A lot of marriage improvement books, seminars, and workshops tell us to focus on our spouse. The message is that we are here to make them happy. Here at Simply Great Lives, we don’t believe that making our spouse happy is our calling. So what can we do to be happily married living our calling?
We call the usual “focus on your spouse” approach to marriage an inward focus. I think in a lot of cases this strains the relationship worse. We start to count all the ways our spouse isn’t doing what we want them to do. Meanwhile we’re thinking our spouse doesn’t deserve our efforts to make them happy. So we hold back – both spouses waiting for the other to go first.
We have a different approach that we have personally found works better for living our calling and for the marriage. We call this an outward focus approach to marriage. Instead of looking to be satisfied by our spouse, both of us look to be satisfied to a large extent outside of the marriage. We do this by living an adventure together. We both help each other pursue our calling and live more meaningful lives.
John Eldredge in his book, Wild At Heart, says that every man needs a battle to fight, a beauty to rescue, and an adventure to live. He also mentions that women have a need to join their man on this adventure. Women don’t want their man to make it all about them. Women already know all about themselves. When we live an adventure with our spouse by both of us pursuing our calling together, we can have an outward focus to our marriage that is very satisfying.
This doesn’t mean that we stop expressing love to each other. This also doesn’t mean we don’t have disagreements or arguments. We just don’t make our happiness depend primarily on what our spouse does or doesn’t do.
With an outward approach to marriage, we get to be happily married living our calling.
