Partnership In Marriage

A few years ago, I found myself sitting in another miserable and seemingly pointless meeting.

I’ve been part of the executive team at a consulting agency for the past 4 years, and we had been meeting weekly to discuss items related to our business. After a few months, I realized that these meetings had gotten entirely out of hand. We had no structure, no concrete agenda, we rarely started on time, and almost never ended with any consensus on anything at all. In a desperate attempt to save my “precious” time that I thought was being wasted, I practically demanded that we move to bi-weekly meetings. And so we did. Weekly meetings became biweekly meetings. By the nature of having them less frequently, we started to gain some efficiencies, but after a few meetings, we fell back into the slump of our useless unproductive chats. Now that I look back, I realize that the problem wasn’t the meeting frequency, it was the structure and intention of the meeting.

In marriage, we go through phases of our lives where we’re great at counciling together. There are also times in life where our “counciling” together looks a lot like my haphazard executive meetings. And the bad news is, a marriage counciling problem can’t be solved by meeting LESS frequently, and neither can a corporate counciling problem.

When my wife and I were first married, we were great at counciling together. We were both working part-time, taking online classes and we had all the time in the world to chat about our days, plans, and dreams.

Then, we were blessed with our first baby. Once life got a little more hectic, counciling and communicating regularly became just as difficult. While we’ve gone through ups and downs since becoming parents, we definitely still have a lot to learn about counciling together.

This week, from Elder Ballards talk, thing that impressed me the most was this. Seeking consensus and sharing perspectives is vital to a healthy marriage council. So often, we like to propose the logical, easy, or common-sense solution to someone else’s problem. In marriage, we share problems, so we must also share in the solution. I often find myself leading a conversation or discussing a problem in the way I would at work. But those tactics are unhealthy and unwanted in marriage. We need to collaborate together, seek each others opinions, dig deep for deeper reasoning, and listen intently. When we seek to serve and love our spouse with our minds, hearts, AND EARS, we’ll council together more like our Father in Heaven.