Hi, I’m Joy. I am a Christian marriage and family therapist and a mom of two young boys. I met my husband Anthony while we were both in grad school at Western Seminary. We entered our marriage with very little experience and lots of baggage–he’s a Certified Sex Addiction Therapist with his own recovery journey, and I’m a recovering co-dependent. What a pair! We knew there were lots of reasons our marriage might fail–and that our only hope was to desperately pursue God to change us.
When a dear friend’s marriage ended in divorce, I felt betrayed by God. As a therapist, I had heard the statistic–that 50% of marriages end in divorce–but I hadn’t believed it could happen to my friends, to strong Christians. Not on my watch! As a result, I did a deep dive into the research on marriage, trying to make sense of what had happened.
What I found out is that the outcome of a marriage is actually very predictable. Researcher John Gottman can observe a 15-minute conflict between newlyweds and predict with over 90% accuracy whether they will divorce, and when. There are specific, all-too-commonplace behaviors that lead to divorce even more surely than smoking leads to lung cancer.
You see, love is much more patient and kind and persevering than many of us imagine, despite knowing how to recite 1 Corinthians 13 by heart. When we feel hurt and threatened, we tend to live out of the protective ways we learned as children, attacking or withdrawing, not knowing how harmful these tactics are to ourselves and to our relationships.
By the grace of God, we as a church need a clear vision of love, a practical sense of how to respond to our spouses and our children when they hurt us the most. This blog is my attempt to share what I have been discovering. As my family will be the first to tell you, I’m no expert at this kind of love. But I am committed to learning and practicing, and I hope we can learn this together.
[Photo Credit: Swirl of Grace Photography]