Cultivating Joy in Marriage

Marcus Warner remembers the season when his marriage wasn't bad, it just wasn't great.

So he went to work to try to figure out what's wrong here, and here's what he came up with. We had what we call a joy gap in our marriage, and that is a joy gap is simply the the amount of time between moments when you share joy together. And what I found was that I was not doing things on a daily basis that let my wife know that I'm happy to be with you. We weren't sharing that, you know, look in each other's eyes and have that sparkle.

We weren't sharing a touch, sharing those things. It wasn't a regular feature of our marriage, and I had no expectation that it should be, and did not realize that this joy gap in our marriage had gotten quite so big. This is Family Life Today. Our hosts are Dave and Ann Wilson.

I'm Bob Lapine. You find us online at FamilyLifeToday.com. So is there a joy gap in your marriage?

And if there is, how do you fix it? We'll talk with Marcus Warner and Chris Corsi about that today. Stay with us. And welcome to Family Life Today.

Thanks for joining us. I think we're gonna find out what happens today if family life and Marie Kondo have a mash-up, you know, because Marie, you know, what's her big thing? You know Marie Kondo, right? Do you not know who Marie Kondo is? Bob, I don't know who you're talking about. I don't either. Nobody in this room knows who you're talking about. Our guests don't know.

Okay, so Marie Kondo is the the woman who's teaching you how to organize everything in your house. Oh, a closet girl. And it's all about, does it spark joy?

Oh. That's what it is. So you pick up your old t-shirts, and you ask, does this spark joy? And if it does, you keep it.

And if it doesn't... It's a real thing? Is she Japanese?

Is this that? Yes. Okay, my daughter watches her all the time. Yeah, she is big.

I forgot. So you pick up items in your closet, and you decide to keep them or throw them away? I watched episode one on Netflix of this, and she came into these people's house and had them empty out their closets on their bed. And then you go item by item, and you hold it up, and you go, does this still spark joy? And if it does spark joy, you keep it. And if it doesn't, you say thank you to it for serving me. Bless it for serving you. And then you put it in the pile so it can bless somebody else. You don't do this with your spouse or your kids, do you? That would be pretty tragic.

That would be pretty tragic. That's season two. We're talking today about sparking joy in marriage, the four habits of joy-filled marriages, and we've got the authors of a book by that name who are joining us, Dr. Marcus Warner and Chris Corsi. Marcus, Chris, welcome to Family Life Today. It's great to be here.

Yeah, good to have you guys. Thank you. Marcus is a conference speaker and author. He's the president of Deeper Walk International, working with issues of recovery and leadership and marriage and family life. Chris is president of Thrive Today, which is a nonprofit that focuses on training leaders and communities on relationship skills, and together they've worked on this book that says on the front, 15 minutes a day will help you stay in love. That's one of those things you put on the front of a book because somebody says, I'll buy that book if it'll tell me how to stay in love 15 minutes a day.

Pretty bold promise. What's that based on, Marcus? Well, it's based on the fact that in tensionality, 15 minutes of actually being happy to be with somebody can do things in your brain that you might not expect, and if you make it a habit, 15 minutes a day, day after day after day after day, your brain chemistry literally changes and your attachment can move out of the fear mode and more and more into the joy mode. Chris, you've looked at brain science, and there's a lot of brain science in this book, but we should start off by saying the brain science is just affirming what scripture says is true about the human condition all along, right?

You're exactly right. There's a lot of references in the Bible to joy, and so what brain science is doing is really highlighting the significance of joy, because joy means we're glad to be together. It's a relationship, and so it's really interesting to look at scripture with this lens of, a relational lens, of this glad to be together joy, because we have a God who's really glad to be with his people, and so it's good to see brain science really starting to highlight that, wow, our brain works best when joy is there, when joy is present.

Yeah, I found it fascinating as I picked up your books. I feel like I'm with two brainiacs today, right? Is that what you guys are? Absolutely.

Just think of us like that. No, I mean, it is interesting. I haven't seen a lot of marriage books that start with the brain science and how our brain works and how that affects your relationships in your marriage, so talk about this, how the brain works, brain science, and even the motivator that sparks something good in your marriage. Well, in the 1990s, all this brain science came out because technology had advanced where they could now scan the human brain while people are alive. They didn't have to wait till people died, and so what happened is you could see really how the brain works, and you could actually observe changes in the brain as well over time, and this guy by the name of Dr. Alan Shore out of UCLA just spent a lot of time in a library pulling together all this brain research, and as we looked at all this research that came out, he highlighted something very significant about the brain, and that was when you look at how the brain works, relational joy is what it's all about.

