Filling Your Marriage With Joy

You've read accounts in the Bible of how Christ impacted so many people, but we really know very little about the lives of those early followers of Jesus. The Chosen I Have Called You By Name imagines what life was like for those who followed Christ. Based on the widely acclaimed TV series The Chosen, this Focus on the Family book by bestselling author Jerry Jenkins brings color and depth to the people surrounding Christ.

You can find out more at focusonthefamily.com slash chosen. You think about it, friendship is the foundation of a really good marriage. You want to be good friends.

And if you're not playing together, are you really friends? That's Dr. Marcus Warner, and he's our guest today on Focus on the Family, along with his co-author Chris Corsi. Your host is Focus president and author Jim Daly, and I'm John Fuller. Here at Focus, we talk about marriage quite a bit, John. We do. It's a good thing, and we want your marriage to be the best it could possibly be, and you can have that kind of marriage. I'm talking about the resources, the tools, all the things here at Focus we're trying to equip you with so you can practice a good marriage. Somebody said the other day to me, you know, we spend a lot of time, you know, getting a license to do something or working hard vocationally, but we really don't put, unfortunately, a lot of work into our marriage.

And I think it's a good reminder that if you don't do that, it'll wither and sometimes die. So we want to plow that good ground around that plant of marriage, feed it, nurture it. Sometimes I do that well, sometimes I don't do that well. And today, we want to be able to talk about the tools that you need to do it better. You know, in the New Testament, 1 Thessalonians, it says, rejoice always. And sometimes in marriage, and certainly in other relationships, it can be a challenge.

You know, the joy-sucking occurs rather than the joy-fountain. And today, we want to give you some tools to cultivate that spirit of joy in your marriage. Dr. Marcus Warner and Chris Corsi will help us do that. Dr. Warner is the president of Deeper Walk International. He and his wife, Brenda, have two adult children. And Chris is an ordained minister and pastoral counselor. He and his wife, Jen, have two young boys.

And together, these men wrote the four habits of joy-filled marriages. And of course, we have that here. Check the episode notes for more. Marcus and Chris, welcome to Focus on the Family. Thank you. It's good to be here. Okay, I've already got the ringing endorsement of my wife, Jean, because we were looking at the book and the content this morning early when I was prepping for the show.

She went, wow, this is good stuff. So for all the wives listening, at least you have Jean's stamp of approval on what we're about to talk about. That's our best endorsement. Yes, it is.

We'll take that. I think it's because she wants to put a few of these things into practice, is my guess, for me to be able to do these things. But, you know, so often we look at the purpose of marriage. And some marriages, I'm sure, they shake their heads at times, the people in those marriages thinking, Lord, why did you create marriage like this?

And the interesting thing, it typically, if not always, points back to us. Because what the Lord is trying to do, I think, in the institution of marriage and what he created is to make us more like him by making us more selfless. You know, giving yourself to another person. And the big question is, now, how do you find joy in that thing that does not come to the human nature, the fleshly nature so easily? Where do we find joy in that?

No, that's a great question because a lot of times we forget that we usually, we get married because we're convinced we'll have more joy with this person than without them. And so it's a great… Is that a fog, by the way, early on? Is that just a fog or what's happening? No, it's because we're having so much joy. It's a lot of joy. Yeah, it's like, this is so great. There's all this energy.

You're really looking forward to the next time you're going to see the person. What we've also found is that brain science has shown us that joy is far more fundamental to the human experience than we've made it. Too many of us have treated joy like it's the icing on the cake of life instead of that it is actually the fuel on which life is meant to run.

That's interesting. Chris, again, from your perspective, what role does joy play in marriage? You know, joy is foundational. Joy is very easy to start early on in our marriages.

What happens for a lot of marriages is joy is hard to sustain. You actually have to be proactive. It's like tending a garden. You've got to pull the weeds.

You've got to work the soil a little bit. And you have to be very purposeful about maintaining that joy. Let me ask you this question because that's a great point because so often we feel like we're waiting for joy, like we're at the fountain. Okay, is it going to happen?

