Episode 12 - Marriage & Relationships with Kristen and Rob Bell

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guys welcome to the liturgist podcast and we are here with rob and kristen bell and you guys wrote a book on marriage this last year why why a book on marriage well it started with an idea yeah i'd stumbled across the idea of zim zom somewhere at reading i was like kristin this ancient esoteric idea that has its roots in kabbalah is actually doesn't that kind of sound and she was like oh my god this sounds like what happens in marriage so we'd sort of carried it around that concept for like a decade probably 10 years just knocked it around yeah and then at one point it just started to get ahead of steam um and we thought let's brainstorm all these ideas on paper and see if we have something here we went to this restaurant near our house for lunch and we sat down and we had like these sheets of paper and just started what's okay what's every idea that we have on that thing it's almost like the idea was like the trunk of a tree and how many how many branches do we have here because we can at least kill this idea fast if it's like oh two but um we were like filling sheets with ideas and so immediately you sort of started looking for themes and like one of the examples is we had always had a sense that marriage is an adventure that you go on with someone because life is an adventure and how many marriages have a heaviness to them that i'm bored just hearing you talk about your marriage you know there's like this heavy sort of stay together get through it as opposed to life is this heartbreaking funky extraordinary euphoric journey that you get to go on with someone so remember that like event i remember adventure right i mean the book really morphed once we started writing it yeah yeah but the adventure idea was one of those ideas that was came from the very beginning also you had been writing a lot of books and i think you just thought i think it would be fun if kristen wrote a book with me well she has some serious game yeah yeah so it was it was like okay nothing would be more lame than a dude writing a marriage book yeah this is how i do it um it was so interesting how many insights she had that were like i never would have come up with that and she would be like we need to say this so she'd like be speaking it and i'd be typing it and i would have this extraordinary sort of interconnected sense somebody is going to read that exact sentence and be set free and only she could say that it's funny you say that uh i have a fantastic marriage you guys listening if you've heard our episodes you've met the honey badger jenny mccarrick uh she is fantastic she is fantastic yeah she is but uh we were at an event um on a trip together and got the book real close to release time and uh she decided that as i drove back she would read me the book so this is this miami yeah it was mine we were all miami together yeah so we drove by mma and she reads the book to me as i'm driving and you know we've tried to read books together before but you know like she's like mike i'm not exactly turned on by a theoretical physics reactions as they fluctuate throughout the biosphere right and then she'll hand me like some you know a fictional book right and i'm like she took the slipper watch the horse out of the window and realized i know he was the judge's son right so we have slightly different tastes that way and then so then we're like so oh we'll go get like we'll get like a book made for married people and read one of those together and that didn't work at all exactly because you know i got i finished it out of a sense of obligation she read a third of it and left it on the nightstand indefinitely so we decided we'll just read this book together literally and so as we're driving on the interstate to come home there were these moments where in an already very very strong marriage she would learn something about me or i would learn something about her and we'd have to stop and just discuss how these ideas came real to us were you pulling over by the side of the road we had to pull over a couple of times yeah because as as people know i'm i'm a crier so if i have a moment of real tenderness the waterworks turn on and that's kind of a safety hazard so we pulled over at a rest stop uh just before we got on the turnpike and had him had a moment where we just sort of celebrated this dynamic responsive space between us and what the energy had returned to us and get ahead of some concepts in the book um but when you say there are these moments i know for this sentence that's going to hit somebody like it really does it really is a beautiful work thank you guys for for writing it and uh doing it together i think there is something about both of you coming from from the perspectives that makes the book special um you know something about creating works together with your spouse yeah and actually a lot of people asked about that so just so you know the literature podcast we generally we look at a topic through the lenses of faith art and science and those are kind of how we usually converse about a subject so you can keep those in mind as we talk about these and but as art like as you know i've i'm far more familiar with rob's art than yours christians but i'm kind of curious even as you think about marriage and working together we had a lot of questions from people online as we posted that we're gonna be talking to you and some of them were about like how how do you work together um in creating art and that's something that lisa and i do as well and i'm interested to hear about your guys's dynamic of how if you have any tips for people that try to work together because it is an interesting dynamic bringing the working dynamic creating dynamic into the marriage it's easy for it to turn into a fight right like if you're working with your spouse you know some people have a different work mode than marriage mode for example yeah well i was i was pleasantly surprised because i mean rob has written books before and i'm new to this um but it was it was we were very much equals in the writing process and what i was so pleasantly surprised about is how willing he was to let go of what he had created like it really we really did create everything together and um he might start going down a road and i would say i don't think that's where we should go and he'd be like okay delete and he would delete a whole sometimes even a whole day's work um because it we really had this sense that this was coming out of both of us and it was almost a metaphor for how we see marriage like marriage is something that the two of you