Cherishing Your Spouse

I used to love watching “The Newlywed Game.” In fact, when I was getting married my sister created a similar game that we played at my bridal shower. She asked my husband-to-be questions ahead of time and then at the shower, I had to come up with his answers. She asked things like his favorite food, favorite band, favorite thing that he liked about me, how we met, etc. Of course, I got a lot of them wrong because I didn’t know everything about him at the time. This is one of the reasons why “The Newlywed Game” is so entertaining. Newlywed couples have made a commitment to each other and love each other, but are still learning about each other. In “The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work,” John M. Gottman calls this process of getting to know important things about our spouses ‘love maps.’ He states, “Emotionally intelligent couples are intimately familiar with each other’s world. I call this having a richly detailed love map—my term for that part of your brain where you store all the relevant information about your partner’s life.” (Gottman, 2015. 54.)  

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My love map has expanded and become more detailed over the years, and I feel quite confident that we would totally nail it on “The Newlywed Game,” but there are still some ways to improve my love map with my spouse. Even after 17 years of marriage, my husband surprises me by telling me something that I never knew. Having a strong love map is a way to show that your marriage and spouse are important to you. It can also help you get through stressful or difficult times together, like the birth of a child or the loss of a loved one. Strong love maps means strong marriages.

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Strengthening Love Maps

One of the ways that Gottman suggests increasing the strength of your love map is through a series of questions that he calls, “The Love Map 20 Questions Game.” Each spouse should write down 20 numbers between 1 and 60. Take turns asking each other the questions. If your spouse gets the questions right, they get the designated points plus you get one point. If the answer is wrong, no one gets any points. Whoever has the most points at the end is the winner.

 

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As we increase our love maps and take additional steps to cherish our spouse, our marriages will be filled with joy and happiness. As H. Wallace Goddard stated in his book, Drawing Heaven into Your Marriage, "It takes strength of character to see errors in a partner's grammar or perceptions and yet resist the temptation to correct needlessly. It takes godly goodness to see weakness and mistakes in our partners and yet resist the temptation to smirk. It takes heavenly humility to be proven right and yet to meekly acknowledge that we all make mistakes. It takes divine grace to discard or limit the hobbies that prevent us from helping around the house." If we focus on loving our spouses, making room in our thoughts for the things that are important to them, and avoid endless nitpicking, we will have stronger and happier marriages.

References:

Goddard, H. W. (2009). Drawing heaven into your marriage: eternal doctrines that change relationships. Cedar Hills, UT: Joymap Publishing.

Gottman, J. M., & Silver, N. (2015). The seven principles for making marriage work. New York: Harmony Books.