Rich Relationships Refuge with Gil & Renée
Rich Relationships Refuge podcast with Gilbert J and Renée M. Beavers is fantastic because it's the best place to really explore the reality of relationships — the good, the bad, and the painful and confusing.
This podcast helps to illuminate what it means to be intimate with others and what it teaches people about them. It will make you want to strive for a kinder, more fun relationship with others. Many individuals don't have room in their hearts or life for people due to unforgiveness, regret, shame, and uncommunicated expectations. Rich Relationships Refuge is an experience with principles to learn.
There are tools to use with an emphasis on building, repairing, and restoring relationships with individuals and families in a safe community environment that will stand in a world that's falling apart. Gil and Renée are originally from Detroit, Michigan. Their relationship started with Renée rolling the pencil off her desk and Gil picking it up. They never knew such a small act would create a 37-year legacy of love.
Gil and Renée were only 21 when they happily committed to until death do us part. Gil retired from the Air Force, and Renée is a former salon owner who has been an entrepreneur and now an author for over 30 years. They have lived in over 13 cities throughout the United States and Germany. They are proud parents to an amazing and talented daughter,
Aharon (pronounced like Sharon, except with an A). After a family tragedy, they also adopted Renée's little sisters (Carmen and Monique).This couple has helped many other couples establish a new habit of love to strengthen their marriage relationship through their tested relationship tools and principles and as marriage facilitators through the Prepare and Enrich Marriage program. Rich Relationship Refuge with Gil & Renèe podcast is back and ready to move forward and deeper into our relationship strengths and growth areas.
Let's get empty of the pain from our past, unforgiveness, resentment, shame, and uncommunicated expectations. Our mission is to empower singles and couples to experience greater intimacy and fulfillment in their relationship with God, themselves, food, and money. This year our podcast will feature individuals and small business owners regarding their impact in these four areas. Gil and Renèe are looking forward to serving you and your relationships. Remember, you are more than enough! Now let's learn to live like it together! https://www.richrrmarriagementors.com/book-online
Rich Relationships Refuge with Gil & Renée
Six Secrets to Preventing Divorce and Building Lasting Relationships
Discover the six essential secrets to preventing divorce, rooted in over 35 years of marriage experience and insight from Rich Relationship Podcast hosts Gil and Renee. What if you could transform your relationship by embracing your differences and strengthening your bond with loyalty, commitment, honesty, and transparency? We promise you'll gain practical tools to nurture meaningful connections, whether you're married or dating, by learning from our personal journey and the biblical principles that have been our guiding light.
Join us as we share our love story, including raising our daughter and adopting Renee's two younger sisters, and how we've navigated the complex dynamics of being an extroverted introvert couple. Our conversation goes beyond personal anecdotes, offering you evidence-based advice rooted in our training as relationship coaches. With insights into speaking your partner's language and reflective practices like journaling, we aim to help you differentiate between lust and love, creating a foundation for honest, open, and transparent relationships. Tune in for an episode packed with wisdom, humor, and heartfelt experiences designed to inspire and equip you to cultivate lasting connections.
RICH RELATIONSHIPS REFUGE
Meet: Gil & Renée
Rich Relationships Refuge podcast with Gilbert J and Renée M. Beavers is fantastic because it's the best place to explore the reality of relationships — the good, the bad, and the painful and confusing. This podcast helps to illuminate what it means to be intimate with others and what it teaches people about them. It will make you want to strive for a kinder, more fun relationship with others., This a place where love flourishes, bonds deepen, and relationships thrive. We're Gil and Renee, authors, and marriage coaches, and we're honored to walk alongside you on your journey towards a rich and fulfilling partnership.
In a world where relationships can feel like a maze, we believe in providing you with the compass and map to navigate the path of love with confidence and grace. Whether you're single and seeking, newly dating, or preparing for marriage, our app is your sanctuary—a refuge where you can find guidance, support, and inspiration every step of the way.
https://www.richrrmarriagementors.com/book-online
Welcome to the Rich Relationship Podcast with Gil and Renee, where amazing things happen.
Speaker 2:Our goal is to help build, repair and restore healthy relationships. Hey everyone, I'm Renee.
Speaker 1:And I'm Gil from the Rich Relationship Refuge.
Speaker 2:And we started each day off with a kiss, so we figured we'd start off each episode with a kiss. In this episode we're going to talk about our marriage story and six secrets that prevent divorce, so hope you're ready, babe. You know how we like to watch all those relationship shows.
Speaker 1:Yes, yes, yes, love. And what is it?
Speaker 2:It doesn't matter what the names are, but we like to watch relationship shows and as a result of watching those shows we have kind of reverse engineered some of the things that we realize can be secrets to prevent divorce, and so but before we share with you the secrets that we kind of they're really not secrets, it's just things that we, I think we learned and we learn, we know and we grow from.
