Saving Your Marriage Before It StartsSample

"Do You Know How to Fight a Good Fight?"

We’ve had our share of fights. What marriage, with a few years of history, hasn’t? But can you imagine a couple fighting over a bar of soap –to the point that it ended their marriage?

That’s the plotline of the book, Love in the Time of Cholera. It was the wife’s job to keep the house in order, including the towels, toilet paper, and soap in the bathroom. One day she forgot to replace the soap.

Her husband exaggerated the oversight: “I’ve been bathing for almost a week without any soap.”

She vigorously denied forgetting to replace the soap. Although she had indeed forgotten, her pride was at stake, and she would not back down. For the next seven months they slept in separate rooms and ate in silence. Their marriage had suffered a heart attack.

“Even when they were old and placid,” says the author, “they were very careful about bringing it up, for the barely healed wounds could begin to bleed again as if they had been inflicted only yesterday.”

How can a bar of soap ruin a marriage? The answer is actually simple: Because neither partner would say, “Forgive me.”

Those two words are essential to a successful partnership – and a requirement for moving past conflict.

Your relationship must be continually wrapped and rewrapped in forgiveness. Without it, your connection to each other will falter under the unbearable weight of blame and pain – as this biblical passage shows us. So how natural or easy is it for both of you to ask one another for forgiveness?

For a weekly dose of encouragement for your marriage, check out Les & Leslie’s blog, Devotion, at LesandLeslie.com