The Marriage Playbook™

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Marriage Playbook?

If You Fail to plan, then you plan to fail! The Marriage Playbook™ is designed to help you create an offensive and defensive plan for your marriage. It helps you find ways to counteract the opponents that will come at you and your marriage before you ever take the playing field of life together as Husband and Wife. Bad habits form in all marriages but if you can place good habits in their place from the beginning or with a fresh start, your marriage can be a lasting one.

Does God allow for remarriage? The Bible says it is better for someone to marry then to live in a life of sin. He made marriage and regardless of whether its a remarriage or not, He has a plan for our lives. I believe God allows divorce so he can bring people back to a close relationship with Him. I've seen people divorce and remarry and go on to have Godly, open communication filled marriages. It is ok, ONLY when God moves you in that direction. If you are leaning on His wisdom, He will tell you when the time is right and to whom. I think remarriages also have the best bet for helping other couples to understand what it takes to make a marriage work. We owe it to God to share our 'junk' so that other couples don't have to face what we have faced or at least know how to use their faith to get them thru the tough times.

How can you handle situations in your marriage when you spouse thinks that when he tells you that we are doing something this way and you give him your ideas and he takes it as he you are disagreeing with him? Communication is key in any marriage. How we communicate in the verbal and non-verbal can be misinterpreted. To cut down on your spouse feeling that you are questioning their decision is to be aware of how they receive your remarks. It may not be what you say but in how you say it. Making suggestions in a caring voice and body language holds more value in opening up the lines of communication. Having high levels of honesty so that they understand how important it is for you to have a voice in the matter will help. Also, in marriage, we have to pick our battles so if you trust your spouse and feel that they have your marriages best interest then trust their decisions.

How do you relate spiritually with a spouse who is not as far along on their walk with the Lord? The best way to make spiritual matters better is to pray together and for each other. Those moments when a husband and wife can sit down and talk about how God is working in their life can challenge the other one. You can't change your spouse spiritually, that's God's doing. Also, talking about the struggles in your life will let your spouse know how to be praying for you. A good book to help start this level of openness is 'The Power of the Praying Husband' or 'The Power of the Praying Wife' by Stormie Omartan.

How do you keep the fire going each and every day? To make sure your spouse feel that "in love" feeling every single day until death do you part. Well considering a deep, true love is not a feeling at all but a choice; it comes down to being in the good habit of showing love to your spouse. If you do something 40 days or more, it becomes a habit and most marriages fail or end because of bad habits in their relationship. Once the 'ooie-gooie' feeling goes away, you wake up and choose to love your spouse and when you don't feel love, we can' allow ourselves to think that we are no longer in love with them because it doesn't feel like it once did. Marriage is not about being on a Love high for the rest of our life. The deep love God planned marriage for can only be reached when we do one thing every day that makes your spouse feel loved by you. By loving one day at a time, you will find a love that last 'till death do you part'.

My husband and I are in uncontrollable amounts of debt. Divorce is the only think I know to do if we don't get things on track. Is this even fixable? First, let me point out that to be in debt is a habit issue. We go into debt because we have formed bad habits with our money. To divorce will not fix those habits and it will only make things more expensive. Last time I checked, it cost more for 2 households then 1. Secondly, this is VERY fixable, it just won't happen over night. You and your spouse need to sit down and see what areas of your spending you can cut so you can get a handle on the money. It usually takes about 3 months to get a budget tweaked to the point it works correctly. It takes discipline to do this but if you spend your money on paper first, it does what you tell it to do. You may need to get radical and take on a second job for a short time or sell some stuff and use that money solely for debt reduction to get this under control. Finally, list your debts smallest to largest on paper and then pay the minimum on everything but the small one and attack that one with a vengeance. Once you pay that small one off, roll that money to the next smallest and attack it like a snowball. It just gains more 'snow' and gets bigger so that by the time you get them ALL paid off, you can take that money and save it, give it away, or loosen the purse strings and enjoy the money you are blessed to have.

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