Marriage and Intimacy Tips for Christian Couples: Secrets of Happily Ever After

The Alchemy of Love and Attraction with Kimberly Beam Holmes

• Monica Tanner, Kimberly Holmes Beam • Season 3 • Episode 261

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Have you ever wondered about the secret ingredients that make a partner irresistible?

In this week's episode, I'm interviewing Kimberly Holmes, CEO of Marriage Helper International, who shares not only her professional expertise but also her personal story.  You'll hear how Kimberly's family history of divorce and reconciliation sets the stage for the transformative work she's passionate about and what she's doing next.

Kimberly gives us the four crucial areas of attraction through her PIES framework and she breaks them all down.

P - Physical Attraction
I - Intellectual Attraction
E - Emotional Attraction
S - Spiritual Attraction

Make sure you join us for this episode and take the Intimacy Quiz at the end if you haven't already --> https://monicatanner.com/quiz

Speaker 1:

There is always hope for your marriage to be better than what it is today.

Speaker 2:

Have you ever wondered what makes the difference between those couples who absolutely love to be together and the ones who merely tolerate each other in their old age? Hi, I'm Monica Tanner, wife to a super hunky man, mom to four kids, relationship coach and intimacy expert. My goal with this podcast is to help you and your partner swap resentment for romance, escape the roommate rut and nurture a bond built on trust, communication and unconditional love. Each week, I'm sharing the secret strategies that keep couples madly in love, dedicated and downright giddy about each other from the honeymoon phase to the golden years. I'm on a mission to crack the code of happily ever after, and I'm sharing those juicy secrets right here, because an awesome marriage makes life so much sweeter. Let's get to it. Hello and welcome to the secrets of happily ever after podcast. I'm your host, monica Tanner, and I'm super excited about my guest today.

Speaker 2:

She is a new friend, kimberly beam homes. She's the CEO of marriage helper international, which is known for its 70% success rate and saving marriages. Alongside her leadership role, she hosts it starts with attraction and co hosts relationship radio. Currently, she's working towards her PhD in psychology. With more than 260,000 subscribers on YouTube and a total of 100,000 monthly podcast downloads. She's one of the largest creators on the marriage related topic, grounded in her belief that strong marriages lead to robust communities. Kimberly shirts insights and strategies to nurture relationships Off the microphone. She's dedicated wife of 11 years and mother to two children adopted from India, residing in Tennessee. Hello, kimberly, how are you?

Speaker 1:

Hey Monica, I'm doing well. How are you? Thank you for having me so good.

Speaker 2:

Well, I'm glad we could make this work despite all the obstacles. I love talking marriage and we we sound a lot alike, so I think we'll get along swimmingly.

Speaker 1:

Monica, I think we'll have great things to talk about.

Speaker 2:

Amazing, amazing. Why don't you start by telling us just a little bit about yourself and how you became so passionate about the topic of marriage?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, the the bio. Actually, as you're reading it, I realized it's two years old, because we're actually about to celebrate 13 years married here in just a couple of weeks.

Speaker 1:

So yes, as it said, I am a wife, I'm a mom, I am a CEO. But how I got involved with this is probably a little more unique than than maybe some people actually to understand how marriage help or even started which. I've been at marriage helper for 12 years and for someone my age that's kind of unique, especially in this kind of world. Like most people change jobs every five or six years, I've been in my job over a decade, but how I got started is a little bit unique and to understand it you really have to understand the history of marriage helper. And marriage helper was actually founded not by me but by a man named Dr Joe beam, and it came out of an experience that he had had in his own marriage, where, in the 1980s, he was a very successful speaker. He had a speaking schedule booked five years out, was very well known in the space that he was in.