In other words, from, well, even before we're born, actually, when we're still in the womb, with just the sounds and everything, and to when babies are born and different senses develop, joy is that feeling that someone's glad to be with me, and so we looked at joy really is like the best motivator for the brain. In other words, if you want to build a really good brain and develop a really good brain, what you need to have present, one of the very important ingredients, has to be this glad to be together, where you are the sparkle in my eye, and I show it with my face and my voice tone and my body language and so forth, so just looking at how joy, how significant joy is on a human brain really impacted Marcus and I as we started to try to figure out, okay, how can we share this news in a very useful resource where people can actually not just talk about joy but build some joy in their marriages. Well, what you're describing is the wedding day. When a couple looks at each other, all you see is joy emanating from one another and love and anticipation of the future, and Dave and I have been working with couples for 30 years, and then we find this couple that's been married maybe 15 years, and there's no joy. So what happened? Well, what happened with you, Marcus, because 11 years into your marriage, you had a no joy evening with your wife, right?

Yeah, absolutely. I was a pastor and decided we were gonna do the date night thing, and our first three date nights ended in fights. That was the first clue, okay, there's more to marriage than date nights.

One of the things I realized was that probably going shopping for date night wasn't a good call. Did you hear that, honey? So at dinner one night, my wife starts giving me the image that's in her mind of feeling like she's in a cave. There's like bars in front of the cave and that I'm outside and basically ignoring her and occasionally throwing her scraps, and you can tell that the tears are starting to come for her as she's telling me this. And I am so detached from my right hemispheres or completely in the left part of my brain that I'm getting angry as she tells me this. I'm not feeling compassion. I'm feeling like, here I am taking you on a date night. You don't understand the sacrifices I make for you.

You don't understand the priority I'm putting in this, and you feel like you're getting scraps, right? So I'm getting angry as while she's pouring out her heart, wanting me to feel compassion. And all of a sudden, she said, wait a second, wait a second. I said, what? She said, Jesus just showed up in my picture. I'm like, what do you mean? And she said, he just unlocked the gate and let me out. And she goes, I don't know what this means, but I feel different.

And I was still mad, which kind of shows you where my emotional maturity was at at that particular point. But what had happened was that what we call a joy gap in our marriage, and that is a joy gap is simply the amount of time between moments when you share joy together. And what I found was that I was not doing things on a daily basis that let my wife know that I'm happy to be with you.

You know, looking at each other's eyes and having that sparkle. We weren't sharing that touch. Sharing those things wasn't a regular feature of our marriage. And I had no expectation that it should be and did not realize that this joy gap in our marriage had gotten quite so big. And it was shortly after that that we began discovering the brain science that put words and language into what we were experiencing and began to give some tracks to run on to begin repairing that. So did you just, you know, the next day go, oh, I need these practices in my marriage and I'm gonna look and bring a sparkle back and I'm gonna touch her hand and that whole thing. Or take us on the journey of the brain science that really impacted your marriage.

Sure. Well, I didn't know any of this brain science at that point, so we hadn't learned it yet. I discovered it in a different context, began bringing it in, and all of a sudden when we understood the importance of joy and I realized, okay, so what I'm after in my marriage is actually joy. They just changed my whole paradigm because before when my wife and I would have a fight, I'd go into what I call my mental man cave and I'd just, you know, go into this room and I would sit here and feel sorry for myself and tell myself, you know, how unlucky I was that, you know, I had a wife like this. Instead now I began to realize actually what has happened is that half of my brain has shut down and is not working. And so now when I attempted to go into that mental man cave, I have a very different paradigm and that is my task now is to get my brain completely back online. So how do I get my brain reengaged so I can act like myself here because actually if I think about it, I'm not acting like myself right now. I've turned into a different person. So learning the brain science gave me some terminology to put to this and said I have a on-off switch in my brain and when it goes off, I turn into a different person.

I don't act like myself and I can't find joy. I can't find appreciation. I forget why I like you. I forget why I even got married to you in the first place. So I'm gonna have to do some things in those moments to get that switch flip back on so that I can once again even feel appreciation. I can feel curiosity and feel some of these things.

