What Most People Get Wrong About Marriage

Are you stuck in the same relationship patterns and wondering why nothing ever changes? In this video, Dr. Kimberly Beam Holmes, CEO of Marriage Helper, breaks down what most people get wrong about marriage and relationships, and what you actually need to do to turn things around. Drawing from a powerful biblical story and real-life experience, Dr. Holmes shares why real relationship change starts with you, why getting uncomfortable is the key to a thriving marriage, and how to stop waiting for your spouse to change so your marriage can finally move forward.

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Transcript

Why Relationships Stay Stuck

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Here's the thing that most people get wrong about relationships. And I know that that sounds incredibly cliche, but in this video, I'm going to break down the reason why people's relationships stay stuck. Why people continue to complain about being married to a narcissist or being stuck in a relationship where there's toxic masculinity or whatever the newest hot catchphrase in pop psychology is. Those are all just spinning the same freaking wheels, but not getting to the core issue. Today's video, I'm going to get to the core issues of what's really going on and the shifts that need to happen in order for your relationship to change. But I gotta explain it with a story. So here's the thing: my husband is 38 years old and he's reinventing himself for the third time, which I love. He's been in the military, he's been in law enforcement, and now he's decided to go back into aviation, but this time as a commercial pilot. So he has been working on all of those certifications and degrees. And along the way, he found out about this missions aviation conference, which honestly, missions aviation has been a dream of his and something that he's been wanting to do for a long time. And we found out that their international conference was this year. And so Rob, my husband, signed us up weeks beforehand. And the week right before it was supposed to happen, we started having a ton of issues. There were scheduling issues, childcare issues. Even the night before we were supposed to leave, there were literally tornadoes. There were all of these things that were keeping us from moving forward, were keeping us from going. And I thought in that moment, man, this is how people feel when they're trying to figure out what to do about their marriage. You feel like you know exactly what needs to happen, you know where you need to go, you know the vision of the future that you want to see and experience for your marriage, but you don't actually know how to get there. Or when you start moving towards it, a ton of obstacles start coming up. And you begin to struggle with discerning are these flags that I'm supposed to lean into and realize? Are these things coming up because I'm not supposed to stay in this marriage? Or are these coming up because it's the enemy or forces outside of our marriage that are trying to split us up when really what we need to do is be together? I think this is what so many of us struggle with in relationships and knowing what to do in order to make the relationship thrive. And it can keep us from doing anything or to do the wrong things because we start listening to bad advice. You know, the day before we were supposed to leave for this missions aviation conference, I went to AI and started asking questions about missions aviation, trying to get some answers, honestly, trying to gather, is it worth our time to go? Is it worth me being away from work? All of these childcare issues and things we were having to work out. And honestly, AI said, it ain't gonna happen. Your husband going into missions aviation anytime soon is just logistically impossible. But guess what? Like it always is, AI was wrong. And what we ended up doing was going to the conference, and it ended up being honestly life-changing. We met so many amazing people. God opened so many doors for us, one of which I can't stop thinking about. You see, at the conference, someone came up to my husband and said, Hey, I want to invite you and your wife to sit at the speaker's table at our final night gala, our big banquet, at the end of our time together, at the end of the conference. And you get to sit with our special guest speaker, who is the COO of Samaritan's Purse. His name is Edward Graham, which was such an honor. And when we got to the dinner that night and got to speak with Edward and get to know him, he started sharing a story to us and to everyone there that I haven't been able to stop thinking about. He was sharing about his own experience of ending up at Samaritan's Purse, where he ended up leaving the army in order to go and be a part of that after a great career in the army. But he was talking about how it was a difficult decision for him. And this matters to you too, because I know that there's a difficult decision that you're likely facing right now. And he started sharing this story from scripture. Now, you may not be a Christian, and that's fine, but the principle of this story, I believe, is going to impact you. And maybe you are a Christian. You've probably heard and know this story, but please allow me to just break it down a bit. So there are four books in the Bible called the Gospels, and these are the accounts that talk directly about Jesus' life while he was here on earth. And so we see this story in scripture where the 12 disciples, who are 12 men that were following Jesus, were in a boat. Jesus had told them to go on ahead of them, that he'd catch up with them later. They probably figured he was just gonna meet them on the other side and was just gonna walk around and meet them their way later. But no, instead, Jesus decided that he's gonna walk on water and meet them in the middle of the night. So they're in the boat and they see Jesus coming, and there's wind and there's waves, but they see him walking towards them. And so one disciple named Peter, who's the risk taker of the group, probably the crazy one that got on all the rest of their nerves, but he took some bold actions. And that night in particular, he saw Jesus walking and he got this great idea that he wanted to go walk towards Jesus. If Jesus could walk on water, then surely he would be able to help Peter somehow walk towards him on water. And guess what? It kind of worked. When Peter stepped out of the boat, he was able to have the faith, the bold faith, to walk on that water towards Jesus. But then here's the thing: Peter got distracted by the wind. Got distracted by the waves that were happening. When he took his eyes off Jesus, he started to sink. And that's typically what we hear in church or in Sunday school. Peter took his eyes off Jesus, and that's where he began to sink. And that's the lesson. And that's a great lesson. But actually, what is a different lesson, but maybe a more applicable and practical lesson for you right now in your life, I know it was for me, is the fact that Peter's the one who got out of the boat. Peter is the one who took the hard, bold step and got uncomfortable. The other 11, they stayed comfortable. They watched it all happen and learned from his experience. But Peter was the one who learned it from it happening to him. When he began to sink, it