Speaker 1:

He was married, had two kids, and it was during that height of his career, when he was, as many people would think, the most successful that he could be, that he actually ended up falling in love with another woman and divorcing his wife and leaving his two kids, and they were divorced for three years and during those three years he went from being this incredibly successful person, speaking schedule booked out, to actually losing everything. He ended up bankrupt, homeless, living in his car, losing most of his friends, going places he never thought he'd go, doing places he never thought he'd do, and ultimately realized the grass was not greener on the other side, like he thought that it was going to be. And at the end of those three years he realized this isn't the person I want to be. I want my family back. So he went back to his ex-wife, who was already dating someone new at that time, and asked if she would take him back, and everyone in her life told him not to do it and she said yeah exactly right.

Speaker 1:

Once a cheater, always a cheater. Don't do it. You could never trust him again. Those were, those are what her family, what her friends were saying. In fact, her best friend said if you go back to him, I will never speak to you again. She knew in her heart, though, that he was a good person who had done a lot of bad things, but she really did believe that he deserved a second chance, and so she gave him a second chance, and they ended up remarrying, falling back in love, and as a result of their second marriage, they had me. So I'm actually the product of their Story, oh my gosh, that is so cool.

Speaker 2:

I never expected that twist and you did that that wasn't one.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, exactly Right, yeah. So a lot of people are. A lot of times people ask me why are you so passionate about marriages and about helping people save their marriage? And it's because I literally owe my life to two people who, against all odds and all circumstances, figured out how to make it, how to make it work, and about 10 years after they remarried they ended up. My dad had gone back into the corporate world at that time and was and financially was, very successful but very empty, purpose wise, like he just felt, like this wasn't fulfilling him, and he and my mom would both say why don't we do things? Or why don't we do something to help people never have to experience the pain that we went through and that my two older sisters went through when we divorced.

Speaker 1:

And so that is how marriage helper came to be. So marriage helper as a, as an entity, like the name that we go under now, marriage helper as a brand, so to say, has only been that name for about 11 years, but we actually started in the first workshops that we did back in 1999. And so for over 24 years now, marriage helper or at least you know what marriage helper is now has been helping helping couples save their marriage and and that's how I, that's how I got involved. I never thought I'd join the family business, but it was in the middle of my masters of marriage and family therapy that I realized how marriage helper could, what all the amazing turnaround honestly that was happening in the workshops that marriage helper was doing and how stuck I felt like my clients were in the practicums I was doing for my therapy degree and I just caught the vision of what marriage helper was doing and how it could grow. And that's what I've devoted my life to ever since.

Speaker 2:

Amazing. Well, what a wonderful thing to devote your life to. Well, I love that so much. So tell us a little bit. I love the story behind marriage helper, but tell us a little bit more about kind of the philosophy and how you help people save their marriages.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so we believe that it does not take two people to save a marriage. We believe that one spouse can begin doing the things that will lead to the marriage being saved and then ultimately it takes two to reconcile. But those are two different things A lot of times. I mean, there's a variety of reasons that people say that they want to get a divorce, but, as you know, we were talking about Gottman before this. When we look at Gottman's research, all of them really boil down into three things it's that people don't feel liked, loved or respected, and so, while we would never say and it isn't even necessarily always true that the actions of the spouse who wants out of the marriage are because of something that the other spouse has done, a lot of times there's just been cracks and fractures in the foundation of the marriage over time. That, even if it hasn't led to someone having an affair or someone getting involved in an addiction or something they're not supposed to do lying none of those things are ever justified, but many times they're byproducts of just falters over time of their own sake, or of just the communication and interactions within the marriage. And so the philosophy that we take is you can't control your spouse, and if they want out right now, then short of grabbing them by the ear and forcing them to work on the marriage with you, you really can't make much progress. But that doesn't necessarily mean you shouldn't do anything and we encourage people. That also doesn't mean that you should give up.

Speaker 1:

So our main approach because the majority of people who contact us is the spouse wanting to save the marriage, but they have a spouse who wants out we call them the reluctant spouse.