We just went to Yellowstone, saw Old Faithful. It's kind of that moment, right? You're waiting, you're waiting, you're waiting, and boom, there it is, joy. Is that what we do too often in marriage? Instead of cultivating it, we're waiting for a circumstance to dictate that joy?

Definitely. We're waiting, we're hoping, we're praying, and we just sometimes wish that God would just zap us with a full bottle of joy. And many times, it's kind of like Adam and Eve had to tend the garden. You know, we have to tend the garden of our marriages to really sustain those joy levels. What's critical about that, I want to make sure we're hearing that, that it's not, it can be, but it's not exclusively an external thing that joy comes from within too.

And that's probably the most sustainable. We should probably define what we mean by joy because people are all over the place on that. For us, from a brain perspective, right, that is that we have the right side and the left side of the brain, joy is a right brain experience. Now, our choosing and our thinking are on the left side of the brain, so a lot of us are trying to think our way into joy and choose our way into joy. But really, joy is this reaction that we have to being with somebody. So a lot of times when it happens in marriages, I'm waiting for the other person to make me joyful instead of doing the things that cause us to be happy to be together. In other words, so what we're doing in joy is we're looking for more and more reasons to be happy together, more and more ways to be happy together.

And because our brain reacts to that, and so from a brain science perspective, it is always a relational word. Okay, that's good, and we're going to get to that throughout the program. Let me move to something you call the joy gap. Now that we've had the positive side of it, I was thinking joy gap.

Gene got it right away. I know exactly what they're talking about. What's this joy gap? Well, the joy gap is simply the length of time between moments of shared joy. So for some couples, it's like hours between. And if you're measuring your joy gap in hours, you've got a really good marriage. If you are measuring your, you know, the last time we shared joy together was like a month ago, there are some problems here. So the gap is how long has it been since we were both experiencing joy from being together? Now do you and Brenda have, your wife Brenda, do you have an example? She's here, yeah. Come on in, Brenda.

Exactly. She told me to say it's hours. What's a safe story that you could share as an example of this, something in your marriage, maybe where you struggled, the joy gap? Yeah, well, we got partway into our marriage and realized that we had a huge joy gap. And it was one of those things where I was oblivious to it because I was kind of a workaholic pastor. And I thought everything was fine because as long as there wasn't a flaring mess, I figured our marriage was fine.

So you were managing it. I was managing the marriage. But then what I realized was that she was actually withering away from this lack of joy because joy is the fuel on which the marriage runs.

And so if there isn't enough joy going on there, she's going to feel like she's not important to me and our marriage is actually withering and I'm not aware of it. So we realized we need to do some things. We didn't have this vocabulary back then, but realized we need to do some things to shrink this joy gap in our marriage and infuse it with more relational joy. And we started doing some things. I mean, the basic things that you are always told, like start date nights.

Well, we did date nights, but we would have fights on our date nights. That's very honest. I appreciate that. You know, because we hadn't spent enough time really doing the kind of habits we talk about in this book that you need to develop in order for things like that to be successful. It's always good when authors write from their experiences.

Yes, it is. Chris, let me ask you in terms of this label that you call the brain magnet. What is the brain magnet and what are the different types of bonds we have with other people? The brain magnet is really the foundation in the emotional brain. In other words, we are created for relationships. We are designed so true for for bonding. It's kind of like, you know, Gorilla Glue where you you really strong adhesive that can glue things together. So the brain magnet is really when when Marcus would started bonding with Brenda and his his brain magnet is looking for her on campus and just looking for that young lady to walk around the corner.

Because his brain magnet is now bonded and his brain magnet is saying, you are personal to me and I want to spend more time with you. So it's this powerful force that God designed in the brain so that we will bond. You also mentioned a term called the joy bucket. Well, the joy bucket is that is a very specific part of your brain is called the right orbital prefrontal cortex. So I like joy.

