Your arms around me is home

Sexuality seems to be a subject that in the LDS culture is taboo to talk about, especially in the youth programs. When it is spoken about you hear mostly about the don’ts and they negative consequences of what will happen if you cross the lines and become sexual active before marriage. These lessons are not meant to scare youth into thinking that sexuality is a bad thing, but unfortunately they tend to do that in many instances and those feelings are held onto into marriage which can negatively affect how one or both partners feel about sexuality in their marriage. If this has occurred then even after a couple is married they may be fighting against negative feeling about being intimate with their spouse. I found an interesting quote in Sean Brotherson talk “Fulfilling the Sexual Stewardship in Marriage” that goes well with my thoughts so far: “President Hugh B. Brown, who served as a counselor in the First Presidency, wrote the following about sexual intimacy in his book You and Yo...

In every marriage there comes a time where we get stuck. We hit a wall and we just can’t move forward. Why you might ask. It’s because we have hit a point where our dreams are not matching up. John Gottman in his book The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work (page 237) shares the four characteristics that all gridlocked disagreements share: 1.       “You’ve had the same argument again and again with no resolution. 2.       Neither of you can address the issue with humor, empathy, or affection. 3.       The issue is becoming increasingly polarizing as time goes on. 4.       Compromise seems impossible because it would mean selling out-giving up something important and core to your beliefs, values, or sense of self.” The thing is, to move past gridlock you don’t have to solve the problem, and neither of you have to feel like you have lost what you’re dreaming of or given ...

Every marriage is going to have conflict. If you ever find one that doesn’t ever have conflict please send them my way because I’d love to meet them and learn their secret. I’m sure so many couples, marriage therapists and bishops would love to meet them, because they’d be the anomaly. This couple doesn’t exist, because like I said before EVERY marriage has conflict. Just today I was talking with a coworker about her daughter and the struggles she had in college last year with her soccer coach and how well she’s doing on her team and how happy she is this year. She made the comment that: “The flowers grow after the rain falls.” This got me thinking about conflicts and marriage and how in the moment the conflict feels so painful and horrible, but once you come out of it and you can look back you can see the growth that you both experienced and you can see how the painful conflict was really a chance to learn and come together and because of it you’re a closer couple now. There are ...

I want to start by telling you a story told by Wallace Goddard in his book: Drawing Heaven into Your Marriage; “I think of the allegory of a man who had two friends in the manufactured-home business. When he wanted a new house, he asked each friend to send him half a house. He gave no plans. He provided no specifications on size or style. He left them to design as they would. So each friend sent a lovely half-house. When the two halves arrived at the site, they were jarringly different. Rooms did not line up. Utilities did not match up. Roofs and walls between the two halves did not connect.” This story gets me thinking about how different a husband and a wife are in a marriage. They both come to the marriage with their different opinions, beliefs, ways of doing things, likes and dislikes. Neither of them is wrong in the way they do things, they are just different from one another. These differences though can cause some contention in a marriage. It is these difference that I’...