Happily Ever After

Drs. Les and Leslie Parrott are internationally known, bestselling authors who have helped thousands of couples to deepen their love and commitment for one another. Married twenty years, Les and Leslie Parrott say they’ve been on a twenty-year quest for good communication in marriage for themselves and for other married couples. Les says that the quality of a relationship can be easily measured by the quality of the communication in that relationship. So the Parrotts have looked at their own relationship communications and those of others around them and they have developed what they believe are the ultimate keys for improving communication.

The Parrott’s most recent book, I Love You More, was recently featured on The 700 Club. They have also been featured on CNN, Oprah, CBS This Morning, The View, and in USA Today and the New York Times. The Parrotts travel extensively as guest speakers across the country and have written for a variety of magazines. Two noteworthy books include the Gold Medallion Award-winning Saving Your Marriage Before It Starts and Love Talk.

The Parrotts are hosts of the national radio broadcast, Love Talk, and are codirectors of the Center for Relationship Development at Seattle Pacific University, which is a program dedicated to equipping people with the basics of good relationships. Les Parrott is a professor of clinical psychology and Leslie is a marriage and family therapist, both at SPU.

DEFINING VERBAL ABUSE
The Parrotts define verbal abuse as blaming, criticizing, name calling, and contempt. They also say the struggle happens because of fear and each person does not feel emotionally safe, but each is trying to gain control. The Parrotts cite some cutting edge research done by Dr. John Gottman. In Gottman’s research, he had hundreds of couples live together in the "love lab" for one day over a span of several years and had everything observed. He came up with the concept of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Dr. Gottman discovered that if couples had the following present in their marriages, their marriages were doomed to fail. They are: criticism, contempt, stone walling (or withdrawal), and defensiveness. This study showed a 94% accuracy rate. The Parrotts also list six saboteurs of marriage which are: busyness, irritability, boredom, drift, debt, and pain from one's past.

Couples need to create an emotionally safe place for each other. Each needs to understand how they are hardwired emotionally, and recognize and address their hot buttons. Couples must learn the art of creating safe conversation to develop effective communication.

FIVE NOT-SO-EASY STEPS TO SOLVING ANY PROBLEM
Anyone who is married or has ever just witnessed a portion of the lives of those that are married, knows that eventually problems will arise. And when they do, the couple will either stand strong in the winds of trouble or collapse and be blown apart with only remnants to remain.

Like a building, progress in marriage needs to be built brick by brick. Couples do not attain a seamless marriage over night but achieve success one day at a time. Struggles in marriage may slow us down or make us weary, but a good couple unites and takes on life’s challenges together with a unanimous goal for survival.

The Parrotts give the five best tools that every good marriage uses to combat bad things. They are: ownership, hope, empathy, forgiveness, and commitment. Two of the five tools, ownership and empathy, are outlined here.

Ownership – Taking Responsibility for the Good and the Bad
The Parrotts write that most couples in counseling believe that it is their spouse who has the problem that needs changed. It is easy to point a finger at the other person but very seldom does the source of the problems fall solely on that of one spouse. The Parrotts say, “Before a single step is taken, before a move is made, spouses will need to realize that it’s not who’s wrong, but what’s wrong that counts” (Zondervan 2005).

In the short term, it is much easier to just blame the other person, but in the long term of your relationship there will be much greater rewards and success with your mate when each takes responsibility for his or her own mistakes. For example, after an argument, look back to what was said and done by you and look for the things that you could have said or done differently that may have really been an offense to your mate. Once you see where you were wrong in the situation, seek to avoid making these mistakes in the future, while realizing that you were at fault whether your partner was or not.

Empathy – By Walking in Your Partner’s Shoes
Research has shown that 90% of our problems in marriage would be resolved if we would just step into our partner’s shoes and view things from their perspective. “Empathy calls for loving our partner with both our head and heart, concurrently,” says the Parrotts. This task is definitely a high calling but is still attainable with many rewards to flow from applying this goal to your relationship.

Each person in a relationship has their own host of influences from childhood on of what a marriage should look like or be. When you put two people together in a relationship, it is likely that there will be different views or standards for the roles in marriage, which makes exploring your spouse’s growing environment so important. Empathizing with your spouse will change the way you look at them forever and give you a better understanding of that person. With a better understanding comes patience and grace, which any marriage can always use more of.