Hence the terminology. Basically, this part of the brain is fascinating. It's the high. It's the part of the brain we would identify as me. And that is when I say I am doing this, I feel this.

I am reacting. This is the part of brain I self identify as my identity center. It's also my joy center. And so what happens is that the larger the capacity for joy, the larger my capacity to act like myself, which is a lot of ramifications for a whole lot of things. But in marriage, the ability to stay myself, even when I'm in pain, is incredibly important. Because if if there's pain in my marriage and that pain makes me overwhelms my capacity for joy, my joy bucket can't handle that much pain.

I will turn into somebody else and I will go from acting like a friend to you to acting like an enemy to you. And so powerful. Yeah, it just changes everything. And so I need a big enough joy bucket to be able to absorb the level of pain that's going on in the marriage. And if those things get out of proportion, there's just way more pain than there is joy in my marriage.

Things are going to start tipping and going south. You know, there's so many responses I think of in that regard. People that when you say of them, oh, they're comfortable in their skin, that would remind me of that person. He or she is very comfortable being who they are.

They don't have to pretend. Right. Is that evidence of a person who's that's evident joy bucket? Right. That means that they have a well-developed joy bucket in their brain.

Yeah. I think, Marcus, you have this acrostic where you relate the on and off switch in the back of our head. Now, I'm going to say it again. So men listen to this.

Women get this gene lit up on this when it said, yes, this is so true. So what is that acrostic? The acrostic is cake. Right. I love that. Yeah.

Well, I designed it for Max. He doesn't like cake. Right. It's like this is a piece of cake to have a better marriage. So the idea here is that the on off switch in your brain means that on the right side of your brain are most of the relational circuitry. And the idea here is that when my relational circuitry is functioning and everything is going well, it's easy for me to act like myself. It's easy for me to stay engaged.

You know, we can it goes well. But if something happens and the switch goes off, I my relational circuits, when they shut down, I stop acting like myself. I turn into a different person. All of a sudden, I don't feel like I want to be with you.

So cake helps us analyze if how I can tell that my circuits have gone off. OK, good. All right.

So the first one is curiosity. And that is, I lose my curiosity about you. And the main reason that I lose my curiosity about you is that I think I have you all figured out.

Right. So if I think I've got you off here, I know why you're having this emotion. I know why you're making this decision. I know why you're being the way you all because you always do this and you never do this. So I have no curiosity about you.

I don't like cake anymore. That is so true. It is. I mean, you tap out. You think you know it all.

That's exactly what happened. Boy, men listen to this. So when your switch goes off, you lose curiosity. If you want to get your relational circuits back on so that you act like yourself, you stay relationally engaged.

You have to disconnect briefly, find some curiosity and reengage with that curiosity. Now, there is a counterfeit form of curiosity to avoid. And that's called sarcasm. Right.

You don't say, so I'm curious. Are you always this stupid? That is not correct. Again, I'm being stereotypical, but we tend to fall that way. We do. We can become very cutting. OK, so we have curiosity. We haven't finished our cake.

Now, you want to walk them through some of this? So appreciation. So one of the wonderful skills and habits that we can practice is just thinking about the good stuff. So if my relational switch is off, I'm not enjoying being with my wife at this moment.

I'm upset because my feelings are hurt or whatever it is. Then I can think about, well, what is it I do enjoy about my wife? Or what are some of the gifts that God's given us recently that I can be thankful for? So just taking a few moments to, you know, focus on the good stuff. What was great about your week?

What was good from your day? What interaction was life giving? And that actually helps to activate the switch. OK, good. So curiosity and appreciation and what's next? Kindness. And that is when my circuits go off, I don't feel like being kind to you. But I feel like I feel like avoiding you. I feel like you just leaving would be a good thing.

I feel like being a little snarky would be a good idea right now. I just don't feel like being kind. And so that is a sign that these circuits have gone off because when my circuits are on and I am acting like myself, I'm a kind person.