create together and there have been a lot of books written by men and even when wives have joined in writing it's maybe she writes the chapter on submission or something like that seriously no i i've i've seen it that is unreal so it was jenny could write a chapter on submission how i submitted him exactly so it was important to us in the creating of the book that this was we were on we were equals creating this and i do think there can be tension if you're if you feel very strongly about certain parts but we found if you're willing to let go that something beautiful happens and there were these moments that it felt like it was beyond us like we were being carried along um and then there were other days that were just pierce log and we would look at each other like what are we doing i don't even know if this is possible um but those moments where you're carried along just are the best they're so energizing and um at one point we wrote on a piece of paper this can be done and like put it up in front of the computer because it was so hard was it harder for you creating together than just by yourself or is it i thought about that often everything about it that made it more difficult was offset by these other unique factors that made it flow more so i think i just got back to zero on that um there's an interesting thing christian pointed out there you guys know central to the creative process you cannot be too precious about your content right like you have to be willing to just chuck stuff in in uh my second book sex god i wrote a whole chapter on this idea that i thought was brilliant about moses and um and my editor was like that chapter doesn't work and i remember just being like oh but you have to be like ruthless like that middle eight doesn't work um and over time you realize i'll put on the shelf because who knows down the road where i'll be like remember that old lame middle eight it sounds great in this one you can't be too precious so you have to be willing to just be ruthless and you always know the strength of what you're creating by how good the stuff is that's end ups on the cutting room floor you know what i mean but it's really interesting when we work together then because if it didn't work for either of us and and sometimes these are aesthetic issues not content or logical issues it's like i can't explain why i don't like that yellow um you saw you you're in this weird trusting thing where she just goes that idea that's not working okay and there really was a back and forth in the writing process where sometimes i would submit to him if he had a really strong feeling about something and sometimes he would submit to me um like really you think that works okay we'll leave it in and then either down the road you're like no seriously i still think that's nuts and she one the other one would be like okay i get what you're saying or no it's great trust me it's great um so there's this really interesting dance you sort of do because there's that call where you just like i don't like it and i can't even explain why and she also at one point was like we're taking all the robbelisms out and went through and took out all of the all of the three words on one line in all of the long she's like everything described by four adjectives [Laughter] or the paragraphs that had the one word on each line for emphasis oh or the sentence that as a period after each word because you're making an important point she just was like no this is not your book this is our book you can write you can write a rob bell book some other time this is our book [Laughter] but we did take a lot of things from how you write which i think is great you write in a very accessible way like small paragraphs um chunks i mean we wrote very intentionally for the person who doesn't yeah yeah who has a hard time getting through a thick book we really tried to um distill it into the essential parts and and not have it be too wordy yeah yeah we had we had some very strong conceptual guidelines from the get-go so we were like this is for people who don't read marriage books right um so this is for the person as as like pete said he said if i were to read marriage book i am one sentence at all times away from hurling it into a volcano that was more about the cheesy factor exactly yeah just like or but like if you if you have experienced pain divorce if your marriage is is like like a carcass of an actual body living body you know what i mean there's um then a book about mayor is like it's just land mines everywhere so so we were like first off this book has somebody who's been completely burned and turned off by this entire institution we have to from the very beginning there has to be uh we get it right we get it you're safe with us we get that this thing can be the hardest thing in the universe um and then we had it has to be conceptual we're looking at the big mysteries here but there also has to be some very street level ways to think about this and actually act them out application and so there are all these polarities that we had going in like this has to move from the conceptual to the everyday practical this has to move from the inspiring to the acknowledgement of just how brutally painful marriage can be and that was probably the hardest thing um is we had this i conceptual ideal we were going for what would it be then i had to be thin so we had to take all these concepts and the simplicity after complexity we had to put the profound and very accessible language right and i think that was the hardest idea because most of the ideas 80 percent of the ideas we had when we started the book we were like there's lots of content and stories like very few of the stories changed over the course of a year and a half of writing but it was the conceptual framework of how do you actually get it to that point where uh especially a dude who was never going to read a marriage book picks it up and even the tactile kid aesthetic sense is it's thin and he opens it up and sees the sketches and it's like okay i can read that right um because that is exactly how we navigate what we read and what we don't read and i think that's how you write all of your books and so the two of us together adopted that yeah so you write a book on marriage you know you look at the cover and for a lot of people the first and most obvious question is what's a zim zom but i thought there's an even more pressing question because today marriage is in kind of a flux state in a lot of ways right what does marriage look like because there's people who have you know classical marriages that are distant and cold and hurting there's people who are very close and have a long