Category Archives: Marriage

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The Hope Factor

How it can make a 24000% difference

Curt Richter had a special relationship with rats. In 1950 he put rats in a bucket with circulating water, to see how long they could swim before they would sink. Under normal conditions, a rat could swim for an average of 15 minutes before giving up and sinking. However, if he rescued the rats just before drowning, dried them off and let them rest briefly, and then put them back into the same buckets of circulating water, the rats could swim an average of 60 hours before drowning. If a rat was temporarily saved, it would survive 240 times longer than if it was not temporarily saved. That’s the same as 24,000% longer. A little hope goes a long way. The rats that had HOPE kept swimming.

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Stop saying the divorce rate is 50%. You’re killing us.

The good news about marriage, and the REAL divorce rate

I read a book, and I’m really fired up.
Before I tell you what it is I’m so fired up about, let me tell you why it’s so important.
The #1 most important ingredient that keeps marriages together is HOPE.
When couples lose hope, it’s the beginning of the end.
The absence of hope is an indicator of the presence of a lie sinking its claws into its prey; whoever is believing the lie.
Shaunti and Jeff Feldhahn interviewed thousands of couples over 12 years.
They found that there was one common denominator among marriages that survived versus those that failed: HOPE.
According to Shaunti, many different factors led to either outcome, of course.
But underneath it all was this bottom line:
Did the couple have a sense of hope … or a sense of futility?
“After all, if the ship is going to sink anyway, why bother working so hard to bail it out?”
Far better, they think, to work on escaping the wreck intact. In other words, a couple’s futile feeling that “We aren’t going to make it” ends up being one of the main reasons they don’t make it.”

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A Relationship Quality Hack To Get 21% Back

Technology can be a telescope that helps you zoom in and focus on something in a way impossible without it. However, in some cases it can be more like the four legged chair that the lion tamer uses in a circus as one of his primary tools in working with lions. The points of the four legs of the chair bobbing around tend to perplex the lion, and the dilemma of which of the four legs to focus on mentally paralyzes the lion, and distracts him from thinking about the tasty lion-trainer.  All of us know of many of the downsides of the technology we enjoy.  However there is one surprisingly simple thing that you could change to get back more than 21% of the relationship quality you might be losing.

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6 Reasons why sexual purity matters

Sexual purity is a big deal. Something that scares me is that many Christians seem to have slipped into believing that sexual purity is not very realistic, and in many cases hardly achievable. Just look at the porn statistics. And some seem to settle with thinking “It’s the norm”. “It’s the norm, that most men struggle with pornography, so you may as well not make a big deal out of it.” For many, living a sexually pure life seems so insurmountable, that just leaving the skeletons in the closet seems to be a fairly feasible option. 

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4 keys for Bouncing back in the face of failure

The dreadful sandal scandal

I bought my wife a gift. It didn’t go so well. Here are a few things I learned in the process.
Much of what we aspire to requires courage. Recently I realized that you can not grow in courage if you don’t grow in failure. To the degree you learn to be o.k. with failure, you will grow in courage and creativity. Courage and creativity go hand in hand.