Sealing a Leaky Love

Fifteen years ago a catastrophic event took the life of golfer Payne Steward. Headed for a Florida tournament, his plane flew beyond its destination for 5 hours before crashing in a South Dakota farm field. This tragedy resulted from a drop in air pressure. As the plane climbed in elevation, air slowly leaked out of the cabin, killing the passengers.

Experts indicate that the loss of air in a plane’s cabin is rare. Unfortunately, a similar event occurs in marriage – a gradual, undetected leak that slowly suffocates the friendship. Knowing how to detect air leaks is only part of the solution, how to keep them from reoccurring is the rest.

In their recent book, Slow Church, Cultivating Community in the Patient Way of Jesus, C. Smith and John Pattison draw our attention to the need to slow down and enjoy our relationships the way Jesus did. In this increasingly busy environment, rather than fill each minute with activity, we need to slow down and invest in the relationships that will have lasting impact on our lives – relationships like our marriages.

By slowing down we don’t mean scheduling a date night every Friday night – that may be a start but it won’t fix the leak. We need to sit down, take a deep breath, and read the gauges.

Reading the Gauges

Sitting at a restaurant together with our faces in our phones texting or tweeting with casual friends, makes our most important relationship feel even less meaningful than these “casual” ones. In the same way, when our job absorbs our primary attention, the one we’ve promised to love the most can feel like a mistress or gigolo. Justin Trammell, put it this way, “Couples are content to lie in bed checking Facebook before they fall asleep when they could be face to face. The foot of separation under the covers might as well be miles for the lack of quality interaction.”* To begin reading the gauges, we have to trade pretending our spouse will understand our distractions for actually understanding what he or she is experiencing – right now – in the relationship.

Reading the gauges involves studying our spouse’s emotions more than we study how our Instagram followers are feeling about our latest hashtag or what our employers think of us. It means turning off our entertainments – anything that sucks the air out of the words “I love you.” Reading the gauges requires asking the question: How does my best friend and lover feel about us right now? Marty and I have found that even learning to ask this one question slows the air leak significantly. The answer to that one question can help us create a list of emotions that will become the gauges we learn to check regularly.

When I (Marty) ask my wife, Linda, “How are you feeling about us right now?” she might reply “bored.” There’s now a “gauge reading” to address and a “gauge question” to ask again in a few days. If I ask the question again, she might say, “content.” That’s a positive reading, suggesting the air pressure in the cabin is good. Celebrating the positive and dealing with the negative readings is how we begin sealing the leaks for good.

How does my best friend and lover feel about us right now?”

Sealing the Leaks

Once we begin regularly reading the gauges, we are ready to reawaken the delight and desire that once invigorated the relationship. Dr. John Powell, in his book Why Am I Afraid to Love, suggests journaling through a series of contemplative questions and then exchanging journal entries with each other. Although not every marriage partner will be excited or even comfortable with this activity, it’s transformative. The sharing helps us begin to know the other person in a way that actually means something to them. That new knowledge not only augments our love for our spouse, it gives us courage to dig deeper.

Because communication is a learned skill, we suggest applying 10 principles for sealing relational leaks.

1. Make the effort. Effective communication is hard work. Many times we don’t communicate because it is easier than making the effort.
2. Overcome your impediments. I (Rich) am married to an introvert. Her first inclination is to be silent. But in her wisdom and maturity she has opted to move out of her comfort zone and communicate.
3. Create the right climate. Some of us create a climate around us that makes talking difficult. Become approachable. Smile and nod when someone is talking. Even if you are pretending at first, these will become authentic climate-improvers over time.
4. Seek effectiveness over efficiency. The easiest form of communication is what experts call “one-way.” One-way communication is “I talk and you listen.” Unfortunately it is the poorest form. The most effective is “two-way.” When our talking becomes two-way, you hear the other person say, “So what I think I hear you saying is . . .”
5. Use creative talk. Too much of our “communication” is cliché and mundane. When we begin creatively sharing our feelings, the oxygen level becomes invigorating again. Avoid, “You’re as pretty as a rose.” Instead, borrow from Solomon’s wisdom, “Like a lily among thorns is my darling among the maidens” (Song of Songs 2:2). Linda knows I like cars. After 30 years of marriage she still smiles when I say silly things like, “You’re like a Ferrari among Civics” or “You’re one classy chassis.”
6. Weigh your words. Solomon also wrote, “The heart of the righteous weighs its answers, but the mouth of the wicked gushes evil” (Proverbs 15:28). You can’t control your spouse’s behavior or speech, but you can “weigh” yours and not “be found wanting” (A Knight’s Tale).
7. Model your message. Seventy percent of what we communicate is non-verbal. What we say is only 30%. If our body language is different than our rhetoric, our modeling trumps anything we say.
8.  Seek to understand. Our first urge is to be understood. But our most powerful ally is our capacity to understand. James reminds us to be slow to speak implying that listening is a powerful tool.
9.  Be proactive. One of the powerful tools possessed by the mature is their capacity for avoiding passivity. Find the right time and place to talk and then initiate a conversation. Proactivity is a significant difference between a pro and a novice.
10.  Start each conversation with God. The Psalmist wrote, “May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer” (Psalm 19:14).

When we communicate with each other in this way, our reciprocity breathes fresh air into the relationship and we grow to deeply respect and trust each other. As we continue to work on communicating, an authenticity grows that defies explanation.

Reading the gauges and sealing the leaks can fill our marriages with invigorating air and the resulting fruits of delight and peace. Solomon’s wisdom, again, sums it up best, “The tongue has the power of life and death, and those who love it will eat its fruit” (Proverbs 18:21).

* Conversation with Justin Trammell, 11/13/14. Justin is Marty and Linda’s first-born and has been married five years to Allison. They are expecting their first child in February.

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