The Marriage Garden: Cultivating Your Relationship so it Grows and Flourishes

Introduction

Welcome to the Marriage Garden!

The University of Arkansas sponsors a botanical garden not far from our home. It is breathtaking! Under the protection of a forest canopy, Nancy and I meander along the winding paths, enjoying a profusion of colors. The giant trees shelter the 210-acre peninsula and the magical paths on Lake Hamilton from the world. The Japanese maples soften the landscape. Streams and ponds invite quiet reflection. Magnificent blooms inspire awe.

Each season shares unique riches with visitors. Winter offers its camellias; spring its daffodils, azaleas, and dogwoods. Summer is enriched with wildflowers and roses. In the fall, the garden catches fire with vibrant leaf colors. It’s hard to imagine that the Garden of Eden was any lovelier than Garvan Woodland Gardens.

As Nancy and I sat on a bench overlooking the verdant gardens during a recent visit, the beauty all seemed so natural and effortless. Nature smiled. We surrendered to peace. At such times there is no hint of the army of trained specialists who care for the gardens. Hundreds of people invest thousands of hours every month to make the garden Edenic. They watch for pests, spray for blights, plant bulbs, prune branches, and fertilize steadily. An army of trained professionals makes the garden look perfectly natural. Yet we blissfully enjoy peace, quite heedless of the efforts that make our serenity possible.

The Marriage Garden

There’s a good reason we compare marriage to a garden. A good marriage is as lush, rich, and satisfying as a great garden. But neither the good marriage nor the great garden happens without wise and consistent effort. Marriage, like a garden, can be renewing and life sustaining. Yet neither will happen by accident.

There are many things that amateur gardeners do that are ineffective or even counterproductive. For example, the popular practice of smearing black sealer on a pruning wound is a bad idea. It inhibits the tree’s own healing process and may even provide a place for disease to grow. Still, the practice persists. Many people feel compelled to cover any tree wound with some chemical bandage.

There are many popular marital remedies that are similarly ineffective or even counterproductive. For example, many people believe that the key to marital success is the sharing of discontents in ways that are fair. The assumption is that we must let our partners know what changes are needed if we are ever to have the relationships we want. This practice not only fails to enrich a relationship, but it regularly creates a spiral of fault-finding that can doom a relationship.

Common sense is not always good sense. That is why it has required decades of intensive research on marriage to provide the key to building strong relationships. Research shows us where common sense is nonsense. We want to do the things that strengthen our relationships rather than destroy them. Doing the wrong things with good intentions is still likely to have harmful consequences.

This book is focused on six processes that research has shown to make marriages flourish. Each chapter considers one of those processes and shows how you can make your marriage blossom like a magnificent rose by applying that chapter’s process in your romantic relationship. It may surprise you to find that when you do the right things, you can actually have a better marriage—with less effort than needed to do the usual things that you thought would help.

That doesn’t mean that a good marriage happens without effort. It only means that we sometimes invest herculean efforts in doing the wrong things. We want to help you do the right things. And before we even begin to talk about those six key processes, we want to share some basic rules for gardeners. These principles are somewhat like the rules that Garvan Gardens would give you before making a tour of the gardens. They might ask you to avoid pulling up any flowers, stomping off the designated paths, or littering.

We want to provide you with six tips that will make your trip through The Marriage Garden safer and more enjoyable. These six guiding principles are worth remembering every time you think about your relationship. These principles will prepare you to enter The Marriage Garden and learn the processes to cultivate a vibrant, flourishing garden.

Remember the Guiding Principles

See the Good

Our lives and relationships are packed with a mixture of complaints, joys, disappointments, and satisfactions. There are bruised sensibilities and battles about toilet seats, facial hair, body odors, and noises. There are also times of fun, laughter, closeness, and joy. Both negative and positive experiences are entirely natural.

Because of the mixture of good and bad, it is quite natural to think that we must be continuously pulling weeds from our partners’ souls. If we fail to be vigilant, the weeds may take over! Yet the master gardeners we know tell us that the best way to deal with weeds is to grow healthy, desirable plants to shut out the weeds. The same is true in marriage.

According to research, the key to healthy relationships is not the constant attention to weeds and pesky behavior. We may think that we’ll build a better relationship by dealing with our discontents. But this keeps the focus on the problems. When we focus on our discontents, we are likely to get stuck in them. And, after pulling the weeds, we’re still likely to have bare earth—that is, even if we could get our partners to stop doing the things that annoy us, we would have partners who are dispirited and discouraged. They will have stopped being themselves.

The surest way to make progress toward building a vibrant marriage is to plant strong and healthy plants. Let them crowd out the annoyances—if not in reality then at least in our minds. Notice what you’ve done that has been satisfying and enjoyable. Focus on the good in your marriage!

Let me give you an example. Nancy and I (Wally) had not been married very long when I noticed that she sometimes left things on the kitchen counters. She seemed like a decent human being, yet she would leave ajar of peanut butter sitting out. I wondered what was wrong with her. Early in our relationship, I tried telling Nancy things like, Honey, I really appreciate a tidy kitchen. Do you mind putting away the peanut butter after you use it? In spite of my perfectly reasonable request, Nancy seemed to feel hurt. She put away the peanut butter, but her spirits seemed to sag. And a few days later, peanut butter would again be left on the counter.

Finally—years later—I realized that it didn’t bother Nancy to have a few items left on the counter. It bothered me for some reason. (Am I a perfectionist? Did I learn some arbitrary family rules in my childhood?) So I learned a priceless lesson: If the peanut butter bothered me, I could put it away.