Speaker 1:But we want to share with you a little bit of backstory about us, because maybe you've seen some of the videos already and you just see who are these people talking to me about relationships and marriage and all that? Well, a lot of times you want to know how credible is the people or what makes them these experts. You should want to know.
Speaker 2:We don't consider ourselves as experts.
Speaker 1:We just have a lot of experience in doing something and that's what we've been sharing with people for over 17 years now and work with couples from eight different states and overseas and all that. But we just wanted to share this information with you now through this medium, so you can get an idea of who you're talking to or who we are talking to, so you know a little bit about us in the background.
Speaker 2:So we're both from Detroit, Michigan. We got married when we were 21 years old.
Speaker 1:And people thought we were crazy.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and everyone kept saying it wouldn't last. Well, the people who said it wouldn't last, you were wrong 35 years later. December will be 35 years, and so I think a part of it is understanding that so many times in the relationship space there are people addressing single women and people addressing single men, but as a couple we're addressing it from.
Speaker 1:We're addressing marriage from a female and a male's perspective with, also with the biblical background, because that is the foundation for what we have built our marriage and our relationship and our life upon.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and a part of it is understanding that we do believe that the Bible is the final authority, but there's ways. You have to learn how to apply it, and so we are certified through preparing the rich. We do have those credentials. So we're not just doing this based on our experience and our opinion, we're doing it based on the Bible 34 years of marriage and tons and tons of training through preparing the rich.
Speaker 1:And other courses that we've taken.
Speaker 2:Other courses we've taken, so this is not our opinion. We're never going to tell you. If I were you, you should do this, because it's really not about if you were me. It's about you being you and learning how to make your relationship work for the two of you.
Speaker 1:You know, because it's very important that you know not only the backstory of the people who are you're listening to whether it's through these videos or through our podcast but also to get an idea of who we are as people. Because, renee, I'll be the first to tell you I was like we'll just stay on podcast video and all that. I get it. I do it. I love being behind the camera, but I believe in this so much that I really said you know what I'm willing to say. I'll get in front of the camera so people can connect with when they hear the voice, with the person, because we know that's just as important when you're listening to things, and we always say it in the show. Thank you for your investment in time, because we believe that's what this is, you know.
Speaker 2:And I really want to commend you because I know that our personalities are different. I am an extrovert and Gil is an introvert, and so in most of these relationships you see one person who's primarily in front of the camera, but we're both committing to going outside of our comfort level and our personalities to help the next generation of people who look like us, and even people who don't look like us, because so many times we don't have examples, we don't have training, we don't have people we can go to that are healthy. So not that we're perfect, not that we have everything all figured out, but we're just willing to put ourself out there in a way that you have someone you can physically connect with and walk alongside you in this relationship, marriage and even if you're dating, um, it's important that you get these tools before you get into a marriage relationship so, as you, we started out the video talking a little bit about the backstory.
Speaker 1:You know we've been married 35 years, since December 34 years, 35 in December uh, but we, before we actually got to those years, we actually had a long road to get there, just from being together as a couple. We started out in Detroit. We're a retired military family from the Air Force we actually have lived in. I think this was move number 13 and may not be done yet, but we'll see where it goes. It may not be done yet, but we'll see where it goes. But that's the lovely thing about this now is no matter where we end up, we still are going to be able to bring you this kind of information yeah.
Speaker 1:So we have one daughter who's 32 this year She'll be 33. She'll be 33?.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Okay, 33 this year, and we adopted two other Renee's little sisters.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And we'll go into that. One day we'll do a video, just about um, because everybody has a backstory yes, and so our backstory is not beautiful it's crazy, but we will definitely share that too. So we gave birth to one beautiful daughter and we adopted my two little sisters, so we're the parents of three children. And yes, at 23 years old we had three children and my husband was in the military and he traveled a lot, and didn't make no money and I spent some time as a single mom.
Speaker 2:so there's some things that we will share and go more into that, but we want to just kind of let you guys know who we are and just share this episode of our love story, our marriage story, because marriage is something that we believe in wholeheartedly and we want to support the Institute of Marriage. We want to, we believe in it and we want to support it. And so we're going to talk about six secrets that we believe have kept us from getting a divorce.
Speaker 1:That actually prevented it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I'll say, the one thing for me is One of your things.
Speaker 2:One of my things is for me. I had really low self-esteem. I did not like myself, I did not think that I was smart, I didn't think that I was valuable, and the thing for me that has helped me has been Gil being one of the first people to really see me and believe in me, and so that made me have a sense of myself from someone else's perspective. So one of the secrets to um not having provenance from divorce was finding someone who sees the value in you and makes an investment in you, and so I would say for me that was one of the big things was him seeing me in a way that I didn't see. I got to see myself through his eyes and it really helped me begin to change the narrative in my head that I had about myself.
