A young man arrived recently at my office in suicidal despair. Tim, a Christian, was distraught over a moral lapse he had promised himself would never happen. He and his fiancée, Elizabeth, had made a pact to avoid sexual involvement before marriage. But one night he stayed too late and the unthinkable happened. Consumed with…
Successful marriage consistently calls for both the humble admission of error when wrongdoing has occurred and the mutual commitment to grow in unfamiliar ways. Nothing destroys these two pillars of healthy relationships more quickly than persistent defensiveness and an unforgiving, critical spirit. These are the heart-hardening factors that eventually destroy the elasticity of creative conflict…
Today, more than ever, marriages are threatened by extra-marital affairs. Such heartache is as old as history itself. The Bible is filled with accounts of those (including God’s own servants) who were lured into adultery. Indeed, King Solomon (whose father had the most famous affair of them all) wrote many of his Proverbs with the…
Many have been there. A relationship that, at first, seemed good deteriorates into a boatload of pain when one deeply injures the other with emotionally (or even morally) indefensible behavior. Sometimes, it involves damaging words spewed out in the heat of battle. At other times, repeated actions inescapably wound the heart. Often, it is only…
As we began our first counseling session, John and Mary were certainly pleasant and polite, almost to a fault, with each readily deferring to the other. It was soon obvious that there was little open conflict between them; in fact, there was little emotional engagement at all. At first, you might wonder why they even…
