Greg Smalley - 9 Lies That Will Destroy Your Marriage: And the Truths That Will Save It and Set It Free

9 Lies That Will Destroy Your Marriage And the Truths That Will Save It and Set It Free

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Jim and Mary have been married eighteen years but say they now feel more like friends than lovers. Its like were roommates, or business partners, says Jim. Not husband and wife. They want to be closer and go deeper, but they dont know how to get there.

According to their many friends, Marissa and Todd are warm, outgoing, and talkative. But when the two of them try to talk to each other, bombs explode. Even simple discussions about their daily schedules can rapidly veer off track, as unresolved conflicts from a month or a decade earlier resurface and inflame powerful passions.

Roger and Brittany both hoped that marriage would be calmer the second time around. Both left their first marriages because they said their partners subjected them to verbal attacks and abuse. But now, a few years into their marriage, theyre too emotionally self-protective to risk sharing openly and honestly with each other.

Beverly and Andrew have been married for thirteen years. Everything seemed perfect for a long time. Now, things are tense, ever since Andrew found out that Beverly, who is fifteen years younger, had an affair with a coworker. She has repeatedly apologized, but a cloud of distance and distrust remains.

These four couples are struggling. Their marriages began with love and hope but have since spiraled downhill.

Now its a Monday morning, and theyre all sitting on big, comfy couches in a meeting room at Focus on the Familys Hope Restored Marriage Intensive in Branson, Missouri. Theyre hoping for a miracle, and as the leaders of this weeks intensive, were praying that they experience one. Were not miracle workers, but God is.

Weve worked with more than seven thousand couples over the last twenty years as retreat leaders and trained therapists. Weve reached even more people through our talks and books. All these men and women have provided a type of marriage lab for us. And what we keep learning is amazing.

The results have been nothing short of miraculous. Most of the couples who come to us for therapy are in real crisis, many on the brink of divorce. Yet, some of our research indicates that more than 80 percent remain married two years after they let us help them.

Weve brought together some of our top marriage insights and tools in the pages that follow. This isnt theory. Its practical wisdom that comes from being able to walk alongside people who struggle to make their marriages stronger. In fact, these are the very tools and strategies our entire team uses in their own lives. If youve been struggling in your marriage, we pray you may find a miracle or two of your own. If not, we know that these insights and tools can make a good marriage even better.

Each couple is unique and faces unique challenges in marriage. But in our decades of working with couplesboth in marriages that are healthy and in those that are strugglingweve repeatedly encountered the same major problems happening over and over and over again.

Yes, the individual circumstances of each marriage may be unique, but the problems we see weakening and destroying marriages are often common and predictable. Thats because one of the biggest problems we see is that men and women grow up learning lies about love, lies generally taught by well-meaning people. Then they put these love lies into practice in their marriages, which prevents them from experiencing the wonder and beauty of real love.

Why would people build a marriage on a foundation of attractive but destructive lies instead of building on the solid foundation of Gods loving truth? These lies are taught as truth and can be very subtle; sometimes theyre even partially true. The problem is, they result in relational strategies that cannot actually workand we dont realize it. And if were using fundamentally flawed strategies weve been told are right and will work, what are we left to assume is the problem when these strategies inevitably fail? The people themselves!

Many of these marriage myths have now permeated our culture, filtering down even into our churches and our dating and marriage rituals. Sadly, we allow these insidious ideas to burrow deep down in the foundations of our marriages and fatally weaken the whole structure.

In this book we will be exploring the biggest lies weve seen at work in peoples relationships. We think of them as big, ugly, hungry termites designed to devour and destroy the foundations of love and marriage.