Marriage Mentoring

Will and I signed up with our church to have marriage mentors. We both filled out a pretty extensive questionnaire/analysis and then we were paired with an older couple. Our hope was to get to know each other a little better, improve on our marriage, and engage in conversation with someone other than each other.

We were paired with a couple that has been married for 25 years with children our age. Their role is to lead us through the results of our analysis and offer lessons they have learned while being married.

Each time we receive the computer generated results of various topics. So far they have included strength and growth areas, relationship dynamics, and our various types of stressors.

Our Relationship Strengths:
Financial Management (Will does the managing. The whole number, balancing, checking bank account thing is something I would rather not partake in. I am aware this could be problematic if anything should happen to Will.)

Parenting Expectations (umm... not really sure. Maybe it is a strength because we do not have kids and we have not had the opportunity to fight over them yet.)

Spiritual Beliefs (I was not surprised by this strength because our "spiritual beliefs," our belief in a forgiving Father, is what brought us together. We want our marriage to be centered around a purpose other than just ourselves, even though we have a difficult time doing that.)

Family & Friends (Another thing that makes us work, is that we both really enjoy the others friends and family. I fully approve of his friends and very much lucked out in the in-law department.)

Leisure Activities (We do almost every leisure activity together. Hiking, running, rock-climbing, camping... We sometimes have a hard time knowing that it is ok to do things apart.)

Growth Areas:
Forgiveness (When we argue Will really wants to make up quick. He is always the first to ask, "Will you forgive me." I am impressed with his ability to do this because I just want to stay mad. I really struggle with forgiving him fully and I hold grudges. Those things do not result in anything positive.)

Roles & Responsibilities (I think that this one fell into the growth area because I have had a hard time "just being a wife" in MT. I miss the independence of college, my own schedule, my own classes, my own everything. I am still trying to figure out the balance between sharing everything and maintaining parts of who I am.)

Communication (This is probably our biggest growth area. However, I mistakenly prided myself in our ability to communicate. I thought that since we got to know each other so fast then we communicated effectively. Will reminded me that we got to know each other because I asked him an incessant amount of questions. This spilled over into marriage... Me telling him every last detail of my day and then getting frustrated when he would tell me one sentence about his and I would have to pry to get anything else. We communicate quite differently and we need to work on how to make it work.)

Partner Style & Habits ( I believe this one is only on here because I most likely was answering the questions when Will was eating a bowl of cereal or something. I become very bothered with all his noises sometimes.)


I am sure most of the people who read this could care less about the ins and outs of our marriage. I just feel that we have missed out on having people be apart of our marriage because we live so far away. I want to present a realistic view of our relationship. I will try to do a couple more posts covering the other aspects of the questionnaire. I know so many words can be rather boring.