked or their favorite candy bar can make their day. For a spouse with acts of service as their love language, unload the dishwasher or offer to go fill up their gas tank for them. If their love language is quality time, ask them to go for a short walk after dinner, or just sit with them – just be sure to put the phone down while you do it! The great thing is, you don’t have to guess. Sit down and have a conversation about your love languages and what they mean to each of you. Showing your spouse love in their love language does not have to be expensive or time-consuming.
Lastly, a note about healthy communication with your spouse: give grace. We each have a past where we have learned habits of interaction and reaction, especially in a second marriage. If you realize you said or did something that was unhealthy, apologize, ask for forgiveness, and work to improve for the future of your relationship. And if your spouse has said or done something you felt was unhealthy, assume they are acting with good intentions. Once you and your spouse are calm, if it is still bothering you, find a time to gently bring up how you felt and why so that both of you can move forward in a healthier and more loving way.
