In the book by John M. Gottman, The Seven Principles for making Marriage Work, he shares one of his secrets in chapter 4. In the first principle he talks about enhancing your love map. What is your love map? "my term for that part of your brain where you store all the relevant information about your partner's life." This means keeping up on major events in their life, staying updated on their information of their feelings as their world continues to change. It means caring for what they do and how they do things. When you care for someone don't you want to know what their up to and why do it?
I love this idea of love mapping. I think it is very important to have a love map on your spouse. I know what its like to be married to an "Rory". (Gottmon shares a story about a husband named Rory in his book). My husband loves to work. He loves to make people happy with his work. He builds peoples backyards and they want all of his attention. My husband has an addictive personality. Everybody wants to be his friend. When he finishes a project, he is praised by those people and then praised by the people of Facebook after seeing his beautiful work. It started to drown me out of his life. I started to wonder if work and satisfying these people were more important to him than me or his family. When we would go around family and certain friends, they would ask me what my husband was up to and I couldn't answer the question. People were concerned about that. My mother finally asked if things were OK. If you don't know your spouses' "love map", people start to noticed. It starts to be a problem. Of course, I wasn't going to divorce him but I wanted to see if he noticed I was gone and went out of town with the kids for a week, "spring break" and he noticed and that was enough to make him listen to me and know how serious I was about this workaholic situation he was in.
In the book Drawing Heaven Into Your Marriage by H. Wallace Goddard, PhD. shares in chapter two, Obedience and Sacrifice "willing to submit in all things", shares "Most of us want the prize without paying the price. We want to have a close, loving marriage, but we're not willing to give up our pet affections." He also mentions later in the chapter, "We cannot have our eyes on our partner and ourselves at the same time."
My husband recently went through the understanding of sacrifice. He was trying to do everything by himself but not realizing that we were a team. We are "ONE" when it comes to our decisions. He wasn't including me in these decisions and I felt totally left out and alone. I was wondering why am I part of this marriage? Does he even need me anymore? Talking to him wasn't working because his head was filled with busy work. I felt like I was sacrificing everything for him but he wasn't doing the same for me? I couldn't get through to him. Finally, it took a situation with his twin brother and wife to stop him in his tracks and wake him up. Since then, we have been going to the temple more and praying together. Family time has been really important to him and we have realized that family and our marriage comes first before things, friends, and work. Once he understood this, we have had a better love map on each other.
He says, "Try as we might, we won't do it perfectly right away. We will be distracted by ego, tripped by pride, snared by temper, or sidetracked by pain. So we go through the process again. We may need to apologize and ask our spouse for patience as we learn to do better." (Goddard).
Cited:
Gottman, J.M., & Silver, N. (2015). The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work (Revised). New York: Harmony Books. (ISBN: 9780553447712)
Goddard, H.W. (2007). Drawing heaven into your marriage. Fairfax, VA: Meridian Publishing.
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