Search Results for: blog marriage amp love love amp marriage

Debt and Marriage: How It is Tough to Love When You Owe

Many couples enter into a marriage with debt already in hand. Others accumulate debt together. Either way, nurturing a loving relationship can be hard when debt is hanging over your head. In fact, according to a study by Jeffrey Dew at Utah State University, couples who reported disagreeing about finance once a week were over 30 percent more likely to get divorced than couples who reported disagreeing about finances only a few times a month. Another inference can be made from this study: there is a whole lot of disagreement about money out there. Debt is a source of contention. … Continue reading →

Babies Having Babies

I had just crossed the threshold into teenhood when CBS ran a Schoolbreak Special called:  “Babies Having Babies.”  It was directed by Martin Sheen and starred my idol Lori Loughlin and Jill “The Love Boat” Whelan as pregnant teens who meet up at a group counseling session. The show was one of my first introductions to the relatively unknown world of teenage motherhood and a far cry from today’s mega-hyped MTV reality TV hits “16 and Pregnant” and “Teen Mom.” Critics have long claimed that both series glamourize teen pregnancy and encourage young girls to procreate outside of marriage.  Meanwhile, … Continue reading →

Preserving the Peace

Much like with marriage, to keep the peace between you and your children, it’s important to learn the fine art of picking battles.  The phrase may seem trite, but knowing how to correctly apply it to your family dynamic can make a huge difference in your quality of life. For example, my daughter struggled with sleep issues for a long time.  And by long time, I mean years… and years and years.  The kid would fight me at bedtime like a combat ninja.  The nightly battles were frustrating, exhausting and downright ugly.  It got so bad that I ended up … Continue reading →

Jim Nabors Marries in Seattle

As you know, same-sex marriage has been in the news – A LOT!  Gays are still fighting to be like regular couples while many heterosexuals feel that marriage should be reserved for males and females. Some oppose homosexuality because they say that lifestyle is more promiscuous than heterosexuality.  I beg to differ and here is a prime example. On January 15th, actor/singer Jim Nabors, best known for played the television character “Gomer Pyle,” left his home in Hawaii to travel to Seattle, but he didn’t travel alone.  No, Nabors took Stan Cadwallader with him.  Cadwallader has been Nabor’s partner for … Continue reading →

Finding Support from Your Friends

We’ve talked extensively about how important it is that we keep friends outside of our marriage.  And that doesn’t mean that we have friends who can’t also be friends with our spouses.  It just means that we look for emotional connections with more people than just our spouses.  I know it’s very true for me; my two best friends give me things my husband never could, and not just things like watching the six-hour BBC “Pride and Prejudice.” It’s a real romantic notion – both in the love and in the story sense of the word – that our spouses … Continue reading →

The Difference Between Friendship and Marriage

Sometimes I wonder what the difference is between friendship and marriage.  Not casual friendship, or even good friendship, but really-close, best-friends, rely-on-each-other-for-everything friendship.  If we look to the media for answers, it seems to imply that the only difference is physical desire.  In movies and television, the only or at least primary distinguishable change in the relationship between two characters that are best friends, and then become something more, is that their relationship adds a sexual element. Those are usually my favorite types of stories (as opposed to ones where the characters aren’t friends but jump right to dating), only … Continue reading →

Living with Engineers: Spouses, not Supervisors

Living with an engineer involves more than just having to hear the word “efficient” all of the time. A lot of engineers end up in management positions, and that means one thing: they’re bred to supervise. The word “efficient” does get bandied about, in how they think tasks ought to be accomplished. I already shared my story about measuring butter for baking, and how my husband felt about that. That’s not the only time something like that has happened. Sometimes, I find Jonathan trying to supervise me when we’re completing a project. To be fair, sometimes I ask for it. … Continue reading →

Having Each Other’s Back

Today I want to talk about kind of a dumb thing I got into the habit of doing, but that I realized one day could be hurtful. Sometimes I have a tendency to make too much fun of Jon in front of others. I’ve talked to him about it and he doesn’t seem to mind, but nonetheless I want to work on it. The habit was born out of our shared college experience. The group of friends we were in playfully messed with each other all of the time, especially the boys. I kind of had to thicken my skin … Continue reading →

Laid-Back Anniversaries

It’s our fourth anniversary today. I know that’s not really a milestone (insofar as any year’s anniversary is one); that’ll come next year, with our fifth. But I don’t see us doing anything bigger next year than we’ll do this year. Like with everything else, Jon and I don’t make that big of a deal of our anniversary. We don’t even get each other gifts. That’s something we stopped doing before we were even married. The first year or two we were dating we got each other anniversary presents, but that ceased by the time we graduated from college. I … Continue reading →

The Effects of the Media on Romance

Where do our irrational romantic impulses come from? Are they just something we naturally want; after all, everyone likes to be spoiled. But often we equate all romance with grand gestures, or expect our relationships to play out like fairy tales. We have the media to blame for that. I know I sound like a broken record sometimes, and it must seem like I think we shouldn’t watch movies or television. I don’t believe that at all, but I can testify that too many romcoms, or at least, not approaching them in the right way, can have a negative effect. … Continue reading →