Speaker 1:

So our approach is let's help you become the best you can be and let's teach you the relationship principles that if anything works to restore your marriage and have a healthy foundation again, these things will, and we can't guarantee that it's going to work.

Speaker 1:

That's why we don't have a 100% success rate. But what we can guarantee is that these are the research-based principles that work, and so when you begin to implement these, not only will you become a better person, but even the other relationships in your life, such as with your kids or co-workers or family members, they'll improve too. Because when we work on ourselves, there's a positive ripple effect into all of the relationships in our life, and more times than not, that ripple effect goes towards this reluctant spouse. They begin to see changes, they begin to wonder hmm, maybe, maybe the reason I want out of the marriage is because I haven't been able to see a vision of how things could be different in the future, and so that can kind of cause that reluctant spouse to begin to lean back in which then we begin we would be. That's when we at Marriage Helper work through the reconciliation process with both spouses. From that point forward, I absolutely, absolutely agree.

Speaker 2:

And so you do a different podcast that's called Something About Attraction. Remind me.

Speaker 1:

That's right. So my personal podcast is called. It Starts with Attraction and in that podcast it's so why attraction? Why that word?

Speaker 1:

So we have a four-step process to falling in love at Marriage Helper called the Love Path, and the first step of that is attraction, and there's four different areas of attraction. But the Love Path is one of the foundational principles that we teach that there's a process to falling in love and if you follow the process then you can fall back in love. And if you stop following the process then you can fall out of love, even if you don't mean to. But every time we that we teach that process, the hope and the takeaway that people have is if we've fallen out of love, or if my spouse has fallen out of love with me, or if I've fallen out of love with my spouse, there's one thing that I can do and that's starting back at the beginning in working on becoming the best I can be in these four areas of attraction, which we call the pies. So physical, intellectual, emotional and spiritual are the four areas that we encourage people to focus on as they're working on falling back in love.

Speaker 2:

How you taking the intimacy level quiz yet? If not, you absolutely should. All you have to do is go to monnecatannercom backslash quiz and take a three minute quiz. At the end, I'll tell you what level of intimacy you and your spouse are at and I'll give you next steps to be able to increase your intimacy. Regardless of what level you're at, you can always make improvements. So do yourself a favor and go to monnecatannercom backslash quiz and learn about your level of intimacy and how to improve it. Well, I love that. I would love for you to tell us just a little bit about each piece of the pie and how to kind of go through that process.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, for sure, this is one of my favorite things. Oh good, yes, absolutely so. Physical attraction is is what the piece stands for. And physical attraction isn't just about how we look, although that is definitely what media and secular culture want us to believe. That's what all the magazines say, what all the clickbait do, this diet, you know, all of the stuff is basically telling us, either straightforward or not, you aren't pretty enough, you're not handsome enough, you're not skinny enough, you're not muscular enough, so you need to change in order for someone to love you. And the bottom line of it is, while physical attraction is important, it's actually not as important as the other parts of attraction, but even further than that, it's not even as important as physically focusing on how you feel more than how you look.

Speaker 1:

So when I do the things and there's some great recent research that's been done about what attracts people to someone else in this one specific study identified 10 different things, but ultimately, of all of these 10 things, what it said was people found that when their spouse, when their romantic partner, was doing the habits of healthy things, that that was more attractive than necessarily their the self-rated physical attractiveness level of that other person.

Speaker 1:

So what does that lead us to believe that when people are sleeping, when they're eating well, when they're getting some exercise in, when they have the self-control and kind of those habits that can lead us to feel our best for our age and situation in life, that that in and of itself is attractive to other people?

