Get to Know Your Partner, The Seafaring Way with Christian Counseling

Principal 1 of a Principals of Marriage Series
from The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work by Dr. John Gottman and Nan Silver
Tips and Strategies adapted from exercises in Gottman and Silver’s book

Marriages work best when spouses accept, pursue, and love one another. Duh. But what does this look like? Dr. John Gottman maps it out for us in his book, The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work. Gottman’s work involves researching the different types of behavior that distinguish thriving and destined-for-divorce marriages. The first three principles in this book describe characteristics of healthy marriages.

Principle I: Enhance Your Love Maps

The word “map” gets thrown out a lot in psychology. It’s almost as if the field is filled with aspiring cartographers. But Gottman’s application makes sense– a map helps you keep track of where different places are. It’s a way of organizing and presenting related information. His “love maps” explain how spouses organize and access information about each other. You can tell how attentive one person is toward another by how much trivia they’ve acquired about them. For instance, a husband will automatically drop his pizza crusts onto his wife’s plate because he doesn’t believe in eating just bread when there is cheese and meat left and she thinks the crust is the best part of the pizza experience.

Take the example of Janice and Luz who have been friends since their freshman year West Seattle High School. It’s 10 years later, and Janice just found out her dream job was given to another candidate. Luz is devastated for her friend when she gets a text message sharing the miserable news. She holds off on calling because she knows her friend will probably be sobbing for a little while yet, and settles for sending a commiserating text with plans to call and hear the blow-by-blow later. Luz knows how to bolster Janice’s disappointment because she’s spent 10 years learning how. After a decade of giggling and heart-to-hearts and growing-up mishaps, they’ve got love maps that look like pirate captain’s logs.

Gottman says couples that have filled out their love maps with every nook, cranny, and secret passageway in their partner are better prepared to handle major life upheavals such as job loss and having your first child because you know how the other will react. (49) But it’s not just as simple as sitting down one time and memorizing each other’s Wikipedia pages. You develop and maintain each other’s love maps through frequent checking in and connecting. As Gottman says, “No wonder the biblical term for sexual love is to ‘know.’” (48) Our heavenly father sets the example for us in intimate knowledge of those he cares about, “Indeed, the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.” (Luke 12:7 NIV) God, who knows everything, knows us so well that he’s even acquainted himself with how many hairs we have on our heads. While I wouldn’t necessarily recommend tackling the futile endeavor of getting to know your partner THAT well, it’s important to understand the significance of the example the Lord sets for us here. If you claim to love someone, you should at least know a little bit about them. Familiarizing yourself with each other’s personalities is the first step to strengthening the intimacy between you.

Tips and Strategies (52-59)

Twenty questions

• Go find a list of personal trivia questions, e.g. “What’s your favorite animal? If you could be anything in the world, what would it be? Favorite band, book, movie?”

o Try your best to answer them about each other!

Create your own map

Make a chart that looks something like the following:

• Cast of characters in my partner’s life

o Friends

o Potential friends

o Rivals, competitors, “enemies”

• Recent important events in my partner’s life

• Upcoming events

• Current stresses/worries

• Hopes and aspirations

Puzzle Pieces

People are created through a zesty mix of innate qualities and life experiences.

For this next exercise, Gottman recommends waiting until you have lots of privacy and lots of uninterrupted time to answer the following questions about yourself:

• Triumphs and strivings

o What are some of your proudest accomplishments?

o How have they affected the way you think about yourself and the things you strive for?

o What role has pride played in your life? Did you parents often tell you they were proud of you? How have others responded to your accomplishments?

o How does your pride in your accomplishments influence your marriage? How do you show pride in one another?

• Injuries and healings

o What are some difficulties or low points you’ve gone through? What are some wounds you bear from them?

o How have you strengthened and healed yourself?

o How do these injuries and wounds affect your marriage?

Write Your Own Epitaph

Unlike a certain TV superhero, your headstone probably won’t say “She saved the world. A lot.” But it’s helpful to sit down and think about how you’d want people to remember you when you die.

• Write your own obituary. For what do you want to be remembered?

• What’s left on your bucket list? List some big and small things you want to accomplishment before you die?

• What kind of person do you want to become?

Learn About Each Other Through Christian Counseling

For couples that have drifted so far opposite that if they moved anymore they’d be moving closer, sitting down for a Christian marriage counseling session is a helpful start to getting reacquainted. Getting to know another person is hard, especially when you can have so many excuses not to. A professional spiritual counselor can help guide you to things the Bible says about how to understand each other better and draw closer together. They’ll help you understand where you’ve drifted apart, and what you can do to get reintroduced to each other.

Images cc: office.microsoft.com – Elderly couple with bike in park, Fleur de lis pointing north on map, Couple walking dog in park