Why Is A Healthy Marriage Important?

How important is it to have a healthy marriage? Can two people simply coexist and still have an emotionally healthy and strong family? Is it possible for a marriage that is barely existing to become healthy?

Many of you have not had examples of what a healthy family looks like. Maybe you grew up in a single parent home, or had an absentee parent, emotionally unavailable parent, or there could have been addiction and abuse present in your family. You carry your past experiences with you, until you learn to overcome the messages that you received and reshape your faulty thinking patterns, beliefs, expectations, the way that you speak, and how you approach relationships through your life skills. You can tear down destructive root systems built upon poor life experiences, and establish healthy relationship skills, communication, conflict resolution, and coping skills, to have successful relationships.

A family is only as healthy as the couple, and couples are only as healthy as each individual. The way that you as an individual have developed your patterns of thought, expectations, life, and relationship skills, affect the overall health of your marriage. You need a healthy self image and a sense of self-worth that agrees with how God sees you, or your marriage relationship is affected. To have a healthy marriage, each person must become an emotionally healthy individual.

For example, if your spouse has a faulty identity, is insecure, and doesn’t like who he or she is, then compliments, encouragement, and even love can bounce right off the stronghold wall. Another possibility is that your spouse may operate in distrust, jealousy, or control. Maybe you won’t talk about difficult issues in the relationship because your coping skill is avoidance. If you never talk, how can you communicate with your spouse? You cannot have healthy conflict resolution without communication. Communication and conflict resolution skills are required to maintain a happy and healthy relationship.

It is important to understand that when two individuals join together as one, each person enters the marriage with different experiences, beliefs, and behaviors. To have a healthy marriage you must consider the root system of how and where you developed your thinking and life skills. Marriages begin healing when each individual develops healthy thinking which produces healthy relationships skills. You can then add to your own development and foundation the marriage skills that produce stability in your relationship.

It is essential to be able to identify what healthy and destructive behaviors in marriage look like. Here is a list of 11 Marriage Essentials:

1. Marriage Essentials: The key to a successful marriage is not finding the ‘right one;’ it’s learning how to meet your spouse’s unique temperament needs and love them the way they need to be loved.
2. Marriage Essentials: One of the keys to maintain a healthy relationship is communication. A relationship that contains the ability to communicate and resolve conflicts, is a relationship that will survive the test of time.  
3.  Marriage Essentials: Respect is essential for long term relationship. We must respect our spouse’s feelings, thoughts, and opinions to foster healthy intimacy.
4. Marriage Essentials: To have a healthy marriage intimacy is necessary, but it is developed from honesty, which creates trust and safety, so intimacy is possible.
5. Marriage Essentials: When you work together in a partnership, you are willing to share the load so no one is overwhelmed.
6. Marriage Essentials: In marriage two unique people become one, and this works well if there is respect and the ability to be the individual you were created by God to be.  
7. Marriage Essentials: A team cannot function if each individual is focused on his or her own interests only. In marriage keep a team mindset, and work together for success.  
8. Marriage Essentials: In dealing with the family finances, be responsible by setting financial boundaries and sticking to them, be present and cooperative – working together share the load, follow a budget, and learn financial skills to relieve stress in marriage.  
9. Marriage Essentials: Faithfulness and trust are necessary for intimacy. Infidelity brings destruction to the foundation of marriage. Do not kick dirt over the wound and try to just go on, repair the foundation.  
10. Marriage Essentials: Pornography destroys marriages, do not minimize its presence. It is a poison that kills love, respect, and honesty. There is healing for sexual addiction issues. Heal the foundation and succeed in your relationship.  
11. Marriage Essentials: The Bible says that two must walk side by side which requires us to have our priorities in alignment with God so that we will not be going different directions but be aligned with one another.

There is power that comes when two whole, healthy individuals come together in marriage. That is strengthened even more when God is the center of the marriage:

“Though one may be overpowered, two can defend themselves. A cord of three strands is not quickly broken.” (Ecclesiastes 4:12 NIV)

It’s vital that you seek growth and gain tools and develop skills to navigate through your challenges and be an overcomer. All it takes is two people willing to learn and grow. Then each individual, your marriage, and your family can be transformed.

 Dr. Michele

Copyright © 2013 by Michele Fleming Ph.D.