Speaker 1:

And so what I always encourage people, especially women, and when we look at just body esteem in general, women definitely are much harder on themselves than men. They definitely tend to have lower body esteem than men do, and the lower a woman's body esteem is, the lower their relationship and marital satisfaction within their relationships, and that's even true to how their husband feels in the relationship. So when a woman, just in particular, can begin to not just focus on like, am I a size two, but can begin to love her body and feel good in her body and about her body, even if her body size doesn't change, if she can just begin doing those healthy habits, that shows her body that she's loving it and it's leading her body to feel the best that it can be, even just that has empirical evidence of increasing relationship and marital satisfaction, which is incredible.

Speaker 2:

I love that statistic.

Speaker 1:

Absolutely amazing. So, while physical attraction doesn't necessarily ever become unimportant in a relationship, it's actually not the most important part of it. So that leads us to the next one, which is I, which is intellectual attraction. So intellectual attraction is all about can I talk to this person about things other than just the kids, the mortgage and the taxes? Do we have enough in common that we enjoy each other's company, that we have shared hobbies, that we have shared interests and that I honestly enjoy having conversations with the other person?

Speaker 1:

Now, when I, when I look inward to ask myself how can I become the kind of person that other people enjoy talking to, then that leads us to look at love of learning, like what am I doing to continue to learn and to grow and to develop in skills and in certain areas in my life, where, where I find interest in it, can also lead me to ask other questions like how am I as a conversationalist, like am I listening? What am I doing when I'm showing up in conversations with other people that they would find me intellectually attractive to talk to? But when we look at it in terms of the relationship, then it really is that question of is this a person that I enjoy talking to. That's intellectual attraction. So that's kind of more about the, about the brain and also, as we go through these, one of the things you're going to see is it's kind of like peeling back layers of an onion and we kind of get deeper into knowing a person the further into attraction that we go. So this, the third area, the E of the pies, is emotional attraction. Now, emotional attraction if it were to have a question that that quantified it, it would be do I evoke emotions within the other person or another person that they enjoy feeling? So this is all about my actions and how it leads another person to feel, and this is the most important part of any long term relationship. And the key here isn't am I evoking emotions in another person that I think is evoking positive emotions with them, or that my intention is to evoke positive emotions with them, but am I evoking emotions within that they perceive on their own that it is a positive emotion? So here's an example of that I am an extrovert, my husband is an introvert and I may like.

Speaker 1:

Personally, when my birthday comes, I want all the stuff, all the spotlight, like a surprise party. Take me to dinner, make it a, make it a national holiday. This is how I want to celebrate my birthday. So when my husband's birthday comes around, I might have all of the positive intention in the world, the best of intentions If I put on a huge surprise party and do all of these things and he will 1000% hit it Right, like he is going to enter into the room and say this is my worst nightmare, I want to leave.

Speaker 1:

Now, when we talk about evoking positive emotions, he could hate that and I could look at him and say, but my intentions were good. I did this because I would have loved it and because I thought you really would love it. But the key is to really lean in and understand how did he perceive it. And if he were to look at that situation and say, but I didn't like it, then I would need to look at it and say well then you know what His perception of it is more important than my intention.

Speaker 1:

Now, when we go into deeper issues in our marriages, this really matters a lot, because people might say things that they thought were well-meaning or do things that they thought were well-meaning, and if we don't actually listen to our spouse when they say, but I didn't like that we can justify ourselves all day long, but it's going to continue to evoke negative emotions within the other person, which pushes them away, which is really the core of great relationships. We're either doing things that are pulling others towards us because it evokes emotions they enjoy feeling, or we're doing things that are pushing the other people away from us because we're doing things that are evoking emotions that they don't enjoy feeling, and no one is going to want to stay in a relationship with a person when they don't like the way that they feel when they are around that person Makes so much sense, doesn't it?

Speaker 2:

Especially when you're talking about a lot of attraction, right?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, absolutely Absolutely. So that is emotional attraction, and then the final part of attraction is spiritual attraction. Now, this one is all about beliefs and values. Do we share a similar set of beliefs and values with each other? Do we care about similar things? Are we on the same page about these similar things that we care about? Or, even if we're not, do I feel respected and do they feel respected in the differences about the things that we care about?