committed relationship but are not married uh and so our ideas about marriage are changing today so to write a book about marriage how do you guys view what marriage is to begin with well mrs bell i can charge in go for it unless you have a pastor well what's interesting is the ways in which marriage has been deeply shaped by a thousand anthropological and social and political and economic factors for thousands of years so at one point you had as many kids as you could because you had a farm and then in other countries you can only have one child because there are so many kids that there aren't enough resources to go around and uh let's let's think about an example from the bible king david is marrying women for very crass political reasons if i marry the daughter of that king then that border is secure right so if you look for any sort of what is marriage you've got arranged marriages you've got political marriages you've got common law where people have lived together and there's no ring and there's no legal document and yet they have an extraordinary bond and fidelity and years of history together to me the interesting thing is whatever the statistics are there seems to be general agreement that somewhere around a half of marriages don't last somewhere beyond that then the question is of the marriages that do last how many of them are abs actually vibrant and or simply just ask your friends how many of your friends parents marriage is a marriage that they want to emulate i mean how many people would are like oh i totally want the kind of marriage my parents had right one out of ten i'm just throwing out numbers there um if there's this thing that millions and millions of people are doing that is like one of the major institutions in culture but it doesn't work unlike a 75 or 80 percent rate do you know what i mean right then um [Music] like lots of people lots of our friends are living with someone they're not married to but they have extraordinary love and they work through their stuff and they go to therapy and figure out family of origin issues and they're really committed to being healthy people that actually is probably the most rational response to this we have a whole generation of people who grew up with there was a legal document a ceremony a cake and a ring but not actually the thing that is the thing that's supposed to be at the heart of it right all law no spirit so i think we're living in a time when this thing is being completely rethought and when people like we're just defending traditional marriage which traditional marriage because do you want to defend um and i'm all for one man one woman right personally i've invested interest in one man one woman fantastic but kristen has this great insight where she points out in a moment when more people than ever are skeptical and disillusioned about the institution of marriage our gay friends what's the one issue at the very forefront we would like to be married right they're fighting fighting for the right to be married to be in the game right so for us people intuitively and innately want someone to go on the journey with right that seems pretty old and pretty beautiful so the better question is how do you become the kind of person or like you had said why is sharing your life with the person you love the most so hard right how do you become the kind of person and the kinds of people who you could actually be up to that challenge because it's beautiful and extraordinary and that's why i wrote a book about it but right like a lot of things in culture right now it's all been thrown up in the air now we got probably uh when we mentioned we were going to talk to you guys and i also got a lot of this this question when i reviewed your book on my blog from people who said if i'm in a marriage that lacks a man or a woman is this a book that's going to be accessible or helpful because obviously you wrote it from a husband and wife perspective yeah uh and i don't know if you want to address people that question yeah we specifically in the beginning of the book we are for gay marriage so we wanted people to know right away we're with you yeah and then we purposely wrote it we used husband and wife partner i think we used spouse we did not use lover we even were talking about what word are we using here other than just pronouns right um yeah yes we intentionally crafted it and wrote it so that people are in a same gender relationship would be like oh yeah yeah we've got a zim zone oh yeah yeah that it would all be applicable yeah and then you write what you know so the stories are about a man and a woman but we assume that our our gay friends would get it like yeah okay you talked about this kind of changing marital norms over history and uh i was reading this uh article very very recently the last couple of days that they were you know studying divorce rates he sort of saw it spiked like just this out of nowhere almost explosion in the 60s and 70s right where you get to this half of marriages or more than half of marriages are failing and then it has started to step down each decade since and so these sociologists were studying this and saying what's happening why is the divorce rate going back down after going up so high we had one of those ground shifts in what marriage meant because you had people who were trained for by their culture a marriage where a man was a breadwinner and a woman was a homemaker and then during the early years of their marriage society changed and the rule the norms they'd been trained for broke and so suddenly it introduces tensions that had never been coped with before in marriage relationships the tools didn't exist so now the divorce rate is falling and and this decade looks to be potentially lower than the pre boom sociology belief what's actually happening is that young people are just now entering into marriage without that baggage and people that get married now are doing it because they view marriage as a shared journey and i just thought like in the context of the book and the changing values what an encouraging sign from the data that um zoom zoom's getting better well when people are entering into marriage with more of that zimzam idea concept and not yeah the unequal i don't want the shell in the artifice and the legal thing i want the heart and soul in life it's normal at so many different points in our life to feel like something is getting in the way of being present or happy something stopping us from achieving the goals that we have for ourselves or feeling connected to the people that we love better help will assess your needs and match you with your own licensed professional therapist to help