Category Archives: marriage advice
Relationship Experts Tony and Love McPherson share their advice for successful marriage
June is the most popular month to marry. With 35 years under their belt, relationship expert Love McPherson and her husband Tony stopped by to offer their tips for building a love that lasts a lifetime.
You can find Love McPherson and her counseling services at LoveMcPherson.com.
She’s also one of several speakers participating in the upcoming, “I Am That Woman” retreat, a 4-day, 4-night women’s retreat at the Unico in Riviera Maya, Mexico from October 10-14, 2018.
The retreat, targeting women ages 40 and up, will feature excursions, yoga and meditation, live entertainment, and workshops led by world renown speakers: Susan L. Taylor, Founder and CEO of CARES Mentoring Movement and Editor-in-Chief Emeritus of Essence Magazine; Kim Coles, Actress, Comedian & Motivational Speaker; Tracey Edmonds, CEO & President of Edmonds Entertainment and Alright TV; Aida Rodriguez, Comedian & Activist; Tiffany Aliche of The Budgetnista; Cheryl Grace, Founder of Powerful Penny; Sheree Franklin-Hill, Author, Speaker & Intuition Coach; Amy S. Hilliard, Founder & Principal of The Hilliard Group; Edna Kane-Williams, Senior Vice President of Multicultural Leadership, AARP; Renetta McCann, Chief Talent Officer of Leo Burnett U.S.; Dr. Rita McGuire, MD, OB/GYN & Fitness Expert; Love McPherson, Relationship Coach; Dr. Karen Pendleton, MD, Ophthalmologist, Lifestyle Medicine; and Ernestine Shepherd, Body Builder & Fitness Guru.
Tickets for the Mexico getaway are now on sale at http://www.iamthatwomanretreat.com.
10 Tips From Other Couples On How To Keep Your Relationship Strong
Image via RawPixel/Getty Images
I can’t believe my husband and I will have been married for four years. It feels like only yesterday we eloped unexpectantly at the courthouse. No one could have prepared me for ups and downs that we’ve faced during our marriage. But I don’t believe anything could make me regret it either. The decision to make a long-term commitment to someone is one of the biggest life decisions you’ll ever make.
While I move into year four of marriage, I wanted to speak with others about what helped them make it through the turmoils of marriage. No two marriages are the same and, naturally, the solutions varied. But here are some of the things that have helped other couples through the years.
“It’s romantic to say your partner is your ‘everything.’ It’s also a one-way ticket to misery, putting that kind of pressure on a spouse. It’s okay to have a funnier friend. A hotter friend. A friend who likes the same stuff you like. Your partner can be perfect for you without being your everything.” — Esther, married for 20 years.
“I’d say the best thing we’ve decided to do is not rehash old fights. Once it’s over, it’s over and we don’t bring it up again” — Rachel, married for 13 years.
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“Non-monogamy and being allowed to find love outside of marriage allows us to be good partners at home and enjoy our family together without heartbreak and disappointment or boredom. Honesty and acceptance of each other’s needs means we ultimately want the other to be happy! That has kept us together.” — Janice, married for 14 years, two of which have been open.
“We share a sense of humor. That’s gotten us through many moves, job changes, unemployment, family stress, a hard pregnancy, and the unending ups and downs of having children!” — Carol, married for 15 years.