Please don’t misunderstand me. We can make requests and express preferences to our partners. But if they know about our preferences and still don’t act on that knowledge, then we can take responsibility. We don’t need to dwell on the weeds when we can plant a vibrant plant in its place. I can, for example, thank Nancy for the peanut butter fudge she makes for me. And I can put away the peanut butter myself.

When we are mindful and thankful for all the good things our partners do, they are happier, we are more peaceful, and the relationship flourishes. So don’t dwell on irritations. Instead, think about and talk about all the good things that are a part of your relationship.

Reflection

This idea is likely to be more helpful to you if you take a few minutes to reflect on these questions:

• What does your partner do that brightens your life?

• When you run into irritations, what can you do to minimize or remove them?

Notice Your Feelings

Some thoughts and experiences help us feel more peaceful and happy. Others make us more tense and angry. Feelings provide us vital clues.

If we dwell on the thoughts and feelings that make us angry, we are likely to get angrier. It’s a predictable path. Something bothers us. We try to understand it. We look for related experiences. Pretty soon we conclude that our partners are messed up. We will probably feel an urge to lecture them or avoid them.

In contrast, if we privilege our positive feelings—if we dwell on them and trust them—we are likely to get happier. Positivity snowballs. We feel grateful for our partners, we act more kindly, and the relationship grows. We find ever more positives.

Every day that we are together with our spouses we have plenty of opportunities to feel positively or negatively toward them. Every day they will do things that could annoy us. Every day they will do things that could please us. We can choose which ones to honor with our attention, reflection, and comments.

You can see how much this is like gardening. If we want some weeds to die, we can cut them off from light and water. If we want flowers to grow, we can be sure that they get our attention. When they begin to wilt, we can be angry at them. We can wish we had never bought them. Or we can water them.

One of the clearest findings of research on marriage is that partnerships grow when we focus on the positive.

We have friends who have only been married a few months. They come from very different backgrounds. He comes from an easygoing family in a small town. She comes from an intense family and works in the fashion industry. If you’re pretty perceptive, you can anticipate what challenges they are facing. He doesn’t worry much about appearances and acts in ways that annoy his wife. She pesters him about it, but she might as well be asking a rose bush to grow rutabagas as to ask her husband to be as style-conscious as she is. It just doesn’t matter to him. So she spends a fair amount of time being annoyed and he keeps wondering why his wife is upset. She is especially likely to get upset with her husband when she feels tired, stressed, or sick.

Our prediction is that there will be a lot of hurt feelings through the first years of marriage. Eventually she may realize that her husband’s easygoing ways are a perfect complement to her intensity and perfectionism. They are an invitation for her to relax. As the years go by, he may become more aware of ways he can adjust to please his wife. Because they are both good people, we predict that they will develop a strong marriage.

But if they dwell on the irritations, they will become more and more unhappy. They may divorce. Or they may stay together and be miserable. Yet, if they decide to look for the good and dwell on it, their marriage will get better and better.

Reflection

Take a few minutes to respond to these questions:

• Think of a time when you were tempted to be irritated with your spouse and you chose to see the good instead. Maybe you realize that this is a choice. Are you prepared to see the good next time something goes wrong?

• Feelings are the result of our thoughts. What thoughts help you to have positive feelings toward your spouse and your marriage?

Speak from Peace

The things we say when we are upset may feel powerful and authentic. Suddenly it seems so perfectly clear that our spouses are self-centered cads! So we tell them off and figure that they ought to be grateful that we are so perceptive and honest. We will fix their pocked souls. We may feel quite noble as we fuss with our spouses’ characters.

The trouble is that most spouses don’t want to be fixed; they want to be loved. As we start to diagnose partner maladies and prescribe wise solutions, our spouses are glad to tell us where we are mistaken. They know that some of our characterizations are simply flawed. And they probably have some ideas about what is wrong in our souls—which they are glad to share with us. Pretty soon we have angry partners clubbing each other with partial truths.

It turns out that anger can make fools of the best of us. Instead of seeing the big picture with personal struggles and imperfections mixed with life events, anger focuses us on a specific assault on our view of right and wrong. We ignore mountains of truth to focus on a tiny problem.

That’s why angry discussions are usually not very productive. When we’re feeling angry, disappointed, hurt, and resentful, we are likely to say and do things that aren’t fair and that hurt the relationship.

We all get upset. We all say destructive things. But we don’t have to make fools of ourselves. We can calm ourselves down. This can be a difficult task. Sometimes we feel that we absolutely must say what is on our minds. But we can have just enough presence of mind to say to ourselves, I’m sure there is a good reason they acted that way. As we set aside our accusations and start to take our partners’ points of view, a hint of peace can sneak into our souls. By breathing deeply and thinking peaceful thoughts, we prepare ourselves to share in a helpful way.

Sometimes it’s wise to say, Right now I am upset. I would like to take some time to think about my feelings so I can express myself in a way that is fair to you. Or maybe you say, Give me some room. I’m not ready to talk. Once we have claimed some time, it is vital to use it not to amass evidence of our spouses’ guilt but to regain our bearings on life. For example, puttering around in the backyard pulling a few weeds or enjoying the sounds of the neighborhood can help us settle down.

The wisdom of this course is easy to demonstrate. You have almost surely had someone very mad at you some time in your life. Maybe it was your spouse or a parent or a boss or a neighbor. When that person was chewing you out, did you reflect quietly, Ahh. Good point. I really would like to do better at that? I bet you didn’t. I bet you felt insulted and angry and mentally prepared your own counterattack. Lecturing people doesn’t make them wiser, it just makes them mad. And it damages relationships.

Instead of attacking and destroying our partners with angry accusations, we can speak from peace and thus bring our different perspectives together to build a stronger relationship.

Reflection

Take