By Coleen York How can being overly nice ever be a bad thing? I mean honestly … shouldn’t we ALWAYS be doting on our significant others and spouses? Well, that all depends. Often times what prompts us to be kind and go above and beyond is not unadulterated love and passion, though you may not
By Ashley McIlwain Have you ever needed to discuss something with someone, but you just knew it was a sensitive subject? Most likely even mentioning it will elicit a negative, strong reaction that makes you opt to avoid it like the plague? You cringe at the mere thought of bringing it up, so you convince
By Ricinda Perry I just returned from a number of trips to see my family. We started off for California, then to Minnesota, and finally ended our travels in Pennsylvania. On these trips I learned a number of things. I’d like to share two of them with you. Lesson one. Look around you. Listen to
By Steve McIlwain Hubs here. Depending on your style of thinking, your brain has between 12,000 - 50,000 thoughts per day. That’s 8-34 per minute; more than one different thought every two seconds!! Men have different ways of expressing these thoughts. Some are loud and outspoken. Some are quiet and muted. Some are entirely unfiltered.
By Ashley McIlwain It’s not you, it’s me. We’ve all heard this cliché line often associated with a break-up. Men and women everywhere use it as a means of ending a relationship that is less than desirable for one reason or another. Maybe you’ve used it or been on the receiving end of it. This
By Ashley McIlwain It’s that time of year where many of us roll up our sleeves to do some serious spring cleaning. We dig our way to the backs of closets ridding them of items we forgot even existed. Things that have gone unnoticed get packed up or tossed out. Corners that haven’t seen a
By Coleen York There’s no denying our lives revolve around relationships. It’s the way we were created: to be in relationship first with God, and then with others. There’s something circuited into the heart of every one of us that yearns for fellowship, for communication and understanding. But for years I thought that in order
By Ashley McIlwain Foreword: A Letter to Newlyweds was inspired by my sister’s recent marriage. As I began thinking about the things I wanted to say to her and her husband about marriage, I found myself frantically writing. Nowadays marriage seems to be entered into lightly, ignorantly, and with little preparation, and as a result,
“What are you most dissatisfied with about our marriage?” she asked. It was a simple question, albeit somewhat out of the blue. Ashley and I were driving home after spending a day at a museum. I sat there partly terrified, thoughts racing through my mind for the right answer. Difficult conversations are not exactly my
The fourth and final of the Four Horsemen is stonewalling. In his book The Marriage Clinic, Gottman defines stonewalling as occurring "when the listener withdraws from the interaction" (p.46). In other terms, stonewalling is when one person shuts down and closes himself/herself off from the other. It is a lack of responsiveness to your spouse