“My husband has always made me laugh. Even when we get mad at each other we don’t stay mad long because one of us makes the other laugh. I also really like him as a person, that helps. We also have always been willing to work on our relationship, we’ve used couples counseling twice to get us through rough patches.” — Kathy, married 25 years
“There are many things I could say, but one that I’ve been thinking about recently is that we’ve actually learned each other’s sense of humor. A lot of couples talk about sharing a sense of humor; I came into our relationship with the dry wit down, but I wasn’t very playful. He was very playful, loved to play innocent tricks. We’ve each learned — without any deliberate effort — to pick up and use the other’s sense of humor. It’s been great.” — Simone, married six years
“We have a rule — whoever cares the most about something wins. We may each have a different opinion about something, but usually, one of us can and does admit pretty quickly if we just don’t feel as strongly about it as the other one does. We figured out this rule when we were planning our wedding, and it has served us extremely well for 15 years.” — Carla
“Some things aren’t worth fighting about. Accepting who we are as people and knowing when it’s worth pointing out a mistake, that’s key for us.” — Michelle, married 17 years
“We hold a safe space for each other to be flawed and fully human. Neruda has this great line, “You among all beings have the right to see me weak.” Embodying this has seen us through some really hard moments. We also really take extreme joy in seeing each other grow and be happy. And we’ve agreed from the beginning that if there’s a moment where that’s not happening anymore, then it’s time to work on that together or to walk away without rancor and to honor the time we’ve spent together.” — Julie, married 12 years
“We don’t try to split household/childcare tasks 50/50; rather, we both bring 100% to everything all the time. The trick is that his 100% and my 100% could mean different things on different days. It all shakes out, and we aren’t building up resentment or keeping score of anything” — Hannah, married 13 years
“This is going to sound grim, but you just hang in there through the hard times. You just keep doing the work, even when it feels pointless. Doing the work means always coming back around to why you loved the person in the first place.” — Lane
“It’s not always rainbows and unicorns, but there’s no one else I’d rather navigate life with.” — Lindsay, married 6 years
“In my family, we often quote Dory from Finding Nemo: ‘Just keep swimming.’ After 21 years of marriage, you learn that sometimes things are harder, sometimes you’re closer, sometimes you fight more, and sometimes everything feels perfect. But like the tide, it never stays the same. To keep from drowning, you have to keep moving forward and adjusting to what’s happening around you.” — Amy
“We’re really good at being bored together! After 33 years. That’s the secret. Easy to hang with someone when there’s fun stuff to do and distractions… it’s the day in day out life that you have to enjoy together.” — Bethany
“I stopped listening to the advice to never go to bed angry. Sometimes, I’m just cranky and what seems like a big deal isn’t in the morning. When it does need to be discussed, we’re both well rested and nicer.” — Kathryn
Listening to the suggestions of other married people gave me a lot to think about. We’re always searching for a “recipe for success.” But perhaps it’s never been that simple — or that complicated. Maybe the secret to a successful marriage is trying to create something beautiful with what you have and letting love and commitment do the rest.
John Styron: The 'advice Shower' and Uncle John's Top 10 lessons for marriage
Another of my nieces is planning a wedding. When my wife asked what kind of shower the extended family should give — thinking maybe kitchen gadgets or china — my niece answered: “Advice.”
“Oh boy,” I thought. “Is this going to be a shower or a tsunami?”
Given that I have four brothers and a sister and we’ve all logged decades of marriage, and that my mother would be there still in deep reflection over the 60-plus years of marriage she had with my late father, that some of the cousins are just far enough into their bringing-up-baby marriages to have fresher perspective, and that other cousins are in their late teens and early 20s and marriage is not even on their radar yet, the event promised to be interesting, perhaps enlightening, maybe hilarious.
My niece (let’s call her “Eve”) is clearly not a material girl. She has long demonstrated a distinct family love and loyalty; her choice for an “advice shower” is consistent with her nature; nobody doubted that she could roll with the punches. Most of us are still just getting acquainted with her “Adam,” so we didn’t know how he would perform under a little pressure. There were lots of ways this could go badly.
My sister threw in a new twist: We would pass the book of advice around the room and each read an entry but not our own. Adam and Eve would have to guess whose advice they were hearing. My wife kept score.
A lot of the advice boiled down to, “Don’t keep score.”
Of course, that’s part of the fun in a game, necessary in business and much of life but potentially disastrous for relationships of love. Experience spoke. The temptation is ever-present and strong — we said to Adam and Eve — to reach for that one fact that will put your spouse in his or her place. Our failures on this front made excellent fodder for humor.
