Family Feud game

Dude Skill #3: FIGHT – Part 1

#11 IN MY SERIES OF POSTINGS DEDICATED TO SUMMARIZING A WONDERFUL BOOK ENTITLED “THE DUDE’S GUIDE TO MARRIAGE: TEN SKILLS EVERY HUSBAND MUST DEVELOP TO LOVE HIS WIFE WELL” BY DARRIN & AMIE PATRICK.

Love without truth is sentimentality. It supports and affirms us but keeps us in denial about our flaws.

Tim Keller

As a kid I was a good talker. I made people laugh. And I was a nice guy, if I do say so myself. The combination of all these things usually de-escelated potential physical altercations. But sometimes the only alternative was to face the conflict. i actually grew to enjoy conflict because it seemed easier to deal with the issue head-on rather than avoid it. I became a kid who took no guff from anyone. I didn’t want to be known as the boy who got beaten up by a girl (which actually happened in 4th grade), so I became a fighter.

This strategy worked well until I met my wife in high school. We dated for several years before we married. We broke up, got back together, and then broke up again. We were too young. I had commitment issues. We had radically different personalities. We didn’t have any mentors. The main problem in our relationship was that we didn’t know how to deal with conflict. We weren’t sure how to confront each other in our weaknesses. We had no skills to help us work through issues. We didn’t know how to fight together. The truth is that you are going to fight. Are. you going to fight well is the real question.

Why Don’t Couples Fight Well

My wife and I had inadequate premarital counseling. Most people are jealous of us because they didn’t have any at all. The guy who married us had great intentions and even probed into our motives for marriage. He asked us to consider the problems that might await us in the future and the concerns we had at that time. All good stuff, but we needed a deeper dive. We needed questions that looked into the future and also brought up our past.

Amie grew up in a house that was a sanctuary, meaning that her family saw the home as a place of refuge from the stress of daily life. Her parents were more private, and both of them worked. Consequently, Amie didn’t have many friends spend the night with her, and very few quests came to the house. My home was an airport terminal. Familiar and unfamiliar people were always coming and going in my house. Unlike my dad, my mom was extremely extroverted. She stayed home and managed the house. Neither of our families was wrong or right.

Having these differences doesn’t sound like a recipe for conflict, but in the early years of our marriage it was. I constantly invited people over to our tiny apartment, and Amie constantly wanted time with “just us.” I felt confined, and she felt abandoned. After several years and three more apartments, we realized that our problems weren’t products of our personalities or housing situation as much as products of our upbringings.

Couples don’t often know how to do conflict well for a multitude of reasons. And our upbringing and family-of-origin is one of the most critical culprits. I’ll begin to discuss this in detail in my next posting.

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