Conversate. Am I right?

 

 

Conversate

Are you lucky enough to have tied to knot to that one special someone? If not don’t let that keep you from reading on, much of what is discussed below applies more to you before getting married!

If you’re thinking about finally getting hitched, then you must be sure you’ve found the one. Here are some subjects I’d bet you haven’t talked about enough.

Eating habits

Sleeping together

Sharing space – Bathroom

Cleanliness

Organization

Roles

-       -  Job

-      -   Chore

 My wife and I love talking, in fact we spent almost 2 years dating long distance and all that time all we could do was talk! And all these topics were things we had serious issues with once we got married. Each one of them. Here are some examples…

Eating Habits – I like to meal prep and eat the same meal all week. Jess hates that.

Sleeping Together – She wants to cuddle, and I like having space.

Sharing a living space – I take a more minimalist approach and she loves to have eclectic/vintage items.

Cleanliness – I leave the dirty kitchen to clean up after enjoying the meal, she can’t enjoy a meal with a dirty kitchen.

I could go on and on! There are so many things we thought we were on the same page about, however in reality once we were living together we had so many conversations that needed to be had. (Many of them into the late hours of the night, yet another thing we differed on.)

Statistics show that most marriages do not end because of big issues, they mostly end because of a lack of communication on the little things. 63% of couples decide to stay together after an affair and a large majority of them report that the marriage comes out more strengthened than before. So we see that marriages are not contingent on avoiding mistakes. They are contingent upon both people communicating.

So, you and your special someone are still committed to making things work (hopefully this hasn’t dissuaded you at all) Engagement is not a place filler, it’s a time to transfer from courtship into marriage. Engagement is a time to get things figured out. Nobody plans a marriage.  Yet EVERYBODY plans a wedding! Why is that? The wedding is a one-day affair, and it only lives on in memory and photos. Marriage, however, is forever and takes work and effort every day! And we are all so willing to skate on through these crucial conversations.

https://ericalayne.co/marital-satisfaction-while-raising-children/

Now you’re married. Congrats! Down the line maybe you’ll also be lucky enough to have children together, studies show (see above graph) that after the birth of the first child marital satisfaction drops off, this is often causes by both people becoming more interested in the baby than each other. Interesting enough most people in this situation report to be much happier than their non-married counterparts. How do we combat this? We essentially need to shirk the modern ideologies of psychology that says we are each our own identity flying through life taking and borrowing things as we need them, then ejecting those things or people from our space when we don’t need them anymore. This simply is not true, President Hinkley once said "We must care AT LEAST as much about what our spouse wants as what we want." This is the way to true happiness; modern society is straying further and further from the simple truths taught by the gospel. When polled, people regret 3 things far more often than anything else.

1. Getting divorced

2. Not having children

3. Not accomplishing your dreams

What do you think youll regret not doing?

Stop hanging out, start dating.

 

Date them until you hate them, in today’s world it’s very common to date someone until you just can’t stand each other then to immediately just into another relationship and begin to make them miserable. Why do people do this? Well one thing people have forgotten, is that when you are dating there should be only two possible outcomes. You either date someone to get married eventually, or you date someone to break up eventually.

Dating

                              Courtship

                                                             Engagement

                                                                                                        Marriage

Imagine these 4 levels as steps, as we progress down these steps into marriage, we often don’t step. We slide. Nobody wants to walk into love, we want to fall in love. But what we don’t realize is that if you fall into love, then you can fall out of love. 40-50 years ago, in Europe this trend began, people started to take dating and courtship less seriously, they began hanging out and stopped going on dates, the results of this change are symptomatic in divorce rates. We in the USA followed suit shortly after and are experiencing the results.

Your brain’s job is not to discern the truth, when we entertain a horror movie our brain starts to treat it as a reality. It is the job of your spirit to know the truth from lies. This is true in the case of relationships; our brain starts to see people we like as more attractive and people we don’t like as less attractive.

What happens when a girl watches a horror movie? Her legs curl up. And she protects herself with a super secure blankey or pillow right? Even though a movie cannot hurt us, just entertaining the idea that It could be real is enough to scare us.

“Your brain is just an organ. Everything you think, your brain interprets it as its real.”

Hanging out equates to engaging in shared interests. There is 0 reliable data to support the fact that shared interests have any bearing on a happy and or successful marriage. In fact, in some cases like for gamers, this shared interest, negatively impacts the relationship in the vast majority of cases. This shared interest is a huge time sink, and if both people happen to be gamers, then they are often competing against each other. If you think competing with your spouse for hours per week with strengthen a marriage, you are a fool.

