Whether your team is playing a pre-season, regular season, playoff game or even a Super Bowl, the basic fundamentals of football come down to blocking and tackling. It takes a player knowing how to properly block for his other team mates and how to tackle legally so that other players can accomplish what’s needed on the field to score. When you start to look at your marriage with a team mentality, you will soon see that there are basic blocking and tackling type areas that can help your spouse accomplish what they need to make your marriage win.

So here are the basic block and tackle moves that you need to have in your marriage:

Block #1: Boundaries

Your relationship has expectations by both you and your spouse. By talking about what those are, rather than assume what they are, you have a greater success rate by knowing what’s expected of you from the person that matters most; YOUR spouse. When you go to work, you know what’s expected of you and you do it. Why should your marriage be any different? Verbalizing what you need/want from your spouse sets the tone so that they will open up to you as well.

In knowing what to expect, you need to draw boundaries in your marriage about outside relationships. This block is key to avoid having your spouse in a situation that might cause them to stumble or be ’sacked’ by an emotional or physical affair. For example, how would your wife feel about you having to ride in the car alone with another women, business or otherwise? By drawing this boundary in the sand, it’s not stating that you have a lack of trust in your spouse, but that you love them enough to protect them(block for them) from ever being tempted to cross an inappropriate line. Boundaries also goes the other way in remembering that you may be someones husband/wife but that title should not define you. A healthy marriage is made of a husband and wife who have time away from home with a ‘guys/girls’ night out. Encouraging that will take your marriage to new levels of respect and honor be having your own identity.

Block #2: Kids

I hear this too often from couples, healthy or hurting, “my kids come first.” I’m going to throw out the number one myth in your marriage; that is a LIE. Your spouse comes first because that relationship can easily be destroyed by contentment and busyness to the point that when you put the kids ahead of your spouse, needs go unmet and you become isolated from each other. Now don’t get me wrong, your kids are important but your spouses needs come first. PERIOD! This kind of block just simply means, making dates a priority and allowing times each day away from your kids to be together so that you are properly investing in your marriage. The other advantage to this kind block is that you teach your kids the value of your spouse and they sleep better at night knowing that Mommy & Daddy love each other.

Block #3: Technology

Between texting, computers, TV, Facebook/Twitter and email, we are overloaded with technology on a daily basis. This block comes down to one simple rule: Set a time limit for when you use these things so that it doesn’t fill up your day. Also, as a side note, be aware of who your spouse is communicating with through these forms of technology and what sites they are visiting. It combines Block #1 into #3 in a very protective manner that again saves your spouse from entering into an inappropriate conversation with someone of the opposite sex.

Now that you have blocks to work on, there are a few things you should tackle together as a team so that you not only on the same page in key areas but so that you have the lines of communication flowing constantly.

Tackle #1: Finances

By in large, most couples that split up do so over money. The lack of it, the desire to make more of it, the need to save some of it and the fear of losing it. There are several programs out there that can help you get on track with money; however, it comes down to a monthly budget. Spending every dollar on paper before the month begins can help you both sleep at night knowing that you are on the same page when it comes to your finances. You both need to be flexible and compromise in areas that matter most and be willing to sacrifice for a short time till you can get a handle on things. It’s what many call a beans and Rice mindset.

Tackle #2: Family

Tackling the area of family is a two sided coin. On one side you have raising your kids; on the other side is the in-laws.

Agreeing on your time investing into the proper discipline and love for your children can bring your family closer together and create habits that your kids carry with them into their families. The in-laws can be a sensitive subject because you often have to take sides by choosing your spouse over your own parents. This tackle is not about an either my spouse or my parents but that in the truth you stand together as a couple. Even if your spouse is wrong in a confrontation about your/their parents, you need to tackle it in private and not in a manner that shows a division in front of the in-laws. This tackle also should cover the minimum/maximum distance you are willing to live to each others parents as well as who you will spend vacations/holidays/birthdays with.

Tackle #3: Goals

Finally, tackling goals together is an on going event because they can and will change. It can be your own personal goals for job or hobbies and it can be goals you have together as couple/family that need input evenly from both of you. There are ways to achieve your goals and working as a team maximizes those opportunities; however, you can’t do things for your own selfish pleasure and think that your spouse/family is just along for the ride.

One key thing to strive for in your marriage, like in football, is that you learn the basic blocks and tackles to become effortless in your actions the more your practice them. It may seem like work for a while, but it’s like training your muscles up, you’re sore at first but in time it hurts less and you see the rewards by working out every day. These areas of ‘blocking and tackling’ in your marriage is not in the violent since of the words but it is to create an awareness of the basic qualities that your marriage needs to design both on the offense and defense in order to achieve your goals in life and love.