So it was a journey to get there. But how do you do that? I mean if you're sitting around going, I would rather watch ESPN than talk to my wife. I'm not feeling any joy.

I'm kind of isolated. How do I flip the switch? I think every listener is like, tell me how to flip this switch. I actually don't think my switch works. I flipped it and flipped it.

No, I'm thinking a lot of us think that. I've tried and it doesn't flip. So how do I do this? Well, one of the best ways to do this is by focusing and remembering the good stuff. So appreciation is what we call package joy. And so if my wife and I are in an off space, one of the things that will help once we quiet would be to remember, think about, and share what were some special moments? What were some good things from your day?

So for example, every evening in my household, my wife and I will do an exercise that's in this book. We call it happy and sad. And we do this with my son. So what were three things from your day that were good? All right, so I had this great moment. I met some new friends and we got to talk about joy.

And so I'd share the three things and then we would talk about what made us sad from the day as well. But for every sad thing, we have to do three joyful things, three good things. So when that switches off, just doing this exercise, it's remarkable.

The end of the day, dinnertime, stressful, like our family's switch is probably flickering. But after this exercise, the switch is on, everybody's engaged, we're smiling, we're laughing. So the goal, if you can take a little bit of time, even if it's just three minutes to think about, talk about, and feel the good stuff and notice, wow, how are you feeling as you just remembered that fun getaway that we had on the beach?

It's amazing what can happen. The goal is, though, I have to feel it. So I'm not necessarily having to go get out the photo albums and say, let's remember a fun thing we did together. If I just talk about what's brought me joy today, whether you've been involved in that or not, you're saying that kind of opens up the whole joy capacity and it starts to happen between us?

Yes. So if I'm offline and my wife is online, I can even just think about those good things from my day. But what happens is when you share it with your partner, you get more mileage out of it. In other words, the switch is kind of brighter, so to speak. So my goal would be, I want to get my switch on and then my goal would be for my wife and I, okay, now let's talk about some shared moments. And so that's just going to give you more mileage in that joy moment. Let me add to that, too.

In our book, we have a very concrete answer to your question, which is how do you get the switch back on? And that is that you first you disengage and you acknowledge that I am disengaged. But you use your disengagement to try to find four things, right?

Curiosity, appreciation, kindness, and eye contact. Cake. Cake. I liked all your acrostics in the book. That's how my brain works.

There you go. It's like I can't remember anything without them. And so that's why we have that in there is that you notice that when your switch goes off, I lose all curiosity about you. And partly because I think I have you all figured out, right?

So in marriages, that's really common. It's like, I already know what you think about this. I already know how you feel about this. I have no curiosity about what you think because you always do this and you never do that and whatever. So I have no curiosity. So if I don't have curiosity, my switch goes off and I need curiosity to get it back on. So one of the things I do when I disengage is I'm looking for is there anything I can be curious about here? And let's use some curiosity to reengage. Second one is appreciation, which is really where Chris has been camping out here because appreciation, whether it's for that person or not, helps to get your circuit, what we call your relational brain circuits back on. And that gets your switch back on. So one of the things I've actually done is I've created an acrostic off of my wife's name of things that I appreciate about her.

So it helps me immediately in that moment say, no, remember what you appreciate about her. You go down the list of things and it gives you a pre-thought through strategy of thinking on, you know, there are things here to appreciate. I got to get my mind here. Helps get my switch back on so that I can engage relationally.

So walk me through this. Dave and I really struggled around our 10-year anniversary. Our 10-year anniversary was a little bit like your 11-year date.

Yeah. So let's say I go back and I think these are the things that I used to appreciate Dave. I could see myself opening a picture album and thinking, oh he used to be blah blah blah and he used to be blah but now, you know what I mean? How do we get out of that?

Because I'm thinking he's none of those things now. I think a lot of people could say that. Well the good news is God designed our brain that it can update. And so when this joy part of our brain is on, you can update.

And so it says, yeah this is how it feels but maybe this can change. So even trying to build some joy in the present actually and noticing how do you feel right now? You just spent five minutes together doing this fun joy exercise. Now let's talk about how does it feel?