Speaker 1:And so the second one for me or the first one for me, but the second one for this video is, I say, loyalty. Loyalty for me was very, very important for who I was dating or who I was in relationship with, even before Renee and I got together. That was just a characteristic or a trait that I thought was very vital to any relationship, that you have to be loyal, because I was not one that actually dated a lot or went around and dated a lot of girls. That just wasn't my thing because one. It'd drive you crazy trying to keep all that stuff straight about who said what or what you said to whom, and then you may get caught and you may get in trouble. So I was like it's just easier to keep it simple and I've always been a one girl kind of guy, even from growing up. So even from that, from that perspective, loyalty being loyal to the person I was going to be with was something that I thought was very, very important. So that's one for me which is loyal.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and the thing for me was committed. I am the kind of person I am tenacious. If I make my mind up about something, it is very hard to get me to change. And so for me, I was committed to Gil. I had a. That was something I brought to the relationship. I think sometimes we need to understand these are the things that we individually brought to the marriage. The marriage didn't give it, give us these things. We brought these things. So for me, I was always very, very committed and commitment was very important to me. So therefore, that's what I gave. I didn't demand that he gave me commitment. I brought commitment to our marriage.
Speaker 1:You know, commitment is something that I thought was very important, even as Renee says it. I'm going to piggyback a little bit, not that she didn't explain it because she did, but from my perspective, the reason why that was so important. Because if you are committed to that one person, it makes life so much easier. And when they say people have commitment issues, that's something that you bring into the relationship. You should already know how dedicated or how committed you're going to be, even before you decided to establish a long-term relationship.
Speaker 2:so that was something that was for me yeah, and for me one of the things, another thing for me is transparent. You know we will talk about being hot. Wait, it's my turn.
Speaker 1:Okay, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, yeah so we all we have this acronym. You see it on the shirt says hot. That was number number two for me, which was honesty. Honesty was vital for me because for various obvious reasons, because if those lies start coming or you can't be honest with yourself about who you are and what you want out of the relationship, things of any relationship that you have to have. Because it kind of goes back to my first one about being loyal. If I can't be loyal to someone, which is just another form of being dishonest or lack of loyalty, is being dishonest to this person that I've decided to commit this, not only before I even get to the marriage altar, just the relationship of saying I'm going to invest my time, effort and energy into this person. That is something that is going to be very, very instrumentally important, vital. I can't emphasize that enough. Not only for us and maybe it's after 35 years. It's come to more clarity, but I didn't realize how important that was all these years later.
Speaker 2:So and for you. I think the reason why um honesty is so important is because what happened to you, because your dad, because when you had you have a parent that is not honest with you sometimes the reason why things are important to us it's because of things that happens, that happened in our childhood and because your dad wasn't honest. I think that's why a lot of things that we prioritize now as adults are a result of maybe something we didn't get.
Speaker 1:You know he wasn't honest as far as lying all the time. Sometimes you can just be through omission that you just are not being honest. It's really just more about keeping your word. There were times where he would say he would do something and he didn't, which made me, which is still another form of not being honest to yourself and to who you make commitments to. That was important to me, so that is just another form of being honesty. Now you can talk about your transparency.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so being transparent, I am the kind of person that when I walk into the room, I walk into the room totally naked. I'm open, I share everything. I don't mean physically naked, I mean as far as communication. That's something I had to learn as I grew and matured was that you can't walk into a room sharing everything. But that's one of the things that I think that Gil loved about me was that he didn't have to wonder what I was thinking. He didn't have to wonder how I felt about anything. I made it clear, and so transparency is a good thing as you mature and grow into it and learning the settings to be transparent. But that's one of the things about me. When people say I'm brutally honest, you don't have to be brutally honest. You just have to be honest to the point where the other person can understand what you're saying and they feel loved and appreciated as a result of you being transparent.
Speaker 1:And then my last one is I had to learn to love. You know, we come into a life with our past experiences and our past bad relationships or relationships that didn't go well. I remember listening to a movie and they say things end badly. They always end badly or they wouldn't end Well.
Speaker 1:Learning to love was one of the characteristics that I had to adopt, because I had already some ideas about what I wanted to see, and sometimes you may have to change your viewpoint or your perspective, especially when you're going into a relationship with another person, to say I have to change a little bit.
Speaker 1:So I had to learn to speak Renee. I paused there for a second because I'm not bilingual, but I had to learn to speak her language, because sometimes things are said that she has one meeting, I have one meeting and we need to make sure we're understanding the same definition of what is going on or what is being said. So I had to learn and one of the one, one key attribute that you can really adopt is what do you mean by that? Before you jump to conclusions, before you make assumptions, something as simple as what do you mean by that when you say so that is something that I had to do, which is what I mean by I had to learn to love and learn to speak, renee yeah, and one of the bonus things I'm going to give that's important is having a love for change.
