Saturday, October 24, 2015

Love Maps, Fondness and Admiration in Marriage



In the book “The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work” by Dr. Gottman, he taught us about the first two principles that he feels are important in marriage, they are “enhancing your love map” and “nurture your fondness and admiration”.
  
He teaches first about how important the love map is and how we need to develop it. He informs us that we need to:

 “…develop greater personal insight and a more detailed map of each others life and world. Getting to know your spouse better and sharing your inner self with your partner is an ongoing process. In fact, it’s a lifelong process.”

Getting to know each other and the things that they like and enjoy, gives couples insights to help make each other happy. He goes on to tell us:  

“Happily married couples don’t “just” know each other. They build on and enhance this knowledge in many important ways.”

There is a great link that I am going to include so that each of you can go with your spouse to take this quiz to see how well you know your partner.


The second principle he talks about is nurturing your fondness and admiration for each other. He tells us that:  

“Singing each others praises can only benefit your marriage. But in order to ensure that the gains continue, you need to put your respect and affection to work.”

I know that as I have been trying to integrate this into my own marriage that I am having a change of heart and some of that newly found love is breaking its way thorough. There is also a great questionnaire that I will put here that couples can do to find out where they stand on this subject also.

http://www.gottmanblog.com/sound-relationship-house/2014/10/28/fondness-and-admiration-assessment?rq=fondness

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