Finding a Real Two-Way Relationship With God

Over the decades of our marriage, Dennis and I have worked through many conflicts—far more than I would have ever imagined when we said I do. These have settled into several recurrent categories: parenting values, decision-making, sex, and travel. For other marriages repeated marital battles may return again and again to finances, in-laws, jobs or exes. Every married couple could name their own set of common conflicts, but no marriage battles the same combinations.

Even in our semi-retirement season of life, some of these issues still surface. Recently it was over travel. Again. And schedules. Again. Feelings of mistrust, lack of support, lack of protection, and anxiety sprouted like weeds as we clashed over our values and desires and ways of making decisions.

Some of the frustration comes because we thought we’d solved our differences and yet they popped up again like the silly game “Whack a mole.” Some of it, we realized, was experiencing these differences between us in a new season of life. Today we aren’t the same people as when we argued about travel 20 years ago. We have different needs and desires now. And often conflict is a revelation that fears still lurk in each of us. Fears of being misunderstood, not valued, not wanted or needed in the same way anymore.

We’ve discovered transparency in our marriage relationship is like peeling the layers of an onion. It’s not a one-and-done, but a slow revealing with each delicate semi-transparent layer, a closer glimpse of who we really are at our core.