Some advice was ironic: “Beware of marriage advice from your family.” Some was odd: “Always neuter your pets.” Some was not particularly good (in my opinion): “Don’t go to bed angry.” (I’ve found that a good rest and the work the mind does during sleep is way more constructive than a late-night harangue.) And then there were recipes, the most practical kind of advice, full of the wisdom of experience.
I tried to tailor my words to the couple, who are both brainy and headed for grad school in biology (her) and nuclear engineering (him). Here’s my “Marriage Advice from Uncle John.” It’s a top-10 list of things I’ve learned from marriage (and Google); as I said to Adam and Eve, take any of it you like and discard the rest.
10. Most advice about marriage is discarded — until much later when you find yourself saying things that your old gray uncle told you years before but you couldn’t take him seriously because he had hair growing out of his ears.
9. The human body, like all matter, is mostly empty space; for example, a hydrogen atom is about 99.999999999 percent empty space. This reality is not what you see when you gaze lovingly into one another’s eyes. Some realities are very difficult to perceive.
8. Studies have shown that most people do not actually know themselves very well; spouses are crucial correctives to this. Speak up. Listen up. Some realities are very difficult to accept.
7. Never mistake truth for love.
6. Always distrust words such as “never” and “always,” particularly when describing the shortcomings of your spouse. You will eat those words one day.
5. Actual eating is more important than almost anything. Meals together — especially when you share the preparation and cleanup — are sustenance for the soul as well as the body. Take this communion often.
4. Your spouse’s soul and body are not yours, which may be the main reason they are so delicious. The best marriages honor the distance between two people and nurture the full flowering of each.
3. A full flowering marriage is like a biome. I have read that biomes are complex adaptive systems in which macroscopic patterns reflect the collective dynamics of individual units at lower levels of organization and feedback to affect those more microscopic dynamics. This is a pretty good definition of a marriage. It takes love to keep it healthy.
2. Love is made. You may think it is a miraculous gift from above, and it is, but the gift is actually your capacity to make love — by making the bed, making a meal, making your spouse’s day in any way small or large. (Sub-point: Lovemaking is not sex, but it is sexy and adds enormous heat.)
1. All marriages fail. Your marriage will fail — it will fail your expectations. But I trust it won’t end. The difference is in your commitment to make love even when you don’t feel like it. Happily ever after is actually today. Carpe diem! This is the day the Lord has made! If you, with word and deed, pronounce one another husband and wife each day, love will never fail.
Now, get this: Out of about 30 bits of advice, Adam and Eve, correctly identified the giver nearly every time. They have been watching us more closely than we knew. There is a lesson in that for all of us.
John Styron is a freelance writer in Granby.
Barack Obama Has 3 Questions for Anyone About to Get Married
He sure knows how to pick a wife, so listen up.
Barack Obama asks three important questions of anyone seeking his advice on getting married, which many of his ex aids did. The former president’s team ended up having “hundreds” of relationships form during his administration.
Now Obama’s former communications director and current co-host of Pod Save America, Dan Pfeiffer, is revealing what those questions are.
In his new book, Yes We (Still) Can: Politics in the Age of Obama, Twitter, and Trump, Pfeiffer writes that while working for Obama, the president offered up the advice he gives everyone about marriage.
An excerpt:
“‘So are you guys moving in together? This is the one, huh?’ Obama was always very proud of the hundreds of relationships that had sprung from his campaigns and his administration. As one example in 2016, I went to four different weddings of people who met working for Barack Obama. One of those was mine.
“He continued, ‘Here’s the advice I give everyone about marriage — is she someone you find interesting?’
“I was initially confused by the question, but I figured he must have a point.
“You will spend more time with this person than anyone else for the rest of your life, and there is nothing more important than always wanting to hear what she has to say about things,” Obama continued.
“‘Does she make you laugh? And I don’t know if you want kids, but if you do, do you think she will be a good mom? Life is long. There are the things that really matter over the long term.’
“We had just pulled up to the plane, and the world was waiting for us to get out.
“‘Howli is incredibly interesting, funnier than I am, and will be phenomenal mom,’ I told the president.
“‘Sounds like she’s the one. Lucky you.’”
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