Speaker 1:

This one is incredibly important and, as I said before, it's kind of like layers of an onion or layers of a cake, if we want to view it in a sweeter way. The deeper that we get, we're getting more to the core of a person. When we get to the spiritual attraction, it's like about a person's soul, their purpose, the things that make them angry, the things that they're passionate about. Like this is what drives them as a person, and likely a lot of the things that they're passionate about, a lot of the beliefs and values that they hold, are going to end up being a lot of the things that they want to see happen in their life. So they want to raise their kids in a certain type of church or religion or faith, or they want to support a certain type of cause or they want to discipline and bring their children a certain way Like we're getting into the real deep core values that a lot of people hold that it's going to be harder not impossible, but harder to have a relationship where you both feel respected If you don't respect each other on those things or if you just don't already agree to some extent about them. So we tend to be attracted to people who hold similar beliefs and values that we do, or are passionate about the same values that we are, or people who we believe have better beliefs and values than we do. So people who we see as kind of being great role models, different things like that. Oh, I want to be more like them.

Speaker 1:

When my husband and I, actually before we started dating, we were both in college at the same time he was a senior and I was a freshman and my friends knew him. They had actually gone on submission trips with him and things like that and one of the first things that they told me about him was how generous of a person he was. We were talking about how one of their one of our other friends couldn't afford to go on a mission trip one year and that my husband who I wasn't even dating at the time didn't even know. Really, my husband had paid for this person to be able to go with them on the mission trip. And hearing this, I was like Kali, what a great. Like what college student pays $1800 for another person to go on a mission trip? And I was like I want to be an incredible guy.

Speaker 1:

So in my head I knew, you know, I knew we shared similar beliefs and values and in other ways, from what I heard, but in many ways I felt like he was even more elevated than me, like I wanted to be more generous. Like him, I wanted to have more of that spirit, and so that was one of the things that attracted to me, or attracted me to him back when we first started dating. So, looking at these overall physical, intellectual, emotional and spiritual we call them the pies. It's an easy way for people to remember it and it's these four things that no matter if you're at the beginning of a relationship and you're just starting down the love path, or you've been married and you feel like you've backtracked on it, starting back with these and working on these areas to become the best you can be in each area for you, not in order to attract anyone else to you, but because it's the best thing you can do for you is the best place to start back on the love path.

Speaker 2:

Got it. Oh my gosh, I love that so much and in reality, it's good to be thinking about those things throughout your relationship, like it's good to be. I always talk to my couples about being a student of their spouse and so really knowing these things about each other, like getting curious about these things. You know, when you first start dating, there's something about this other person that you just always want to know more. Right, you can't wait for the next thing they're going to say. The next time you see them, you can't wait to smell them again. Like there's just so much anxious anticipation because you don't really know each other very well, right and I always try to point this out to my couples that it doesn't matter if, even if you're spending 24 hours a day, seven days a week with somebody, you're still experiencing the world in a very different way.

Speaker 2:

So there's always things you can be learning about each other, even if you're just separated from each other for small periods of time. Like realistically, there's so many things to be curious and excited to learn about and that keeps that attraction going, right, even if it's you know any part of those pie things. Like it's just really important to always be curious about your partner and what they're learning and what excites them and what drives them and what motivates them, and you know the things that stress them out. All of it like all of it, it's just your. It's like you're married to a new person every day and when you take that mentality, you'll always be attracted to them. It won't ever get that dry like, oh, I know what she's going to say, I know what she's going to do, I know everything about this person. Well, yeah, you're like cutting off that attraction.

Speaker 1:

Absolutely. The other thing I was thinking of, as you were saying that is when you said the phrase like you'll always be attracted to that person if you do that. And the other part I would add to that is back when we were dating. We also had more of that positive sentiment override, right.

Speaker 2:

Like we believe in the best.

