Video Transcript
Hi, David here. Welcome to part 1 of Quarantine, Your Marriage, and Surviving this Madness with Your Relationship intact.
Over the past couple of days, I’ve been reading news stories about the impact of COVID-19 on marriages and how lawyers are predicting a spike in divorces based on a surge in inquiries they’ve in the past few weeks.
I’ll be the first to say it…
Being stuck together isn’t the real problem here. This quarantine isn’t what’s causing issues in marriages it’s just revealing what the distractions were covering up before.
And that can be a good thing. This time alone gives you an opportunity, as a husband, to get to the root of the problems in your marriage. Over the course of this series, I’ll be covering both the what and the how.
It’s my goal to give you a blueprint for quarantine survival.
The first thing that you must remember is that you are both on the same team. You are both facing the very same uncertainty.
Your wife is not the enemy. You are not the enemy. You and your wife are on the same team and together there isn’t anything that the two of you can’t overcome… together.
So, lets get right into it.
The first thing you have to do or BECOME is tolerant of wife’s reaction to stress.
Not everybody reacts to stress the same way, and you have to be okay with that. This means that you must be tolerant of the way your wife reacts to hers, no matter what.
Yes, that means even if she isn't tolerant of the way that you react to yours.
That may not sound fair, but meeting intolerance with intolerance isn't conducive to a happy marriage. Not only that, but it will ensure that being quarantined together is tougher than it needs to be.
Look, things are tough enough right now, there is no need to pile it on with something that can be avoided. At the end of the day, you can control your REACTION to things even though you can't control the things that are going on in the world around you.
But, as a committed husband you have to go even further than that. Talk to your wife about the things that are going on.
You can say something like: “I know this is stressful, it is for me too, how do you feel about this whole quarantine thing?”
The idea here is to open communication. Just because the two of you haven’t spoken about your feelings surrounding all of this, doesn’t mean that neither one of you are stressed about it.
Uncertainty breeds fear, fear causes stress and stress distorts a things true shape or form. So, communicate with your wife. Talk it out. Get to know her how you used to know her before the distractions of life got in the way.
So, remove any and all tendencies that you have to judge and talk to your wife. Make a plan for your days quarantined together and a plan for what you’ll do when the country opens back up. You can have a stronger marriage on the other side of thing. You just have to put the effort in. I’ll see you in part 2.