was Jesus' hand that got him and that he held on to. Only Peter has that experience because he became uncomfortable. Peter did a lot of other things that we see in stories in the Bible where he had a lot of boldness and he didn't always do the right thing. But eventually Peter got to the point where he became bold in his faith and bold in his trust of Jesus and that Jesus is who he says he is, that he ended up preaching a sermon that brought 3,000 people to God, to Christ, to believe that Jesus is who he says he is. And when I heard Edward Graham talking about that, it made me start thinking and asking myself, where is it in my life that I am just too comfortable? Where do I need to get uncomfortable? Because here's the thing: we can get really comfortable in the way that we're treating our spouse, in the way that we are just doing our day-to-day life, in getting on our phones at the end of the day while each of you are sitting on opposite ends of the couch. We can get really comfortable with sleeping in separate beds. We can get really comfortable with watching things that maybe we shouldn't be watching, talking to people that maybe we shouldn't be talking to. We can get really comfortable doing the things day in and day out that absolutely destroy marriages. We can get really comfortable with just little slights that we make to our spouse about how they need to change and how we wish they would do things differently, how they're not good enough. And in order for us to be able to love them fully, they need to meet our standards and our expectations. We can get really comfortable with that because it's everything that YouTube and influencers are telling us. Everything you're hearing is you do you. You make yourself happy. Do what makes you happy. If someone is hurting you in a relationship and it's hard, leave. That's the whole premise of the relationship. It's something you fight for. It's something that you commit to, it's something that you work to make good. But no, if it's not easy, if it doesn't make me happy, I am just gonna leave and be with someone who will. You're never gonna have a real relationship. In fact, you're staying comfortable because you're staying comfortable with doing what makes you happy. What if we shifted our mindset to not just wanting to do what makes me happy, you doing what makes you happy, but instead doing what makes us holy? That's a hard word. That's a hard word, especially for people who aren't of a faith background. But the word holy means set apart. What if we did things that set us apart from the world because the world is crazy? They're sleeping with multiple people at one time sometimes. They're constantly just ruining what a family looks like. They're tearing down the things that actually lead to stability in a home. That's what the world is doing. I don't want to be like that. I would rather my relationships be set apart. I would rather work hard for them. I would rather them be long-lasting, and I would rather end my life surrounded by the people that I love now, that have loved me for years, that I've done life with and that have cheered me on and loved me through and never left my side. And me never left theirs, not because it's easy, but because it's hard and because it's worth fighting for. These are the things that no one says. I was just watching a reel yesterday on Instagram where someone says, you shouldn't care about other people's perceptions of you. This person had like, I think, a million and a half followers. You shouldn't care what other people's perceptions of you are. That's that's actually a lie. That is actually untrue because other people's perceptions of you and the way you treat them is how you know if you're good to be in relationship with. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying the way I treat someone, that's not what matters the most. My intentions are not as important as the other person's perception of how I treated them. And their perception of how I treated them should be my guiding metric of whether or not I need to change. And if you want to have a healthy marriage, you've got to be okay with change. And it has to start with you. My marriage didn't get saved because my husband changed. I wanted my husband to change. I hated him at one point. I regretted ever marrying him. I wished that we had never gotten married. I thought I made the biggest mistake of my entire life. And this was like two years in. I had so many things I wanted him to change, and I definitely let him know about it. And you know what? He should have changed some of those things. I wasn't wrong in some of my wishes and in some of my desires for that. But I was unwilling to even think about how I needed to change. I could never control him, I could never make him change. Never have, I never will. But it wasn't until I began to change, which was uncomfortable, that the marriage began to change. And ultimately he began to change. But you know what? You know what else happened? When I changed, I also began to accept him, to become less critical of him. And some of the things that I wished that he would change and that he would do different, they stopped mattering because I loved him more. I loved him more than whatever that desire was, whatever that request was. And I knew that he loved me more. We're not perfect, but we've been married 15 and a half years now, and I can say I love him more now than I did then, and I know I'll love him more in 15 years from now than I do now, because we work through the hard, and it's not always comfortable. Sometimes it really sucks. But what I'm trying to say is your marriage is worth it. And so if you're wanting things to change, if you're wanting your relationship to change and you're not wanting to stay stuck, it has to start with you. And it has to start with you being willing to get uncomfortable, to get out of the boat. Guess what? You're gonna fail a couple of times, but that's okay. You'll get back up. If you're a Christian, you have Jesus pulling you right back. But you have to try because you can't save a marriage that you don't actually try to save. It's just like those commercials: a body in motion stays in motion. You have to start doing something. If you're just sitting there waiting for change to happen, it's not going to come. If you're just sitting there praying for God to change your husband, start praying that God changes you. If you're just sitting there thinking time is going to fix everything, it's not. It's time for you to start looking inward and do something about it. We've created a free assessment that you can take at Marriage Helper that will help you understand: is your marriage worth saving? Spoiler alert, it is. But it'll also tell you how many reasons you have to save your marriage, and it'll explain those reasons and why those are important. And it'll give you a full kind of like PDF that you can even save, and it'll explain to you the key components and what you have working in your favor right now and the parts of your marriage that are maybe kind of rocky, but at least you'll be able to have awareness of exactly what you need to do. You can take that assessment completely free by clicking the link in the description. If you want something to change, then you've got to be willing to make change happen. You've got to do something. Start now.