Why Marriage?

     “Remind yourself that being helpful to each other will do far more for the strength and passion of your marriage than a two-week Bahamas gateway.” (Gottman) In this week’s readings, I learned that for couples to be more connected they need to turn toward each other by working in little life details, such as doing small activities together, and really enjoying being together in the most trivial tasks of everyday life. We tend to think that this little tedious every day-life events are not important to the welfare of the marriage, but Dr. Gottman´s research clearly attests that couples who remained married are those that turn to each other in mutual respect and cooperation. The author also identified two major hindrances that prevent couples from turning toward each other more efficiently. The first one is related with negative emotions or accumulated anger. It is very difficult to couples decode the partner´s clues or “bids” when we are hurt with unresolved past...

I confess that when I first read about love maps my first impression was: how am I going to do this? I don´t have time! But, after pondering and doing the first Love Map questionnaire I realized that I was not so bad actually. I remember years ago to hear that to love Christ we need to know Him through the scriptures, this same principle was cleverly used by Gottman. The love map is an important tool to help couples to know each other more profoundly, put it in other words, the Love Map it is actually more than a tool, knowing each other, not only superficially but with profound and genuine interest, with empathy and altruism, is probably the most important objective that a couple must work on in order to gain, not only temporal happiness, but most important an eternal happiness. The deep questions, ideas and other mechanisms developed by Gottman are not new, many of us, consciously or unconsciously, did or will do at least some of the love map questions during his married l...

This last week I had opportunity to begin reading an interesting book called The Seven Principles For Making Marriage Work by John M. Gottman and Nan Silver. This book, a reading requisite for the FAML 300 course, is surprisingly interesting. The author, an emeritus psychology professor, and famous writer, developed an important research method based on the observation of several physical and psychological traits of individuals in a control environment which he called Love Lab. The data collected and analyzed during many years serves as the most important tool for his couple therapy methodology, and literature thesis. Gottman’s book main claim, which I agree in part, is that deep friendship is the key for happy marriages. “Friendship fuels the flame of romance because it offers the best protection against adversarial toward your spouse” (Gottman 2). I said in part because friendship could not be enough, a deep understanding of the purpose of marriage is, in my view, essential to ach...

Being born and raised in a family that taught me the importance of family made me prepared for feelings of gratitude and desire toward marriage and family life. For instance, I remember that even before I was baptized, in my early 20’s, and not knowing clearly about the “doctrinal ideal of marriage”, extremely well presented by Elder Bednar’s article, I had this inexplicable desire of getting married, and more interestingly I had this certainty that love and ties created in and by a family would not end with death. I knew, without knowing exactly the doctrine (that was presented lately in my life by the missionaries), that the bounds of love created inside a family had more power than death, and would be eternal. It was not a surprise that, with 24, when I had the privilege of learning about the plan of salvation, and how our Father in Heaven had created a plan that could elevate families to an eternal perspective, my joy was full, it was like a dream come true, it was like I had a...