Time and again I meet couples who have been married 7, 10, 13 + years and they tell me that the love has faded in their marriage. First off let me say this is totally normal. That new love feeling in the first few years of a relationship does not last. As great as that feeling is it can’t last. That love is a chemical reaction in our bodies, an adrenaline rush, but over time our body adjusts and no longer releases the adrenaline from that feeling. So then what? Is that the end of the marriage? For some people yeah it is, but it does not have to be.

When that love fades we can choose to continue to love our spouse. Each morning I get up and choose to love my husband. It is easy to do now, but a few years ago I didn’t even understand what that meant. I had to make it a habit.

Have you ever tried to stop a bad habit? Whether that habit was smoking, not exercising, or eating poorly that bad habit did not go away over night. In most cases you have to replace that bad habit with a good one. The same thing holds true with marriage you have to replace the bad habit of just expecting to feel love with choosing to love. The first few weeks of making that choice it can feel awkward, unnatural even, but the more you do it the easier it gets.

So what does choosing to love look like? Well, it is not getting up each morning, looking at your spouse and going, “love you” and going on with your day. . Choosing to love your spouse is putting them before yourself. This can mean husbands watching the kids so your wife can have a girls night out once a month. Or wives this can mean making a nice food spread before he watches the game with his friends. It obviously varies with each couple. What shows love to you and your and your spouse is going to be different than what another couple does. The key here is that you are making an effort to show love, not for what you can get back in return, but because it is the loving thing to do.

Now you may be asking yourself, but what if I don’t feel like I love them anymore? You may have heard the expression “fake it till you make it” well that is sometimes what you have to do when you are choosing to love. When my husband and I nearly divorced a few years ago, he asked a friend of his what he was supposed to do since he didn’t feel any love for me. His friend asked him if he had asked God to give him that love back. My husband said he had never thought of that before, but he started praying that prayer and choosing to love me and eventually he was able to find that love again. Before i started choosing to love my husband, I pretty much took him for granted. I loved him, but didn’t really take any time to let him know that I loved him. According to him, it didn’t even show on my face. However, once we went through our “junk” I was so sure of my love for him that I began to make the effort to choose to love him everyday. Before that you probably could have asked him if he was sure of my love for him and he may have said no, but now you would get a definitive YES.

So take the time this week to choose to love your spouse. Stop waiting for those feelings to be there and replace a bad habit with a good one. Don’t expect things to improve over night and don’t expect immediate love returned from your spouse, especially if your marriage is in a slump season, but just see how it affects your marriage. God can and will show up and show off.

The Marriage Playbook

where marriage is going

As I talk to my friends who are trying hard to work off pounds and work out regularly in the new year, there’s a mindset that I noticed that happens when you are trying to change our lifestyle in radical ways.

We calorie count to the point that math becomes a dirty four letter word and exercise is a bear all it’s own. However, we seem to justify in our minds a behavior that if we’ve “been good” all day/week, that we can have an extra piece of something after dinner. We can find ways to guilt-free out of why we do or don’t do something. In reality, we continue to lie to ourselves to the point that no behavior has changed and we’re stuck feeling hopeless.

In our marriage this same mindset is dominate throughout couples. We guilt-free ourselves out of the hurtful words we say to our spouse, the ‘harmless’ flirting/conversations we have with someone other then our spouse which leads to building walls because of lack in communication just so we can sleep at night. We never realize just how much we are torturing our spouse and our marriage with our behavior until one day, you wake up and don’t recognize them. You don’t feel the love you once did because your behavior turned you into a “Spouse Potato”. You got lazy or too busy to think about the needs of our spouse and then dead weight starts to build and become as unhealthy of a lifestyles to our hearts as bad food is it is to our bodies.

There’s the 2 things that come to mind of how to change this mindset and change your marriage for the new year.

1. Stop making excuses: Justifying why we do or say the things we do in our marriage, only belittles our spouse. (If you are the husband, I encourage you to set the tone at home by making up for what you have done.) The longer you treat them in this negative way, will only push them further away. Forgive yourself for your old patterns and then change them by doing the opposite.

2. Get back to the basic: Much like in working out/eating right, in your marriage, getting back to the basics of sharing experiences together, like you did in the beginning of your relationship, will greatly impact the love you and your spouse have for one another. Date nights, laughing together, setting boundaries and having an identiy outside of “husband” or “wife” will be one of the healthiest steps to a better marriage that you could ever take.

The Marriage Playbook

where marriage is going