Wednesday 21 December 2016

Why Husband and Wife Should be Best Friends




Husbands and wives who want their #marriages to be enduring and endearing must be #friends. Mr. and Mrs. Driscoll wrote, “All the talk about spending time and doing life together, making memories, being a good listener, growing old and taking care of each other, being honest, having the long view of things, #repenting and #forgiving can be summed up in one word –#friendship.”
Happy marriages are based on a deep friendship. By this I mean a mutual #respect for and #enjoyment of each other’s likes, dislikes, #personality quirks, hopes, and #dreams. They have as abiding regard for each other and express this fondness not just in the big ways but in little ways day in and day out. Friendship fuels the flames of #romance because it offers the best protection against feeling of adversarial toward to your spouse. Ann Landers wrote, "Love is a #friendship that has caught fire. It is quiet understanding, mutual #confidence, sharing, and forgiving. It is a #loyalty through good and bad. It settles for less than perfection and makes allowance for human #weaknesses."
At times your marriage may be strained, but because of the friendship you’ll still remain together. True friendship involves healthy #conflict. The husband is the head of #family, but also a considerate friend. Friendship is an integral part of marriage and a safeguard against #emotional adultery. Emotional #adultery is having as your close friend someone of the opposite sex who is not your spouse.
To make conservation, to share a #joke, to perform mutual act of #kindness, to read #together well-written books, to share in trifling and in serious matters, to #disagree through without animosity –just as a person debates with himself and the very rarity of #disagreement to find the salt of normal #harmony, to teach each other something or to learn from one another, to long with #impatience for those absent, to welcome them with #gladness on their arrival.
Marital friendship requires both the husband and #wife to willing to invest what it takes to be a good #friend. Friendship is costly in everything –time, energy, #emotion, and sometimes #money. Those who want their #spouses to be friends without seeking to be good friends in return are #selfish and demanding. And those who want to be good #friends but do not help their spouses reciprocate are prone to be taken advantage of, abused, neglected, and suffer from their marriages.
Sometimes we try hard to make some people our friends while neglecting who should be your best friend –your #spouse. What I believe it means for couples to be FRIENDS is:
Faithfulness
Couples should be faithful to each other. Their being together has to be a strong bond, a common sharing of experience, a dream-fulfilling romance that carries them along. All relationships go through peaks and troughs, but they should dedicate their lives to their partners’ happiness in a way, that requires focus, strength, passion, drive, enthusiasm and effort. Abandoning one’s partner to have affairs outside the marriage will not solve problem but rather aggravate it. The essence of marriage is to stay together for life and not to get divorced. Faithfulness will give us the opportunity to have a really good and strong relationship based on mutual trust, and shared happiness. In order to encourage fidelity, we have to be kind, courteous, reverential, stimulating, respectful, thoughtful, considerate, and sexual.
Reciprocal
When one spouse is friendly and the other is unfriendly, the marriage is marked by selfishness and sadness. But when both spouses make deep and heartfelt commitment to continually seek to become better friends, increasing love and laughter mark the marriage.
Intimate
The easiest way to know whether couples are friends is the way they sleep. When they lie back-to-back, it is obvious that the partners are not friends but ranges from strangers to enemies. But when they lie cudgeled up or the woman in the man’s arm, it is obvious that they are friends who will work together on tasks or projects, such as keeping the home, raising the kids, growing the business etc.
Wives, to be a good friend, learn to spend some time with your husband in shared activity. If he’s watching a sporting event, sit down and share it with him. if he’s working on a project, long out nearby to help or at least ask questions and be a companion if nothing else. If he’s going fishing, asking if you can come sit in the boat with him just to be in his world.
Husbands to be a good friend to your wife, learn to have deeper and more intimate conservations. Keep your advice to a minimum and learn to listen to what she has to say. No wife likes feeling like a problem relationship becomes most intimate we begin to share our feelings. Spending time together.
Ecclesiastes 4:9-10 says, “Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their labor. For if they fall, one will lift up his companion. But woe to him who is alone when he falls, for he has no one to help him up.”
Empathy
The wrong we do to others and what we suffer are weighed differently. Empathy alone is a very important characteristic of a positive personality. People with empathy ask themselves this question: “How would I feel if someone treated me that way?” sympathy is, “I understand how you feel.” Empathy is, “I feel how you feel.” Both sympathy and empathy are important, but of the two, empathy is certainly more important.
Needed
God create the woman because He felt man needed to helpmate. Therefore a man needs his wife as his companion and friend. And a wife needs to be helpful according to God’s design. The more his need of his wife and her need to help him increases the faster oneness and friendship blossoms in the marriage.
Devoted
A devoted friend is #dependable through varying seasons of life. Fake friends are with us so long as they get something from us. A real #friendship is about both people giving and taking in every season without keeping a record of what is given and taken. A #fake friendship is about one #person doing all the giving and the other doing all the taking. Fake friends quickly desert us when #life with us becomes complicated, costly, inconvenient, or no longer meets their needs. It is in the darkest season of life that you know your devoted friends. In marriage, being a #devoted friend in all life’s seasons is a key to building #oneness, #intimacy, and trust.
Sincerity
Most of our dating time in spent pretending to be people we are not, and after few years of marriage, our spouses start to discover who we truly are rather than the #characters we have been acting like. The same is true for them. A #husband and wife need to accept that they are flawed person who needs loving help and patient #endurance. A spouse who only showers you with praise, never disagree with you, avoid conflict at all cost, way not be a sincere #partner. Proverbs 9:8 says, “Do not correct a scoffer, lest he hate you; rebuke a #wise man, and he will #love you.”
Conclusion
Friendship takes sacrifice. Building friendship and #relationships take sacrifice, loyalty and maturity. #Sacrifice takes going out of one’s way and never happens by the way. #Selfishness destroys friendships. Casual #acquaintances come easy but true friendships take time to build and effort to keep. Friendships are put to tests and when they endure, they grow stronger. We must learn to recognize counterfeit relationships. True friends do not want to see their friends hurt. True friendship gives more than it gets and stands by #adversity.

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