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

What If Everything You Learned about Marriage is Wrong?

• Monica Tanner - Marriage and Intimacy Coach for Christian Couples • Season 4 • Episode 336

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Traditional marriage advice often sounds wise but can secretly damage relationships when applied to modern marriages. In this episode, we examine five common marriage myths that might be undermining your relationship and explore healthier alternatives.

• The dangers of "never go to bed angry" and how it leads to sleep deprivation and worsened arguments
• Why "happy wife, happy life" creates an impossible burden on one spouse and ignores both partners' needs
• How "find someone who completes you" leads to unhealthy codependency instead of partnership
• The myth that happy couples don't fight, when research shows healthy couples simply repair better after a fight
• Why compromise is outdated and collaboration creates better solutions for both partners
• Bad marriage advice is anything that makes communication lazy or doesn't require vulnerability
• Plus, ten more marriage myths are explored in depth in the book

My new book "Bad Marriage Advice" launches September 30th! Email moni@monicatanner.com to join the launch team or visit www.badmarriageadvice.com for more information and bonuses.


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Speaker 0:

Hello and welcome to the Secrets of Happily Ever After podcast. I'm your host, monica Tanner, and I am also the author of Bad Marriage Advice. And starting now for the next six weeks or so, we are getting ready to launch this book into the world and I couldn't be more excited. Just yesterday, I got my galley copy and I don't know if you are watching this on YouTube. You can see this but if you're listening, imagine my excitement when I go out to the mailbox and I get a copy, a physical copy, of my book in my hands. I am so excited and I'm scanning the cover of it and if you look right here, if you're watching on YouTube, you can see this glaring typo error. Like literally, the word instead has an R in the middle of it. I was mortified, like how embarrassing. However, this is why you do the galley copy. This is why you get this physical copy of the book in your hand before it's actually published, so you can check it all out, make sure it all looks good. So we've got a few changes, corrections to make, obviously, but we've got some time. So super, super, super exciting.

Speaker 0:

Most of the podcasts leading up to this launch on September 30th are going to be about different aspects of this book. So in today's episode I thought I would just kind of tease out several of the pieces of bad marriage advice that are secretly ruining your relationship. So if you are excited about the book and you'd like to be kind of behind the scenes in the book launch process, if you'd like to help me get the word out because it's so important, please email me monnieatmonicatanercom. Let me know you want to be on the launch team and you're going to get all these awesome bonuses. You're going to get to see all the behind the scenes, you're going to get to talk to some of my amazing relationship expert friends and it's going to be awesome, I promise All right.

Speaker 0:

So let's get started with this episode, and I want to start with a question. Have you ever been given a piece of marriage advice that sounded sweet at the time, but now that you've actually been married, lived with another human kind of, been through some challenges together, you realize that that piece of advice was kind of terrible. Well, that has been the total like guidepost for this book. I wanted to prep my son and his beautiful new bride for what was going to happen, because they are getting married so young, I knew that so many well-meaning, well-intentioned adults in their life who care about them were going to start giving them all of this marriage advice and probably they were going to go. Oh yeah, that sounds like great advice. But I didn't want them to be kind of stumped or misguided about the advice. So I, as protective mama who wants to save them some heartache, wrote this book about 15 pieces of marriage advice. Most of this advice was given to me when I first got married and it took me years, maybe even decades, to sift through all of it and recognize why it was bad advice and what is a better plan.

Speaker 0:

So some examples like never go to bed angry, which sounds notable, right, it sounds like good advice until you're up at three in the morning arguing about how the toilet paper should be put on the roll, or something just ridiculous. That can be worked out maybe in 10 minutes when you're both thinking clearly in the morning, but at three o'clock it's like you're just yelling and screaming about something totally dumb, right, okay, so that one. And then the classic happy wife, happy life, which I mean, sure, but what if you're the husband? Right? What if you're the husband that's scrambling around all the time trying to make his wife happy? And what if your wife is a normal human with, 50% of the time, is just not super happy? I mean, we are created to feel the full range of emotions and what does that say about you as a husband when your wife isn't happy? And that's a lot of responsibility for the wife to just always be happy, right? So I mean you're going to have lots of experiences in life and the wife isn't always going to be happy.

Speaker 0:

But if we focus on happy spouse, happy house, meaning I, as the wife, am doing my best to ensure my husband's happy and my husband's doing his best to ensure I'm happy, even though, let's be honest, it's not my responsibility to keep my husband happy or his responsibility to keep me happy. The reality is it's my job to make myself happy and his job to make himself happy. But now that we've got that straight, I hope you understand how happy wife, happy life, is horrible advice. But I have yet to meet very many people who did not get that advice on their wedding date by some man in their life who was trying to help. So some of the myths might surprise you, some might sting a little, but my promise is that once you hear the truth behind them, you'll never fall for them again. You'll be like, oh my goodness, you're right. That piece of advice has made us a little bit miserable.