Speaker 1:

Yes, absolutely. We believe the best about our spouse and their intentions, and isn't it crazy, like whatever it is in the wedding cake that leads us to shift away from that, and it's probably just a combination of habituation and you feel like you get to know the person so you become laxadaisical and just lose intention about it and all of that stuff. But that's such a key thing too, like the more that we can see and believe our spouse in a positive light. Then it just continues to keep our head in the right space and to not start thinking about alternatives Like, well, what would it be like if I was with this other person? Would life be better? And that tends to happen once we start allowing ourselves to believe the negative things about our spouse and ruminate on those things.

Speaker 2:

And you know it's really interesting. The more I work with couples and have the opportunity to see this kind of inaction, the more and this is probably just my own hypothesis, but I feel like it's pretty backed in what I have experienced with other couples is we, we tend to co-regulate as humans. When you, when you spend a lot of time around somebody, you co-regulate, and so when you've got that sense of positive sentiment override about your partner, they rise to that. But if you're always seeing them in this negative light, then they tend to be like well, it doesn't matter what I do, you know, and so they tend to just mold to that or regulate to that as well.

Speaker 2:

So you've got to be careful about how you think about the person you're with, not only for them but also for you. If you're always noticing the bad stuff, which is to be clear, what our brain does like that's part of our brain's job is to point out the problems, like to keep you safe, like that's what your brain naturally wants to do. But if you're always finding the negative and always focusing on the problems, you're going to find more evidence of that and it just grows and envelops like dampens, crushes that attraction. But if you're looking for the good, if you're giving your brain good problems to solve, if you're seeing your partner with gratitude and appreciation and respect, then it just it makes everything stronger and your partner will track that and they will rise to that and you find more evidence. It's like it's like what came first the chicken or the egg, right, like you find more evidence of the fact that they're a great person and they just they are a better person for you Absolutely.

Speaker 1:

There's two. There's two stories and examples that come to mind as you're talking about it, just like highlight and exclamation point the points that you just said. And the first one, which I'm sure you've heard about I'm probably many of the listeners, but the I believe it was maybe I believe it was Harvard. This was several years ago where they put these kindergartners through this testing and told the teachers that 20% of them were just exceptionally intelligent and the other 80% were just kind of average and normal. And then they followed them until they I mean even into college and afterward, and the 20% that were told and the and what they told the teachers wasn't even true. They just picked 20% of the kids randomly and said these, these kids are incredibly smart, and I think they called them like the boomers or something like that. And they followed them in these 20% of kids because the teachers believed that they were just exceptionally intelligent. They ended up getting better grades, they went on to have the higher paying jobs, like, their lives turned out way more successful than these other 80% of kids, and the results were just made up. It was all a self fulfilling prophecy based on how, what someone believed about the other person, which I mean think about that with our marriage, like if we believe that our spouse is just, you know, selfish or narcissistic or whatever. That's what we're going to see and that's how we're going to treat them and that's how they're going to further continue to be, because it it's, it's part of just the psychology of how human behaviors work. The other part of it that I that I thought of.

Speaker 1:

This happened just earlier this week and I've shared a lot on my podcast. I've, I've. I am an anxious person. I started having anxiety when I was six years old, so constantly I'm like fighting the anxiety in my head. And on Monday this was on Monday I sent an email to a coworker last week and he didn't respond, which was fine. But then over the weekend he sent me a different email, just and it was very short and it was just about something else, and I was like, huh, that's interesting, he never responded to the other one.

Speaker 1:

And then we were we were talking on a different format, like Slack or something about something else and about his wife, his wife, his, his going through some health stuff and I was asking how she was doing. And then we were like in the moment, talking to each other. And then I asked him if he had gotten my email and he didn't answer and like he just stopped. And I was like what is going on? And so in my mind I began to paint this whole picture of like he's planning to quit, he's mad at me, there's something I've done.

