Knowledge and wisdom are two different things. Knowledge is the possession of accurate information, and wisdom is the skill of how to use knowledge. So, wisdom is the skill of applying knowledge to the various parts of our lives.
Marriage is, itself, a skillset, one all of us married couples need to have. The marriage skillset is a set of five skills:
- Communication. You won’t find any part of marriage that doesn’t depend on communication. A couple lacking in communication skills is bound to have trouble.
Marriage requires unity – that the couple become one flesh. The Bible asks how two can walk together (as in walking through life in unity) unless they agree. The logical question is: how can two agree unless they effectively communicate?
Communication is transferring what’s in one person’s heart into the heart of another. We can transfer our positive or negative contents to our spouse’s heart. If I’m bitter and resentful, that can be transferred, just as mercy and grace can be; it just depends what the contents of our heart are. Jesus said that out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks. Therefore, it behooves us to ensure that the contents of our heart are agape-love (see #5).
- Money Management. Money problems is one of the top two reasons couples get a divorce. Chances are, one spouse will be better with money than the other. Still, that doesn’t mean one should be totally uninvolved. Most important is to determine roles and (you guessed it!) communicate what the roles are, through the process of making money decisions as you plan, carry out, and review financial operations.
- Conflict Management. It’s inevitable that couples will have conflict. There are two perspectives and two personalities involved in everything a couple does. As important as it is to arrive at agreement, conflict resolution skills are often the deciding factor of whether agreement will be reached.
- Sex & Romance. This is probably the most intriguing skill ; the problem is that it’s also the most misunderstood. Think of sex and romance this way. It’s like painting a house. It takes a whole lot of preparation to ever get to the point of applying the paint. There’s scraping, sanding, pressure washing, repairing, caulking and cleaning that happens first, and the prep work takes a lot longer than the actual painting.
Sex and romance is the skill of connecting so intimately that we make a deep emotional, mental and spiritual-soulish connection as well as the physio-sexual one. In the house painting metaphor, the prep work addresses all the non-physio-sexual connections. It’s about caring, giving, sacrificing, prioritizing, respecting and serving, all for the benefit of the spouse, even without expecting anything in return.
It’s even possible (It usually takes husbands a while to get this but typically is understood naturally by the wife. Husbands are like: who wants to have a prepped, unpainted house?) that the “preparation” (painting analogy, again) can be satisfying enough without sex. And most wives understand there’s such a thing as non-sexual physical affection. Here again, communicating about all this is important, as are resolving related conflict and keeping financial pressures at bay.
- Agape-love. This is the single most important skill to possess, in marriage and every other relationship. It’s the kind of love God has for us and that He’s imparted to us through Christ and the Holy Spirit that we might use it toward one another. There is no more important relationship for it than the husband-wife one.
Its description is found in 1 Corinthians 13, but suffice it to say that it’s the same thing as grace: unmerited favor, loving without expecting anything in return.
Without agape-love, none of the other marriage skills will really work.
Want success in your marriage? Work on mastering these 5 skills.
