Hi everyone, this is Rev. Ronnie Roll with Hearts Unlimited, the heart behind Hearts Unlimited and your rebel reverend. I'd like to give a special shout out to Katherine Lillie and Icon Realty, our show sponsor for believing in Hearts Unlimited and my mission to spread love around the world. You can find more information about Icon Realty on all the pages where you download each episode. Please say hi when you reach out to her for me.

Today we're going to talk about coupling up and how to do it successfully. I'm not just talking about marriage because there's a lot of different kinds of committed relationships out there. And how you choose to do you can look totally unique for you, and that's okay. I'm Ronnie Roll and I am the heart behind Hearts Unlimited.

And let's get talking about this because this is a pretty important one to me. So when we start out thinking in terms of relationships, one of the things that usually comes to mind is we have these images of what things should look like. We're told what a marriage should look like, and we also often think about what committing to a long-term relationship with someone actually means.

You know, we grow up with these images from Disney where we have this. Happily ever after. The end. Hollywood gives us those same kinds of images where marriage is supposed to be beautiful. And it's kind of like there's this couple and they're standing up on top of a hillside and they're all dressed in their marriage outfits.

The bride is usually wearing a wedding gown and the groom in a tuxedo. And then there's this gorgeous sunset behind them. And Over the top of their heads are a couple of bluebirds flying with this banner that says happily ever after. And that's what we really think happens the day that we get married.

But the truth is, the relationship begins the following morning. But we still have that belief, because thatss what we've been told. We also know that scientifically, couples who are in the first couple of years of their relationship, a lot of times are in what we call the limerence phase.

And in that limerence phase, we have all of these emotions that are running through us. And they're beautiful. It's all of this serotonin flowing through the brain. Life is beautiful. All the feels, right? We start to feel that our heart flutters when we see our sweetheart. We might actually stutter a little bit when we';re talking about them. There's so much eye contact that happens in the beginning of a relationship, and that's about the time when the two start to think, this is it.

This is the one I've always wanted to be with. This is going to be perfect, right? And we think that this is what love and marriage and commitment is. And unfortunately, then we get into the relationship and then stuff begins to happen. And life sets in. And we get comfortable. And maybe we do things a little bit differently than we were before.

Maybe the cap on the toothpaste gets left off. The toilet seat gets left up. And we start to wonder, oh my gosh, who is this person? And why have they changed? I thought they were always going to be that perfect person that I fell in love with. Well, this is usually about the time marriage begins. And one of the things that we know is that is that people become disillusioned at this point.

And when they become disillusioned, if they don't have the skill set to be able to fix things, to understand what's actually transpiring, to know the scientific research behind everything that's occurring, the marriage will fail. And those failure rates for first time marriages now are looking at about 40 to 50 percent.

If the couple doesn't get help, and they decide to split, and they don't do the work, if they don't learn at that point, their second marriages are going to fail at about a 60 to 67 percent rate. Third marriages fail at an even higher rate of 70 to 73 percent. So what does this really tell us?

It tells us that if we figure it out right the first time, if we do the work in the beginning, we can avoid a lot of that type of failure.

Entrepreneurs and C-Suiters, I'm sorry to tell you, your numbers are even higher. And part of that is because relationships require a lot of attention. Intention, time and financial resources and commitment that often gets directed towards your business rather than the most important relationship of your life.

The Gottman Institute is the number one research institute in the world for relationships. They do everything scientifically. It' not just about asking questions. For them, they're measuring your responses in things like skin temperature and your eye pupil dilation, the amount of eye contact that you have with somebody visually, they're measuring all those kinds of things.

And one of the things that they've come up with is this. After 50 years of scientific research, they know, studying 150,000 couples, that couples that have a healthy relationship have greater health, greater wealth, greater resilience, faster recovery from illness, greater longevity. Do you believe this? An average of 15 years longer for couples, and their kids are going to be more successful.

Now, that's scientific research. That's not just me talking off the top of my head. That's incredible to know that that's how important a healthy relationship can be. Now, Dr. Gary Chapman, the author of The Five Love Languages, has a very special quote that I love. He says, Most of us spend more time preparing for our vocations and more time preparing for our vocations than we do preparing for marriage. Maybe that's why we're more successful in our jobs than in our marriages. Yet life's meaning is not found in money, but in relationships and marriage is designed to be the most intimate human relationship. If we want a successful marriage, then spend time preparing. The Journal of Family Psychology says there's a 30 percent increase in marital satisfaction and a decrease in divorce rates if couples do prepare. And so, you may be asking, Who does?

