During all the different seasons of marriage, it can be a challenge to keep romance alive. Here are some ideas!

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Is your marriage struggling around trauma, grief, PTSD, depression, betrayal, or other serious challenge? For those of you staying together through it, here are some tips for working on marriage with difficulties such as these in the picture.

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What did you think the empty nest or retirement would be like? Was it what you expected? For many of us, it wasn't! What about navigating marriage during these seasons?

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Sharing beliefs is communication at its deepest. To get here, we're likely already doing well talking about almost everything else and feeling a good bit of trust to share.

Can you unite on needs and goals? These are deeper topics of communication. Sharing on this level deepens intimacy.

As a couple, can we come up with joint vision and goals for the upcoming year together? When we make the time to dream and seek God's direction, we can unite our efforts toward shared goals.

Can you share your feelings without a verbal and emotional explosion? This is a deeper level of communication. To get here, we first want to get better at more surface levels of small talk, facts, and opinions.

Sharing opinions goes deeper than our usual surface level of communication. Here, we can learn to respect each other's differences, which sets us up to go deeper.

A lot of us easily communicate on the surface. It's in this zone we can work through going deeper.

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Do you long to talk on a deeper level? Here's a good starting point. _______

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While some of us excitedly plan for the holidays, others are dreading it. As a couple, what can we do to improve the holiday scene and make precious memories for our family?

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Communication happens on different levels. In marriage, the hope is that we will learn to share our deepest self to each other, and that we would receive such communication with gentle interest and curiosity with a goal to know and be known.

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How do we blend together while parenting prodigals?

We're always investing via our time, energy, and focus. We receive a harvest from the direction of our investment. The question is, what are we investing in? If it isn't our marriage, we shouldn't be surprised if it is no longer fulfilling. To enjoy what God intended, we should invest as God intended.

Have you felt disillusioned in your marriage as you notice his and her imperfections? So, what do we do with that?

How do you maintain a healthy marriage while parenting? Here are some ideas.

Parenting together well requires husband and wife coming together, blending very different ideas about parenting. Here are some thoughts to get you started.

Have you been married long enough to realize your spouse isn't perfect? Once the honeymoon is over, reality of day-to-day life sets in when everything isn't as perfect as we'd imagined. So how do we adjust?

Returning to our first love and doing the first works (Revelation 2) maintains our walk with the Lord and also applies to our marriage.

What do we do with negative thoughts about our family? We can control our thoughts and avoid assuming.

When we over-address, it can seem everything's wrong and push the spouse toward losing hope, but when we pretend nothing's wrong, we neglect cleaning out the relationship and allow walls to build.

When we over-address, it can seem everything's wrong and push the spouse toward losing hope, but when we pretend nothing's wrong, we neglect cleaning out the relationship and allow walls to build.

If we address issues too frequently, we create the feeling we are unhappy and dissatisfied, but if we address them infrequently, we come across as not caring. How can you land on somewhere in the middle?

Temper your sharing frequency toward your spouse's to avoid overwhelming an under-sharer and to meet the conversational needs of the over-sharer.

When we talk more easily, we can come across as aggressive, and when we don't talk as much, we can come across as withdrawing. This can send a message we didn't intend.

Tone of voice can twist a well-intentioned message. Anytime we express negative feelings via tone of voice, it's likely to return a negative response.

We are shaped and prepared for ministry via our relationships at home.

Our marriages speak to others and are a testimony of what we believe - especially about how we see God. How might we pattern our marriages after God's heart to share a better message?

We can learn how to grow deeper in our marriage relationship by understanding how we grow deeper in our relationship with the Lord.

Let's talk about Proverbs 16:24 and what it means for our words to be sweet for another person to receive them.

Let's look at Proverbs 22:17-18 to understand how to listen to someone we want to blend with.

Males & females interact with their emotions very differently. Let's talk about it. We're referencing Dr. Carolyn Leaf's book, Who Switched Off My Brain?

Our day-to-day routines can include or exclude our spouse and family. Working as a team around routines contributes toward marriage & family closeness.

Because we are male and female, we process information differently, and this affects the marriage.

Let's talk about how male and female viewpoints are different and how we can complement each other with these differences.

Our brains are wired differently, and it affects the way we communicate. Let's look at how men and women are different and how knowing this can improve communication in marriage.

As a couple, we need to be on the same page about our budget, but it's helpful to position ourselves to even go there. Here are some ideas about getting ready to talk about the budget.

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As individuals, we place different meanings and values on things, like holidays, the way we believe about different things, and... everything! It's important for us to come up with "We" meanings.

Sharing and supporting dreams helps us thrive as individuals and as a couple.

How do we juggle all our relationships? Let's talk about budgeting our time.

Dr. John Gottman recommends strengthening a marriage by adding these 6 hours per week.

What happens when disagreements don't turn out well? Couples in healthy marriages analyze them. Let's look at how to do that.

Have you ever apologized, but it wasn't well-received? Here are some tips to help you say your apology well.

How do we make decisions together when we have such different perspectives? We're supposed to have different perspectives! Let's look at how to blend.

When our spouse shares a problem, we need to be willing to adjust. How might we do that well?

How do we pray in faith for our family, and how do we get started as a couple?

We both have something to say, but we can only work through one topic at a time and must wait until it's our turn to share.

Before we can address issues well, we should create an environment of unconditional love and acceptance of our spouse as-is without trying to change him/her.

Let's look together at what God says in His Word about marriage.

Let's look at what God says in His Word about marriage.

How do you let your spouse know what you need in the marriage? Couples need to be aware of the different needs of the husband and wife in the deepest of relationships to facilitate marital growth. Let's talk about his and her core needs and a good way to make those needs known.