If I were in your shoes right now, what would I be thinking? What would I be feeling? And so the moment you do something that's joyful but then you kind of pay attention to it and go, oh well that was fun. That basically is like putting some cement into that memory for your brain going, oh this is good. This is really good.

So it's actually letting your brain update when you start to notice, hey this was meaningful. This was special. I really enjoyed what you shared about me. That made me feel loved. Now how does it feel that we did that? And that's why every exercise in the book has this component of not just physically connecting like holding hands or something but it also pay attention to how you feel.

What did you notice doing this exercise? And it's like your brain is going, oh okay. Even though this is how it's always felt, this is how it used to felt because your brain always looks back in order to predict the future. So in those moments your brain's looking back and going, oh yeah this is just how he is and you know it's I feel pretty discouraged right now and is this ever going to change? Well with a little bit of joy what happens is your brain says okay let me look forward now.

Let's see what's around the corner. Maybe there's something good here. Maybe there's hope. And the moment you get hope into the equation that's a really good thing to have.

Well and there's two other points I'd make on that. First of all whenever you're doing an appreciation exercise we have one firm rule and that is there's one forbidden word whenever you do appreciation and that is the word but. Okay you can't say I really appreciate it when you did this and when you used to do that but you don't do this anymore.

You're not allowed to say that when you share appreciation with people because obviously it pulls the rug right up from under it. It also does it for us but if you find yourself in your mind having a lot of these buts that becomes an opportunity for prayer because now what you do is you take that to God and go what perspective do you want to give me about this thing that I'm feeling about my husband right now and I find that the devil wants to give us a narrative and the Holy Spirit wants to give us a narrative and where we have those problems with our our spouse is often where those narratives collide and without realizing it because the devil's narrative feels true and there's evidence to support it I don't realize how fully I've bought into that narrative so when you do find that coming up this is a good opportunity to back up and say God has the devil been influencing my narrative here and do you have a different one for me and that gives me an opportunity to begin rethinking what's the way you want me to look at this and then when I do talk to the person you know don't use the word but when you're sharing appreciation. Tell me this I'm thinking to use the on-off switch what do you do when you feel like the circuit board is shut off? I'm trying to flip on the switch I realize I'm off I'm discouraged I'm mad and there's no joy and I'm supposed to right now flip the switch and be curious and be appreciative and kind of I can't I'm stuck even if you're talking to your seven-year-old you know they're like no I don't want to I'm just stuck it's almost like the power board is disconnected or been shut down and how do I get out of that rut? You know some for some people they're high-energy responders some people are low-energy responders so if you're a high-energy responder it might help to go walk go move people you know will notice if they go for a jog they actually find that it helps to get them back into relational mode pretty fast or for some people they're overwhelmed by stimulation or noise so they have to go find a nice quiet place with some soft music and then they can actually do the cake that Marcus was talking about and with kids for example my oldest son who's nine he his switch 99.9% of the time will come on if we can make him laugh so if we're silly if we can remind him of a funny moment like his switch will come on quickly but if we just tried talking to him when that switch is off like oh come on buddy let's try to remember something it's not going to go well but if we can playfully interact with him that'll work now that wouldn't work for my seven-year-old my seven-year-old would not respond well to that he would just get annoyed so for my seven-year-old he needs the low energy so I might sit with him and then I might share some stories about some fun moments that we've had together and in a short amount of time it will actually help to warm up that circuit but your brain works according to patterns so whatever I'm used to that is what kind of becomes my natural state so when when couples are going through the exercises in this book at first they find it's a bit of an uphill climb it's work because they're used to the switch being off but what surprises them is if they're building some joy and they're feeling some joy and they're actually starting to smile your brain starts saying hey this is good if your brain says I like how I feel when this happens and your brain wants to do it again and again but if our switch is off and we're just trying to like talk it through your brain is gonna say this is not fun I don't enjoy talking with my wife when our switch is off and we're talking about the finances or whatever those buttons are your brain just says I want to avoid that therefore I want to avoid her so the goal is spark some joy and you got to do it you know for a while that's why we say 15 minutes a day to start just get the joy growing so what's the first step if we're talking to a couple today and they would say we're kind of in the doldrums just blah we're not mad at each other we just there's not a lot of a lot of desire a lot of joy in our marriage we want to jump start it 15 minutes what do I do tonight what I would have them do is actually pick an exercise and do an exercise here's the next as I would do my favorite exercise