Maybe you didn't in the beginning and you're thinking I'm talking off the top of my head. Well, many in the Gen Z and Millennial generations now view seeking out any form of counseling or therapy as a proactive way of coping and improving the quality of their relationships and overall lives.

And this comes out of a study from The Knot And they're saying that a whopping 45 percent of Gen Z'ers and 31 percent of millennial couples are now starting to do things like attending premarital counseling. And this was just last year alone. So, how do you do the work to get prepared? That's a great question. You could try to do it on your own, but it's much easier if you have a guide. If you have somebody who knows what the pitfalls may be, who has talked to people, who have had amazing experiences on both ends of the spectrum. So, you can certainly try out premarital counseling through a religious organization.

Or you can do couples therapy with a professional. There's also programs such as the Intentional Marriage Design Program that Hearts Unlimited offers. And so you say, well, how do I know which one? That's another good question. Well, if you have a religious belief, you may feel more comfortable in going through that kind of a program.

And what that looks like is you have a series of meetings with your minister, your rabbi, your pastor, and they're going to talk with you about the kinds of things that couples should talk about before they make that kind of a commitment. To each other for a lifetime. They may also bring up some of those spiritual things that we talk about sometimes, um, how the church may view your marital commitment.

So those kinds of things can play out in that kind of scenario. Um, if you go through couples therapy with a professional therapist or a psychologist, in many times what they';re going to do is to work with you to understand how your past may be playing into your current. So, there may be some deep dives, for instance, into prior relationships.

Maybe some negative experiences you've had. Have you been cheated on? Um, did you have parents who fought a lot? Um, do you come from an abusive background? They may delve into a lot of those kinds of things to talk about how that is beginning to affect you now in this relationship. Now this intentional marriage design idea that I'm talking about, which is part of the program that Hearts Unlimited offers, differs from those kinds of things because here what we really want to do is start to design your future and we talk about what are going to be the rules of engagement for the two of you in this relationship. And the reason we do that is because then everybody knows what the rules are. And we can avoid a lot of conflict because of that. And so, when you go through a program like that, one of the things that you do is you design a marital plan. That marital plan is kind of like a lighthouse that gives your relationship direction.

So, if you can imagine a lighthouse is usually on the shores that tend to be kind of rocky. And the light comes out during the evening time so that boats can navigate around those rocks and then that way they're not going to hit one and sink. It gives them guidance whether or not the water is going to be calm or whether or not it gets really turbulent.

For those of you that have a business mindset, this is a lot like your business plan. And so when you start to create. This marital plan. There are a lot of moving parts to it. The first is, you really want to understand your why. Why is it that we're getting married? Especially in a world like today where, guess what?

You can meet somebody, you can have sex, you can live together, you can make babies, you can die and leave everything to somebody. Why the heck ever bother to get married? What the heck does it mean to you? What do you want from it? Why this person? What's unique about them? And the reason why this stuff is important is because down the road a lot of times we forget our why.

Things get a little rocky. Maybe the person has changed. Maybe we have changed. And we are looking at this other person and we are going, Who the heck are they? Why did I ever want to be in a relationship with them? And it is always a good thing to have this in writing somewhere, that you can remind yourself.

When I work with couples, a lot of times we keep love journals. And in our love journals, We write down on a regular basis why we love this person. What is it that we saw in them today?

Did it just be that today I looked at them and I was reminded of the little dimples I first fell in love with? Or was it the fact that today this person said thank you to me because I bought dinner?

And that shows just that little bit of appreciation for me. So that why can be important. The marital plan is also going to talk about your dreams, your goals, your aspirations, not just your own, but your partner's. And then, what do you want to create together? The reason why all of this becomes important is because we also know that part of the reason why marriages fail is because we get to a point where maybe those dreams have never been met.

And now here we are, 20 years down the road. The kids have grown up. They've moved out of the house. And we are starting to think in terms of what do I want from the rest of my life? And we start to remember those dreams that we had that maybe have not come to fruition. And having this marital plan means we can come back to how did we ever say we were going to end up there rather than where we are today.

And it can get us back on track. This can be something that we pull out too when we do relationship checkups. I highly recommend that we do those on a regular basis. Whether you are doing them individually every six months with each other, or whether, you know, once a year you meet with a professional and go through something like this, those checkups help you to stay on track so that you are not going to get to a point in life where those dreams don't occur.