Right. So why did I stop being a kind person here is because something triggered me and my circuits went off. So I need to recognize that. And then the last one is eye contact. You know, so a lot of times my wife will say to me, would you look at me, you know, look at me. And I'm like, I'd rather not.

That's a sign that my circuits are off. What about the narrative engine and how does it affect us? And I want a story from you. So how have you personally experienced this? So narrative engine basically now we're moving from the right side of our brain where all the nonverbal relational circuitry is over to the left side of the brain, which is the part of my brain that is really good at analysis and problem solving and storytelling. So it's the part of my brain that is weaving a narrative together as to why does this keep happening? So what happens is if my relational circuits are on, I will literally tell myself a different narrative than when my relational circuits are off. So if my circuits are on and I'm engaged and excited and appreciative about my wife, I have a very different narrative about her. But when my circuits go off, my narrative about her changes. And so like if my circuits go off, it's like that's when I go into my it's like we have some kind of a fight.

We're upset with each other. I go into the next room and I go to what I call my man cave in the back of my head. And I am just like going, why does she always do this? Why doesn't she ever treat me like this?

Why don't you know, when is she going to get this right? And I and what I'm doing is I'm rehearsing the narrative that justifies the emotion that I'm feeling. And so if I'm going to break out of that emotion, I'm going to have to change that narrative. So I've got to realize now that isn't that narrative isn't always true.

It's it only feels true when I feel like this. And so trying to get sometimes getting your relational circuits back on actually helps you change that narrative and get back to a healthier narrative about. So if we brought Brenda in here, what story would she bring to the table of when that was a matter for you to discuss?

All right. So a classic one, I think we even have this in the book, was there was one time where sometimes I could tell my relational circuits went off because I would just shut down. Right now, I would just stop talking. And and we would be in the middle of a fight and I would just be quiet. And so she's sitting on the bed, I'm sitting on the couch and she looks at me and normally she would say, we got to talk about this. We got to talk. And this time she looked at me and she said, is it OK if I come and sit next to you? And I just shrugged my shoulders because I was not talking. And she sat next to me and then she looked at me, said, is it OK if I hold your hand? I looked at her, I said, you're really not good at this fighting for this stuff, are you? And I said, OK, you can hold my hand. And as soon as she did, it was like I could just feel this whoosh inside of, OK. All said in this on off switch, pop back on my relational circuits came back on. And all of a sudden I realized I like this person.

I want to have a kind conversation with this person. And we could talk about our problem now relationally, because both of us had our relational circuits on. If we talked about that problem when I was still had it off, I would have just, you know, been living out of this narrative instead of. But by getting our relational circuits reconnected and getting reengaged with each other, a different narrative took over. I'm like, no, I want this relationship to work.

I want this problem to get solved. And we were able to handle it totally differently. But in that context, if I can add, Chris, you can bounce off of this, but it sounds like you got to react almost opposite of what your emotions are telling you to do. Yeah, exactly. That takes discipline. Well, it also took. But it largely took getting the circuits back on, because what I found is that one of my circuits are off. I do turn into a different person.

Right. And I will treat my wife like an enemy instead of treating her like a friend. But when it's as simple as getting the circuits back on and all of a sudden I don't feel like treating her like an enemy anymore.

I want to I now want our relationship to be bigger than the problem. And so she what she did was helping me get there. So tying that together, you go back to your cake acrostic and the first one, curiosity. This is where that would play right where you have to keep if you're the one with more joy in your bucket or your bigger joy bucket. You want that curiosity so you can help your spouse enlarge his or her joy.

That's right. And if I'm if I'm in a having a great day and my joy levels are really high and I see my wife, her, she's just not had a very good day. So those joy levels are not what they could be. You know, I'm going to say, hey, honey, what do you need right now? Like, you know, I'm ready to go have some fun. I feel like we should, you know, go go out and do something fun. She's no, you know, I'm not in the mood. OK, well, what would be meaningful for you right now?

Like, what do you need? So curiosity is a very helpful invitation for connection. Right. Now, you have another acrostic plan, is it? And let's get into that, because these are some of the practical ways to do what you just said, Chris. Yeah. And the first one I like play together.