Here’s what a “date” is.

DATE:

         PLANNED

         PAIRED OFF                                         

         PAID FOR

Knowing Quotient:

            Togetherness (shared experiences)

+ Talk (mutual self-disclosure)

+ Time (3 months to begin to know..)

-----------------------------------------------

Knowing another and the couple

 

 “There is no sense dating someone exclusively until you are ready to get married.” – President Gordon B. Hinckley

 

Know   Trust   Rely     Commitment              Touch                                    - Jon Van Epp

     |           |          |                   |                             |

     |           |          |                   |                             |

     |           |          |                   |                             |

The higher you move a slider up on each of these scales the more attached you become to somebody, and starting from left to right you should never allow one of the subjects to the right to overscale the subject to its left. For example, you shouldn’t trust someone more than you know them, and you shouldn’t rely on someone more than you are committed to them. Understanding this simple scale allows people to realize the truth and interpret that data to make the best decision clearer.

What are we to make of all this data? Stop hanging out and start going on dates. I bet that if you stop hanging out with your boo and start dating again, you’ll come to a new realization of how you feel about them.

Is society creating a disorder or a culture?

    "I was born this way."

We've probably all known somebody who has spoken those words. Or maybe you haven't depending on your age? It's incredibly common for people in my generation to have gays friends or family. (More accurately people who identify as LGBTQ+) And I feel that I hear this phrase more often than ever before. So, are peoples genes becoming more gay? Or is society turning people gay.

 

    Is it possible that our culture is just more inclusive and accepting now of people who identify as LGBTQ?

 

    I doubt it. It’s more complex.

 

    What I’ve seen in the media is that people are more polarized than ever. People continue to flock towards either leftist ideologies or right. I do believe about 80% of people sit somewhere in the middle. With all the media and influencers ramping up their opinions on hot button topics we see more people divided than ever before in our country’s history! Yet there is this tremendous surge in people. 

 

"LGBTQ youth are more than four times as likely to attempt suicide than their peers (Johns et al., 2019; Johns et al., 2020)."

 

    How does this statistic make any sense if we are more accepting now than ever...? I think the answer lies in a difficult yet simple truth. We all have a problem.

 

    Our problem is the desensitizing of our youth, it’s the fact that 70% of adults who are gay reported being sexualized or abused sexually as a child. It’s also that parents are pushing these poisonous ideologies on their children at younger and younger ages so they can virtue signal to their friends about how "loving and progressive they are." Anybody who labels their child as gay, lesbian, trans or whatever sets them up for failure in life. One of my nephews believes he is spiderman, and he wears his mask and light up shoes everywhere he goes! Children’s brains are so plastic that anything can take root and become their entire personality, they aren’t aware of gender or sexual attraction. 

 

    What consequences will we face down the road if we continue down this path? It’s quite funny to imagine but if the rates of people who identify as LGBTQ continue to grow as they have been for the last 75 years, then everyone will be gay by 2050! It’s certainly not possible, however funny it is.

 

I have my own fair share of things I wish I didn’t want. There is no lasting happiness to be found in seeking after your own gratification. No matter your religious beliefs or ideals, we know that family and selflessness lead to lasting happiness far more often than anything else. Becoming better is what you should strive for, not living with who you are now. Therein lies the message I wish you to know, it doesn’t matter if you were “born this way or that” be better.

 

 

          Now we have arrived back where we started. Were you really born this way? Perhaps, just remember that everyone has their own proclivities towards certain things, whether you decide to indulge in them is your decision. I have a propensity to sleep in, I am currently undergoing a transition. I love sleeping in, but for the last two weeks I’ve gotten myself out of bed and hit the gym at 6:00 AM every morning. Afterwards I end it with a 2 minute cold shower. David Goggins refers to painful self-inflicted experiences as “the suck”. I enjoy “the suck” because that where growth lies. I feel more in control of my mind and body, and it leads to me making more changes in my life. If I sat back on the couch telling myself “This is who I am” I wouldn’t ever grow, so maybe you are gay, maybe your not. But ill be damned if I don’t speak my mind that nobody cares. Everyone has demons, get out and conquer them before you start going out proclaiming “I was born this way”.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

https://www.thetrevorproject.org/resources/article/facts-about-lgbtq-youth-suicide/