We talk about what are your bumpers in a relationship. I love this. For me, I talk about bumper bowling with couples, and if you are not familiar with bumper bowling, what it is, is when kids are little, and you take them bowling for the first time, what you might be able to do is find an alley where they fill the gutters full of these big, long, uh, things so that when the child rolls the ball down the center, they're bound to score, right? It is not going to end up in a gutter, and they never succeed. What if you could bumper bowl your marriage? What if, in the beginning of your relationship, you set out what all of those bumpers are?

So, What could a bumper be? Well, you know, when we get married, a lot of times we say those vows that say, in sickness and in health, until death do us part, right? But do we really mean that? Do we really mean, until death do us part? What if your partner is the one who is beating the crap out of you? Do you really mean, until death do us part?

Or are you the one that says, no, wait a minute, there's a line there that, that, no, that one doesn't work for me. Ah, so now we have a bumper in the relationship. What might be those other bumpers? Could another bumper potentially be whether or not somebody cheats on you?

What do we really mean by cheating?

What about the work, wife, or husband? Is that cheating? Or does it have to be something just physical? So, when we design this marital plan, we talk about what your bumpers are. We talk about the what ifs. The what ifs I'm referring to with bumpers. What happens if? What are we going to do if?

To give you an example of what this looks like, years ago, I was in a relationship with a friend, and that's what we were, was friends. He was dating other people, I was dating other people, and we would talk with each other about those relationships. And I would say, oh, you just don't belong with them. And he'd go, you don't belong with them either. And we started talking about the what ifs that we had, In our relationships, like what if we had a partner who did start to become violent, more aggressive, things like that.

What would we do if? And so we'd had those conversations at friends. We were very blessed. We fell in love and got married. And unfortunately, some of those what ifs came up. And we'll talk about how we've worked around those in future episodes. Your marital plan, we'll talk about communication and conflict resolution skills.

How to get better ones. Because maybe you grew up in a family where the fighting style just wasn't something you felt comfortable with. And now you've carried it into your relationship and it just doesn't seem to work. How do you find new ones? And then, you create a plan on how to hold this all together, once the stuff hits the fan.

Because it does for almost every couple. And then, what do we do? And, now, what other kinds of things could a good program have in it? Well, think in terms about understanding why couples disagree. and what they usually fight about. Wouldn't it be good if you could be in a hot discussion with your sweetheart and in the middle of the discussion go, Uh oh, I remember we talked about that and that if we saw ourselves doing that, that we needed to take a time out.

Now is not a good time for us to continue this discussion. Wouldn't it be great if you could stop yourself before you hurt your partner by saying the wrong thing? And they could do the same.

How do you recognize the signs your relationship may fail and how to turn those around and how to keep the passion alive?

Because when we get married, many of us do it with the idea that the relationship is going to be beautiful. All the time, right? Forever. That's the image we were given. So how can we do that work to keep it passionate? I worked with a lady one time, married 31 years, and she said, you know, everything is really good.

He's a great man. I really, really love him. But you know that little spark we used to have? Well its kind of gotten to a point where it's not even really smoldering anymore. And I worked with her and her husband for about five minutes, one little exercise, and we were able to get all the tingles back.

What if you knew how to do that so that whenever it starts to happen, you would be able to say, Honey, I know what we need to do. Because right now, I may be feeling a little bit more disconnected than I want to be. Let's try to pull this back to where it used to be. Let's try this idea. As always, if you feel you're in danger of yourself or someone else, please seek immediate help from a professional doctor or therapist rather than other types of professionals or those who may be untrained in such things.

If you have huge traumatic experiences in your past that haven't been fully healed yet, consider working with a professional therapist. You can still design your relationship. It should just be done in conjunction with the healing of those past experiences so they no longer be the driving force in your current or future relationship.

And for all of us, being intentional about our relationships will lead us to a healthier, happier, hotter relationship that will be able to stand the test of time and avoid all the rocky shores of life.

Thank you for listening to this episode of Hearts Unlimited's podcast. If you enjoyed it, please subscribe to receive a notice when new episodes are released by going to www.heartsunlimited.org/subscribe. Heartsunlimited.org is where you can go to find more information about how to intentionally design your relationship, resolve conflicts at home or in the workplace, find more resources on how to have healthy, happy, and hot relationships where appropriate and more.

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Lastly, if you'd like to send me a message, let me know what you thought about this episode, give me ideas for what you'd like me to address, or whatever, you can reach me at [email protected] or on the Hearts Unlimited Facebook page. Until next time, here's to a life full of love and blessings along your heart's journey.