And I think that helps build that bucket as we're talking. So aside from the obvious, how does a married couple learn to play together? Well, in you think about it, friendship is the foundation of a really good marriage. You want to be good friends. And if you're not playing together, are you really friends? You know, because friends are tend to be people you would invite over to play and to do things together. And some of it's really simple stuff like making sure you take time to take walks now and then playing cards together, doing things that you both like, watching a movie, but talking about it and interacting over it and not just I mean, it's just you treating somebody like they're a friend that you enjoy doing stuff with.

So playing together is huge. You describe that like I smiles and date night getting relational. I was Jean and I were talking about this this morning and she said, you know, actually, I said it to her. You do I smiles through the phone when she answers the phone when I'm calling. She's so upbeat. And I said to her, that is so good for me to hear when I call.

She said, hello, how are you? I mean, it's just upbeat. So it's like a phone smile. It is.

And you know what? Joy is best grown visually and through voice tone. And so that's exactly right. You can hear it in the voice. Are you glad to be with me? And that's what our joy center and our joy buckets always asking.

Are you glad to be with me right now? And that leans into the next one, listen for emotion, the L of play. Right.

What is that in? You know, for us, people that may not understand that clearly give us some concrete examples. So going back to the right and left side of the brain, the left side of your brain naturally listens for problems.

And the right side of your brain, in order to train, it needs to be trained to listen for emotions. So what happens at a lot of conversations that I have is as soon as I hear the problem, I quit listening because, oh, that's the problem. I can fix that. I'll let you finish whatever you're doing, but we'll circle back.

Oh, that is such a big landmine. But also, I mean, I, I relate to that. So part of what we're telling people in learning to listen for emotion is the idea that you listen for emotion first. And then you identify the emotion accurately and how big it is for that person. Now, you don't have to agree that they should be feeling it. You're just acknowledging that this is, in fact, how they're feeling.

And that helps them feel seen and it helps them feel understood. And now you can circle back and solve the problem. And you're going to do it from a relational foundation instead of skipping the relationship and going straight to the problem solving. And so where most of us make our mistakes in all kinds of relationships, whether it's leadership or parenting or marriage, is that we lead with problems in our conversations instead of taking the time to listen for the emotion. All right. We got to move quickly.

So that's the P and the L of play. Now, appreciate daily. That sounds like a no brainer for us as Christians.

It does. But a lot of us confuse gratitude with appreciation. And that is if I just say, well, thank you for doing that.

That's almost a left brain task. And I can check off my list. Appreciation is where I take the time to really let them know how it made me feel, how it affected me, you know, how good this was.

In other words, taking three, four or five minutes, you know, to let people know that this was really something I appreciated. Yeah. Chris, your wife, Jen, we got to get her in here. You have a story about you and Jen. What happened?

Yes. So when we were newlyweds, we discovered something very important that at night when she tries to fall asleep, she has a very busy brain and she can't fall asleep. And I'm a light sleeper. So we discovered this was not making a very restful night for either of us.

So I was learning about all this recent brain research and I thought, you know, let's try an exercise here. So one night we decided while laying in bed, just cuddling, we shared three things from our day that that brought a smile. So three good moments, good things from our day could be very practical, like, hey, you know, I really enjoyed watching the snowfall today.

That was really meaningful. Then she does her three and then I share three things I like about her. You know, I appreciate, honey, that when our friend came over this evening, you your hospitality was amazing.

I really like how warm and hospitable you are and how you make our home just a joyful place. So I'd share three things with examples. She would share three things. And it was this point in the exercise.

I could physically just feel her body start to relax. But there was one more step, and that was what are three things that we appreciate about God? I might say, you know what? I really appreciate God giving me this opportunity to spend time with my friends today. That this has been such a meaningful visit.

And, you know, I'm just thankful that God really values relationships. My three things with examples, she shares her three things. It would take us 10 minutes to do this exercise.