Speaker 1:

And I just kept ruminating and ruminating of all these terrible things that had happened, none of which were actually true, they were all just me. So finally that afternoon I was just going to call them. So I picked up the phone and I said I don't mean to annoy you, I just need to know. Like, did I something in the email? I send a Fendi you sent? You know, send a Fendi. Or like tell me what's going on. And he goes what email? And I said this one is all straight. And then I was like well, even in our text messages, I brought it up and you and he was like I never saw that text. It's like okay, it was all in my head. He was like we're good, we're fine, we talked everything through. And I thought you know, this happens 99% of the time. What I believe is happening and the story I'm telling myself isn't even in reality, it doesn't even reflect the other person's what they're actually thinking or what they're doing.

Speaker 2:

So that's such a great example of how things start in our marriages, too right, when we don't have open lines of communication and we can't go to each other and be like, hey, this little thing happened. The story I made up about it is and we can just kind of create these horrible narratives about something that we're like totally making up in our heads For sure. So crazy, yeah, Awesome. Well, this has been. It's been so fun to talk to you, kimberly. I love your story. I think it's so fun. The way you told it and your passion for marriages is just really, really awesome. I love it. I always end my podcast with this question If you had the undivided attention of all the couples in all the world for just a few moments, what do you think is the most important thing you could teach them about keeping the level of attraction in their marriage high?

Speaker 1:

Oh, that's not how I thought you were going to end that question, I know.

Speaker 2:

I was like what did we learn in this interview? I'm going to pull it in.

Speaker 1:

Well, I'm going to answer the question I thought you were going to ask and I think I can loop it all together.

Speaker 1:

I would say to them that there is always hope for your marriage to be better than what it is today, and there is always hope that things can turn around for good, and the situation that you might be in now or in the past, or the fear you might have for your future, like it doesn't have to be that, and whether it's that you feel like you've fallen out of love or you're not attracted anymore, or that you're struggling, so many times the world wants to tell us that the answer is to just give up and start over with someone new, and that never answers the problem, because so many times, what we don't realize until we do that is whoever you marry, you marry a set of problems and they marry a set of problems, and so the real key is how can you learn to love each other and feel accepted through all of your of, all of the best, all of the baggage, all of the hurt, because ultimately, what we all want is to know that someone is going to love us and be there for us, no matter what has happened.

Speaker 1:

So, even if your relationship feels completely hopeless right now, what I can tell you is I have seen the craziest of situations be saved and that there is hope for a better future, and there is hope that things are going to turn around. And the best thing that you can begin to do is starting with you. Not starting with making a list of everything your husband or wife has done wrong, but starting with what can I do to become the best version of me, and that's the best first step for you to take.

Speaker 2:

I love that so much and I do think that answers the question because if ever you feel like there's a loss of attraction in the relationship, you can go back to that question and think how can I make myself more attractive? And that's always where it starts. I love that. Thank you so much for your time. Will you please tell the listeners and the viewers where they can find you, learn more about you and your teachings and marriage helper and all the good things.

Speaker 1:

Absolutely. You can find out more by going to marriagehelpercom. We have a free mini course on there. If you're struggling with your marriage right now, then we can teach you a little bit more in depth about several of the principles that I talked with Monica about today. And then there's my podcast as well that you can listen to as well as with Monica's. It's called it Starts with Attraction, where I talk more about the pies. That's every single episode. We're diving into one of these areas of physical, intellectual, emotional and spiritual. I would love for you to have a listen.

Speaker 2:

So good. Well, thank you so much.

Speaker 1:

Thank you.

Speaker 2:

If you had as much fun as we did just now. I hope that you'll head over to your favorite podcast player and leave a rating and review for the show or share it on social media. That's how other people can find this awesome content. We can spread the message that happily ever after is possible. Feel free to check out my website, monicatannercom, to find out more ways you can work with me and, as always, thank you so much for spending this time with me. We'll see you next week.