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Keeping the Flavor in Your Marriage
by Norman Bales
All About Families


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Insofar as I'm concerned, the fellow who invented chewing gum created a product that comes close to being entirely useless. It gives me sore jaws; I can't find a place to get rid of the stuff when I'm tired of chewing it; and the flavor doesn't last very long. It does have one practical advantage. If you chew vigorously enough on an airplane flight, it will keep your ears from popping. I chew gum only on plane flights and when I do, I pop the stuff in my mouth just as the plane leaves the runway hoping the pilot will gain altitude before the flavor runs out. When he levels the plane off, I discard it in the little bag supplied for those who suffer from air sickness.

When I look at the divorce rate in society, I think a lot of people are treating marriage the way I treat chewing gum. When the flavor is gone out of the marriage, it's not unusual for one spouse or the other to discard a partner even though he or she once stood before a minister and promised to love and honor each other until "death do us part."

Marriage doesn't have to grow stale with the passing of years. Ann and I have been married 42 years and it's still an exciting ride. You have to work at it. If you're willing to invest a little energy in creativity, you can keep the excitement going twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years and beyond.

How do you do that? I don't know all the techniques of keeping a marriage exciting, but I'm sure I know of at least one thing that works remarkably well. EXPRESS APPRECIATION OFTEN!

In one of his famous Lake Woebegon monologues, humorist Garrison Keillor described a long married couple. Every night the husband consumed a generous portion of the same menu offering. (Breaded veal cutlets as I recall). Every night over the course of four decades, the husband devoured the cutlets, wiped his face with a napkin, pushed his chair away from the table and looked his wife in they eye. He smiled at her and spoke in a tender voice, "That's the best you've ever done." It may sound monotonous to you, but to her his words of appreciation sounded like sweet music.

When Ann and I married, we drove to Fort Worth, Texas and spent the night. We got married on Saturday night, got up early the next morning and drove to a small West Texas town where I delivered one of the most pitiful sermons I've ever preached. We went out to dinner on Sunday evening and went to a movie on Monday. On Tuesday morning, I reported for work on a construction project. That was our honeymoon. I don't really recommend doing it that way, but it did give us a lot of room for improvement in terms of building an exciting relationship.

By way of contrast, consider today's affluent newlyweds. They may book a cruise to some spot in the Caribbean or fly to Europe. They stay in the finest hotels, dine on elaborate cuisine and experience just about every luxury they've dreamed of up to that point in time. That doesn't leave them a whole lot of room for building excitement. Often the flavor has gone out of the marriage by the time the honeymoon ends. They begin focusing on one another's faults. They settle into a pattern of complaining and faults become magnified. Criticizing gets to be a daily habit. They would never be able to understand the guy who would praise his wife's breaded veal cutlets every night.

I really enjoy certain foods. Lasagna is one of them and Ann makes delicious lasagna. I'm not sure how well I would handle it if Ann fed me lasagna every evening. She probably wouldn't hear me say, "That's the best you've ever done." However, I do know that praise resonates quite well in our relationship. The more we display thoughtful consideration and express genuine appreciation, the more we grow as a couple.

The apostle Paul wrote, "Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen" (Ephesians 4:29). People who practice that principle in marriage never lose the flavor.

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