The nights that we did this exercise, Jen would fall asleep within 10 minutes of the exercise and have a wonderful night's rest. Wow, that's great. There's somebody thinking, I'm just feeling it. Someone's thinking, hearing this right now. Boy, three smile day.

That's a good day. That's it. All right. The N is nurture rhythm. And that's plan.

That's the acrostic. So who wants to speak to nurturing rhythm? Well, nurturing rhythm goes back to the idea that you have to have margin. You can't grow joy if there's no margin in your life.

That can be the hardest thing, Marcus. Absolutely. And that's why you have to prioritize so that we have some practical ways that even busy people can grow some margin. For example, making your bedroom a problem free zone. Like once we go to bed. Amen. When you go to bed at night, for a lot of married couples, we've found is it is the bedroom is the boardroom. Yeah. Jean has been awesome at that. I mean, early on in our marriage, I think she was far more. She's a night person.

And this can play into that, you know, where she's energized and ready to conquer the world at about 10, 11 o'clock at night. I don't know where the world is. My eyelids are shut. But you have to learn to do that, right? You do. Where's that rhythm for you as a couple?

It is. And so establishing a rhythm of marking out our calendar. When are we going to have our breaks to have play dates together? When are we going to have our weekends? But also creating a rhythm in your day that says this is when we're going to be together, knowing that I've got relational things to look forward to.

OK, we have covered a ton of territory very quickly and folks need to get a copy of this book, obviously. But I'm thinking for tonight, you know, as a couple is listen to this going, ah, we've got a joy gap. Let's just go back to that very first thing we identified. What's one thing they can do today that they can work on to close that gap? You know, what I would have them do, one of the exercises is just, you know, sharing those qualities that you appreciate about your spouse while you cuddle. That three and three.

I like that. You know what? That's a very simple exercise. And all of the exercises in the book always close with quiet and rest, right, which is part of that nurturing a rhythm. So joy is high energy. It's great while it's there. But OK, I need to catch my breath. So do the appreciation exercise. It's fun. It's meaningful.

It's life giving. Spend about five minutes just resting as you hold each other. The the bonding hormone oxytocin increases while we hold our spouse. So just a couple minutes of holding each other. You feel very close, bonded, peaceful and joyful. Yeah, it's good.

It'll definitely turn your circuits back on. Yes. And that's the point, right?

Yeah. Marcus and Chris, this has been good. Jean was right. This is great content. And I hope folks will get a copy of your book. The four habits of joy filled marriages right here at Focus. Again, this is what we're trying to do is equip you to not have just that mediocre relationship. Let's as Christians model what marriage can look like so that others, especially those that don't know the Lord, can look at your relationship and say, what do you have that's so different? Wouldn't that be terrific? And we can have that.

And this is one of the ways to learn these great habits. And I think your marriage will change. And we're talking to those who have, you know, just the regular bumps in the road kind of marriage, not where you're in an extremely bad place. There's different things for you to do in that regard. And you can call us for that help as well. But send a gift of any amount and we'll send the book The Four Habits of a Joy Filled Marriage to say thank you for being a partner. And if you can't afford it, I mean, we'll get it into your hands. We'll trust that others will cover the cost of that. So get ahold of us because your marriage is what we care about. We're a phone call away and that number is 800-232-6459-800, the letter A and the word family.

Or check the episode notes for details. Marcus and Chris, thanks again for being with us. Great stuff.

Thank you. It's great to be here. It's been a lot of fun.

Yep, we've enjoyed ourselves. On behalf of Jim Daly and the entire team here at Focus on the Family, thanks for joining us today and be sure to be with us next time as we once again help you and your family thrive in Christ. I was convinced that nothing could change what was going on in our marriage.

And I didn't want to try anymore. But my commitment to God helped me try one more time. We went to a Hope Restored marriage intensive and it was life changing. The counselors created the safest environment we could imagine, so that let us really talk. We're on a much different course now and I believe we received a miracle that week. Receive your free consultation at HopeRestored.com