Great Expectations

At Church, we started a new small group last night with the younger couples. I call them the younger mainly because of our kids age, but also in their marriages they are fairly young. Joy and I are the oldest with 14 years in, but our kids are 3 and 4, so we fit right in. It was a good start and part of our lesson was talking about the desires we bring into our marriages. Whether it is all of a sudden or over time, when we get announced as man and wife, these desires become our expectations for the marriage.

Expectations can come from anywhere: TV, media, books, parents or others marriages. These sign of an expectation can be, "Well that's not how my parents did things!" Of course it can be any number of ways, but expectations can be detrimental to a relationship. If our spouse does not live up to the expectations we can get conflict. Conflict is just a nice way of saying having a fight. This is an option for expectation not being fulfilled, but it does not always end good unless we know that the conflict is not going to end in someone taking off and saying, "Enough!"

We talked through some of the different solutions for expectation, but we ended on the perspective shift of fighting for our marriages. It is not enough to fight for our marriage. We are in a relationship with another person. We need to fight for the other person, just as the other person should be fighting for us.

It is never easy to have a one-sided relationship, because it is not possible. It's in the definition: one-sided is not a relationship. Our prayer is for our group to become more we centered and fight the temptation to be I. Working together to strengthen our marriages with the strand of 3 cords making sure Christ is the third strand.