Speaker 0:

Every single one of the myths that I'm going to talk about today, in addition to many others, are unpacked in my brand new book, bad Marriage Advice. Again, it's going to be officially launched into the world on September 30th and you're going to want it for yourself. You're probably going to want it for your best friends, for your kids that are getting married, your siblings, your coworkers, literally anyone who calls or texts you about relationship drama. They're going to need a copy of this book. All right, let's talk about for a minute how this bad marriage advice kind of proliferates like it does. So bad marriage advice sounds familiar because usually we've heard it from people that we trust, like our parents, our mentors, hollywood, many of us right. Most advice has like a grain of truth to it, which makes it harder to kind of unstick. Also, probably all of this advice was useful at some time, like generations past.

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Marriage has changed so much in the last few years and decades that some of that well-meaning advice that worked for earlier generations, for our parents, grandparents, great-grandparents doesn't actually work with modern marriage as well, and also pop culture, and Hollywood has trained us to romanticize really bad habits. So like. The example I want to give here is Jerry Maguire, the famous scene where he says you complete me, right, and every woman just goes swoon. That's so sexy. I want someone to say that and think that about me until you really start thinking about it. Right, find someone who completes you. That's like the dream, right? You think that's the standard and it's romanticized again in movies and fairy tales and maybe your parents or grandparents talk about it. But it sets you up for dependency, not partnership. If I think that someone is my other half, that they complete me, that maybe we own each other, now you're going to get all kinds of enmeshment, codependency, big problems in your marriage. That can be avoided if you understand that you're already whole and you're looking for a partner to compliment you. You're looking for a partner to share your life with, not someone to complete your life or fix your life in some way. Right, so that's find somebody who completes you. That's the first chapter in my book. Right? So that's find somebody who completes you. That's the first chapter in my book.

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Really, really bad advice. I remember getting the advice big time on my wedding day. We were standing in the line and all the people that we love and who were part of our upbringing, we're walking through the line and I remember a couple of older couples that would come through the line and they were like just remember, don't go to bed angry with each other. Always pray before bed, don't go to bed angry. And in my 23 years of marriage and working with tons of married couples, the advice pray together every night before bed is wonderful advice. I will never tell you that that's bad advice. But not going to bed without solving everything is horrible, horrible advice.

Speaker 0:

So early in my marriage I lost so much sleep because I was like these guys know what they're talking about. If they say don't go to bed angry and it's biblically backed Like it says don't let the sun set in your anger in the scriptures, they must absolutely know what they're talking about. And so when my husband was exhausted and was like I have to get some sleep now, we're not going to work this out right now because I have to go to bed, I would unravel, I would come unglued, I would sob loudly, I would jostle him awake, I would move around in the bed, act like he was completely just disregarding me. I was obnoxious and guess what, when we were arguing about something at three in the morning that could have easily been solved with a little bit of a break and fresh eyes in the morning, it got out of hand and it was making us both very miserable. It wasn't until I stopped Well, very miserable. It wasn't until I stopped.

Speaker 0:

Well, actually, it took me probably a year of journaling my feelings till I realized that my abandonment issues, that I would spiral, that I felt like he was just leaving me somehow on unread that's kind of the modern term of it Right, and it was painful for me. But he didn't really understand that because he didn't have the experiences that I had growing up. So when I finally could like muster up the ability to communicate with him what it felt like to me inside, when he could turn over and go to sleep, not only that it was my abandonment issues, but also I was like we're not listening to the wisdom of our elders, right? But once we both could understand the experience that I had, there was a simple fix and this is what it was. He would say Monica, I love you. I'm not going anywhere, but right now I'm too tired to think about this clearly. So let's get some sleep and talk about it in the morning and guess what happened? Way healthier communication. Most of the time we didn't have a lot to talk about in the morning because it was just that we were tired and grumpy and taking it out on each other. But when we did have something to talk about in the morning, we could talk about it so much more productively because we had fresh eyes, we had rested, we'd taken a breather and gotten some perspective and it was so much easier. So that don't go to bed.

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Angry advice that sounds so right was actually very bad for our relationship and I haven't met a couple in my practice who actually agrees with that. I do hear that advice still given, but in practice it's not good advice. So let's think about a couple other ones. Happy couples don't fight. So when couples come into my office and they say that they don't fight, I actually worry more about those couples because I'm wondering why don't you fight? Is it because one or both of you is completely withdrawn and you don't care about the relationship? Is it because one or both of you are playing small and not talking about the things that are important to you, that you're sweeping things under the rug, that you're doing everything you can to keep the peace, that you're afraid to stand up to your partner. What is it? Why aren't you fighting? Because when two individuals get married and if you want to think about this in the religious sense God create us all so differently. No two of us are the same, so of course we're going to have different experiences, opinions, preferences on things.