is what we call triple three appreciation and this exercise started because my wife when it was time to go to bed her mind would race and race and race for up to several hours and we discovered when we were first married I'm a light sleeper so those nights where she's up and her mind's racing and she's tossing and turning and you know maybe worrying about something neither one of us got much sleep so with this brain science in mind it's like let's try an exercise and the first step of this exercise we're laying in bed word so we're cuddling and the first step is we share three things from our day three highlights from the day here's what was good from my day and so we're cuddling and I share these three things and then Jen my wife shares her three things and we're already breathing a little easier okay and then the next step is three qualities I appreciate about my wife and so I'll share I'll say Jen you know I really appreciate your your heart for hospitality when our friend came over for dinner you just you're so in your element serving and making our guests feel welcomed and I really like that about you so and I would name again two other qualities I appreciate about her with examples and now even though there's another step here this would be the step for my wife I could literally feel her body relax after I shared my three things what I appreciate about her physically her body would relax she would breathe deeper she was calming down it was noticeable and then she would share her three things about me and then the third is three qualities we appreciate about God so I might say you know I really appreciate God's presence I really felt like God was with me today when I was feeling overwhelmed with this work stuff you know I just took a few minutes I prayed and I just felt like God was seeing me and hearing me and understanding me and I just that that meant a lot to me I like that Emmanuel is God with us and then I'd you know come up with two other qualities I appreciate about God this exercise would take us you know less than 15 minutes and consistently every time we would do this exercise my wife would fall asleep within 10 to 15 minutes the nights that she would that we wouldn't do the exercise she could be up for easily two hours and I admit there were nights where I was already half asleep and she'd say hey can we do that triple three appreciation us could you and Jesus do that and bless her she would try it but she said and you know I find it's helpful to have you and Jesus with me doing this so that exercise when when we saw the effects of doing that exercise and under you know 10 to 15 minute exercise made that much of a difference and for her sleep and really for our marriage you're saying if you looked at the brain as that was happening it would look different from beginning to end yes because what happens is the moment you think about an appreciation file you remember that special moment as far as your brain is concerned your brain is reliving the moment so just thinking about you know the special moment with my wife while we're watching the sunset as I bring that up and I'm thinking it and I'm feeling it I'm sharing it with her my brains responding as though I'm reliving the moment like as though I was there watching the sunset all over again so this is why the stuff so powerful like it's kind of interesting because God designed the brain for joy but you can imagine what do horror movies and scary movies like that like your brain responds as though you're living those moments so what Marcus and I want to do is help couples learn to amplify the good stuff to share the good stuff and you have in the book a number of exercises like this that couples can do that are a part of your 15 minutes a day this is your new workout for your marriage to try to grow joy and the book we're talking about called the four habits of joy-filled marriages how 15 minutes a day will help you stay in love we've got copies of this book in our family life today Resource Center you can order the book from us online at family life today calm or you can call to order at 1-800 FL today again our website is family life today calm if you want to order a copy of the book the four habits of joy-filled marriages or call 1-800 FL today to request your copy and I know many of you have wanted to know about our plans for weekend to remember getaways this spring we have a handful of getaways scheduled we're still adding dates this spring of course all of this is contingent upon restrictions that apply in various locations you can go to our website at family life today calm to find out more about some of the upcoming getaways that we expect to be having this spring and I should say we expect these getaways will also be sold out we have limited availability because of social distancing so if you're interested in attending a getaway sign up now and a plan to join us for a weekend to remember this spring and for those of you who can't get to a getaway we are making plans to send a getaway to you it's family life's date box that we're still putting the finishing touches on but it's a great way for you to have some customized dates that will help unlock some great conversations in your marriage again stay tuned to family life today for more information about the date box it should be out before Valentine's Day and we hope you can join us again tomorrow when we're going to talk about communication and how when communication breaks down in a marriage so does the joy what can we do to keep joy at the center of our marital communication even when we're not seeing things eye to eye we'll talk more about that tomorrow hope you can be with us for that I want to thank our engineer today Keith Lynch along with our entire broadcast production team on behalf of our hosts Dave and Ann Wilson I'm Bob Lapine we'll see you back next time for another edition of family life today family life today is a production of family life of Little Rock Arkansas a crew ministry help for today hope for tomorrow