Friendship In Marriage

I believe that it is one of the most important things to have your spouse be you best friend. This is important because when hard times come, and they will, you will be able to go to your best friend and discuss what is going on. This helps with when you need to strengthen your marriage, you will have the ability to go beyond just asking "How was your day?", you can really have deep discussions.

Ever since I was a little girl and I saw my parents relationship and heard my mother call my dad her best friend, I wanted that. I decided that day that I would be friends with my husband, and that he would be my best friend. This does not necessarily mean that we will be best friends before we get married, but I want to be really good friends. This way I know that I can trust my husband and he knows that he can trust me. I want to be able to tell him something and know that he will keep it to himself. This will really help when we fight or get into arguments, because I know that we will be able to talk to each other and over come our problems.

It is also important to not just have a good friendship before marriage, but to work on it all the time. This means that there need to be times where just "mom and dad" get time alone. This could be done everyday by just talking to each other. Have a specific time where just husband and wife can be alone. Since I am a very active person I think that it would be fun to do like my parents do, either exercise together or just take a walk together. I also like what my parents did with dates. They had a date night, Friday night, where they would go and do something that they wanted. Either dinner, a movie, even sometimes they would take a weekend off and spend a weekend together without kids. I find that this really strengthened their relationship and helped to make sure that they would know what was going on in each others life.

My mother also tried to have the house clean when my father came home that way the could just sit and talk. They would go and talk for about and hour when my father first got home. This is when the kids would take over dinner or anything that mom was doing, so dad and her could have their alone time. I really like this idea of just spending an hour right after work just to talk to each other. Along with this is the concept of "5 magic hours" meaning these five hours can help to strengthen relationships. This could be while making dinner, on a walk, and just talking to each other. It is really important to communicate with one another. That is the KEY to marriage, COMMUNICATION!!! You need to be open and not only just be able to talk, but to listen.

Last week I had an experience where I was talking to someone, and they told me that they feel bad when they talk so much around me. I told them that it was ok, because I preferred to listen instead of talk, and they corrected me and said that I also like to tell stories. I think this is the key, one person can not do all the talking or listening. It needs to be a two way thing, both people need to not only talk, but listen also. So that is important during these five magic hours. Make sure that each person gets a chance to talk, and listen. This will help to build that friendship that I was talking about that my parents have. They both learned to not only talk, but to also listen.