Speaker 2:change is something that everyone has to be willing to bring to their marriage relationship, because without the willingness to change, or without the willingness to feel the need to change, you give the impression, or you send the message, that you have it all figured out and you're perfect. And so these are just six things well, seven that really help you to be prepared to go into any relationship, whether it's a work or a marriage relationship, with some longevity.
Speaker 1:Because that's going to actually prevent the divorce from happening. Because if you just practice some of these things that we share with you, it's going to change your perspective. It's going to give you different ways of seeing things. We always tell our couples that we work with there are no such things as marriage problems. There's individual problems that you bring into the marriage. So if you work on these six things, hopefully you get something out of it that will actually help you in your relationship, whether you're married, dating, single, looking Think about these things and start assimilating them into your life now, because that's going to help you later.
Speaker 2:So you need to be loyal, you need to bring commitment, you need to be bring honesty transparency, learn to love and be willing to change, because we don't have it all figured out and everyone needs to grow and change.
Speaker 1:So hopefully you got something out of this. We'll be sharing with you more little snippets like this, but also some of the shorts. Check us out on richrelationshipforrefugecom Website has everything and we'll see you in the next episode.
Speaker 2:Love you guys, bye. As women, we're so used to sharing with our sisters and our girlfriends that we don't learn how to share our feelings with our husbands. And so if you're in a relationship and you're developing that relationship, you have to learn how. So, if you're in a relationship and you're developing that relationship, you have to learn how to share your feelings in a way where the other person can understand it, and that's something the Lord showed me. How do you expect for him to know how to deal with your feelings if you never share them? So a part of that being honest is that safety feeling safe comes from practicing. You're not going to just feel safe because you're thinking, and you're going to feel safe when you take that first step and try, and they might not get it right the first time or the second time, but a part of building a relationship is to learn how to practice being open and sharing your feelings.
Speaker 1:And that's what leads us into the transparency. When you have that internal ability to interpret and really feel what your spouse or your significant other is feeling, that's because they're being transparent. You can almost feel and see okay, something is not quite right. The only way you can come up with those types of things is because they're being transparent, where you can actually figure out or you shouldn't have to figure out, but you can actually perceive how they are feeling and what they're thinking.
Speaker 2:sometimes and the thing I love about this is the honest and the open are about you and yourself, and the transparent is about you and the people around you. You have to be able to say I'm going to be vulnerable, this is an area that I'm growing in and I'm struggling. Could you please help me? Please help keep me accountable. So the transparent part of it is you sharing with the people around you what's going on in you, because that's how you're going to grow. So you need God, you need you and God, you need to really understand you. And then that's when you go into the part of it where you're letting other people in and you're growing from the things that you share, because the greatest way to grow is in relationships. You're not going to grow on the island of autonomy, because you got yourself there and so you have to allow yourself to get to a healthy place where other people are part of your relationships.
Speaker 1:And so, to wrap those things up, the part about learning to go deeper within yourself, that's what these time of reflection questions is really all about. We share with you about the lust and the love and being hot, but then you can take this information that we share with you and use the questions that are in the book to actually go deeper with yourself.
Speaker 2:And the thing that I love about the time of you writing is because you need to write down your own thoughts and how you feel right now and this year and this time, a year from now, you'll be able to gauge your growth, and so journaling is such an important part of really developing a good, healthy mental perspective and it's a good habit and so, to really preserve your own mental health and preserve your own growth, write things down so you can get a better understanding of who you are and who you're not.
Speaker 1:And so, to summarize everything that we talked about in this brief lesson, we talked about the imposter of lust, we talked about some of the things that you can identify as when you're falling into lust, but we also talked about what does love look?
Speaker 2:like. And we talked about love grows, because love and lust are not the same. Love grows and it flourishes, and it takes time and it takes commitment. And we talked about hot. Are you hot? Because that's the goal is to be hot and to build our lives to one love.
Speaker 1:So we hope you got something out of this lesson. We hope that you take the time to do those reflection questions, review this lesson over again and just really dive into it because, like Renee said, you're gonna get out of it what you actually put into it. Thank you for listening. Thank you for your investment in time. Remember to subscribe to the show and hit the notification icon to be notified when new episodes are posted on the podcast platform that you're listening from.
Speaker 2:Or you can always find us on our website at richrelationshipsuscom, or our YouTube channel, rich Relationships with Gil Renee. If you found this podcast helpful or you think it could help someone that you know and care about, please pass it along and share it with them.