Speaker 0:

So there's always going to be conflict in any healthy marriage. It's not whether there is conflict, it's how do we handle the conflict. Do we have the skillset to fight? Well, that's what I can help couples do. If they're not fighting, I wonder why they're not fighting. So John and Julie Gottman have done a ton of research on happy, healthy couples and what they found is that healthy couples have just as many conflicts as unhappy couples. They just know how to repair, they know how to communicate and they prioritize the relationship, meaning they work as a team against the conflict versus working against each other. So those are the major differences between the couples that are happy and the couples that are unhappy. It's not how much conflict, it's how do they handle the conflict. So the truth is here's the real truth behind it Fighting fair builds connection, so the more is here's the real truth behind it fighting fair builds connection. So the more conflict that we have and the better we handle it, the more connection we're going to create out of that conflict. So fighting is actually a pretty good thing, right?

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And then, if you've heard me talk on any other podcasts, I'm very passionately opposed to this idea that marriage is all about compromise. Again, probably at some point in history, this idea of compromising in marriage was really good advice, but it's very outdated. There's no reason to compromise anymore. We have so many resources, we have so many options, there's so many ways of doing things in our modern world that compromise is a very outdated idea. It breeds lazy communication. If you want to compromise, that means I give up some, you give up some, sometimes a lot. We meet in the middle. Nobody actually gets what they want. It engenders a lot of scorekeeping and resentment and it makes me feel like I'm giving a lot and getting less in return. That's what compromise does.

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Now, collaboration, which is what I teach in the book, is all about getting very curious, getting vulnerable, communicating with your partner cooperating and then coming up with collaboration something that neither of the two of you could have come up with on your own. Meaning, you take those differences of opinion, you take those different experiences, you widen your perspective, you put all the information out there and then you do some research to figure out how can we get the best of what you feel strongly about, the best of what I feel strongly about, and create a plan for the two of us that takes into consideration all of the things that we both really care about. That's collaboration, not compromise. All right, so those are five of the myths. There are 15 in the book and I want you to understand that every myth you believe shapes your behavior, the way you show up in the marriage, right? So over time, these small things, that kind of guide your behavior. They either build intimacy or they build walls.

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The danger is not realizing why your connection feels shallow, why your marriage feels off, why you're feeling so resentful towards your partner, why your anger is coming out sideways. Instead of just being able to communicate the things that are important to you, you're passively, aggressively fighting against the connection in your partner, right, because you're following this advice that everybody gives. That turns out isn't that great of advice. So my personal encouragement for you, that is, if you have been operating on bad marriage advice and I'm going to give you a hint here bad marriage advice is anything that makes your communication lazy. If you don't have to talk about it, if you don't have to get curious, if you don't have to be vulnerable, if you don't have to have good communication skills in your marriage, that's probably bad advice. Vulnerable, if you don't have to have good communication skills in your marriage, that's probably bad advice.

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Now, if it stretches you, if you have to get uncomfortable, if you have to talk about things that are important to you, if you have to really think about what's going on with me and how do I express that to my partner in a way that's productive, that they can understand more about who I am and I can understand more about who they are, that's probably good advice. But if you've been operating on bad marriage advice, it's not your fault, it's okay. You came by it honestly. It was modeled by your parents, by your mentors, by Hollywood. You were just doing what you thought was right. But there is a better way and you can change the narrative, starting right now. So the five myths or bad marriage advice that I talked about today are just the beginning. There's 10 more in the book and honestly, they're just as common and just as sneaky as the ones I just talked about.

Speaker 0:

So if this episode made you think, laugh, maybe squirm a little like think, like Hmm, that we do do that, like I do think that way about that, you can replace all of that bad marriage advice with skills that actually work. That is what my new book, bad marriage advice, is all about, and it's coming out September 30th. I couldn't be more excited. You can't purchase it until September 30th, but if you want to be part of my launch team, if you want to see behind the scenes, if you want some really great bonuses, please email me, monnie at monicatanercom.

Speaker 0:

If you just want to be on the list to get all of the information about the launch and about how you can get your copy of the book, make sure you go to badmarriageadvicecom, get on that list, get the bonuses that there are there, and if you know anybody that could benefit from getting better marriage advice than all the little cliches that you hear all the time out there, please forward them this episode, send them a link to badmarriageadvicecom. I guarantee they will thank you for it. So thank you so much for spending this time with me. Thank you so much for getting excited about the book. It's been a long time coming and I cannot wait to get a copy into your hands, a copy that doesn't have a huge typo on the front cover. So I'll be here, same time, same place, next week, talking about more bad marriage advice, and until then, happy marriage-ing.