you work on all those things you can connect with someone in a safe and private online environment for that reason it's so convenient you don't even have to leave the house you can start working with someone in under 24 hours when working with someone through betterhelp you can send a message to your counselor at any time and get a timely and thoughtful response plus you can schedule weekly video and phone sessions betterhelp has licensed professional counselors who are specialized in treating things like depression anxiety navigating family conflicts and so much more they're committed to facilitating great therapeutic matches so they make it easy and free to change counselors if needed anything you share with your counselor is confidential so many people have been using betterhelp that they're recruiting additional counselors in all 50 states start living a happier life today as a listener you get 10 off your first month by visiting betterhelp.com liturgists join over 1 million people taking care of their mental health again it's betterhelp h-e-l-p-com slash liturgists we should perhaps define zimzone for people that are listening at this point it does seem like it's about time oh really i like the tension i was gonna say mike and i are fine just dragging this thing out because i was gonna say a lot of people have commented to me who have read the book that they really appreciated the concept of zimzam not only in their marriage but in all sorts of relationships because what we what we do with zimzam is we we define marriage as as this space between you that has a flow of energy it starts when when you meet someone and you start to care about their interests and and their life as much as you care about your own and you create space for this person to thrive while they're creating space for you and what this does is it creates the space between you that the two of you share and the space has an energy or a flow between it we talk about in the book how you have great power to affect this energy between you and that all comes from the ancient concept of zim zam which i'm going to pass it to you rob there's all this fascinating esoteric contemplation and speculation about the origins of the universe and the ancient rabbis said that at first there was just the divine it was all the divine there's nothing else but the divine so for the divine to create something that exists that isn't the divine the divine has to create space that isn't the divine so the divine has to withdraw or contract from a space to create a space where god isn't so that something else can exist and this hebrew word for contraction is a zimzam actually it's t-z-i-a-m-t-z-u-m is how it's like originally written and when i stumbled across it i was like well that's what happens when you fall in love is you naturally create this space in your life for another person to thrive because before it's just you it's your internship it's your grad program it's your friends it's your family it's your what whatever it is that you do for fun it is it is your rituals with your family it is it is your life has a center of gravity and you meet this person and you begin to find yourself more and more interested in them and then you find yourself falling in love and gradually their well-being becomes more and more important to you until you're actually making sacrifices for their well-being so what you naturally do is create the space and if they're doing the same thing for you it creates this extraordinarily energetic space between you and our observation was that most people in their conceptions of marriage were static so do these three things do these two steps these four techniques these languages and you'll be fine but our observation would be that the space never stops changing so one of the things that got us thinking like whoa this is a new way of understanding marriage at least for us and it might be for others is yeah those two steps might have worked yesterday but today the dog threw up our kid pooed on the ping pong table and we just found out that our kitchen roof is leaking so all of a sudden that lovely thing yesterday now the space between us has got 14 things in it and demands and we feel distant and so it's actually navigating this space between you i mean people will say things like i just felt something was not right between us what they're essentially saying is that beautiful humming flow of love seems to be blocked by something oh it's your ex-girlfriend you're still facebooking with her so it's you and i and yet she's somewhere in there so this space is actually terribly exclusive and sometimes people can be in there her mother-in-law his boss she's like am i talking to you or am i talking to your boss right now because your answers feel pretty corporate and that's sort of what got us rolling on wow this is like a whole nother concept which means you never you never stop talking how's the space between us what's in the space how is the space changed oh really we have a second kid the kids now we have two kids now in diapers that affects the space you're working longer hours that affects the space yeah so a year and a half we sat side by side every day and on that idea by of dynamic right we had a lot of questions specifically on how to deal with issues where people are changing in marriage especially for a listen of our shows where one or both partners in a marriage is undergoing some form of faith transition we actually had a specific question that i think took it all to a point you know rob and kristen have you guys ever been at a point where you're in different places in your faith theology or understanding of god and how do you deal with that that might be an interesting case study um on how this dynamic relationship works great question and one we get all the time comes up all the time we've pretty much been on the same page and i think a lot of that is because of the amount of time we spend talking like we've really made that a priority in our marriage in our journey and our work that we really bring it all up i just listened to your podcast with your wives and um i loved what you said in there that it is about being honest and authentic and trusting this person that you're on the journey with i appreciated the fact that you said you know sometimes you do that with some discernment you take some some baby steps in but i think it's really important to always be on the journey together whether that's sharing books going to events together having new experiences together um traveling overseas all of these things are things that make our world bigger and if you're not engaging in that together one person's world can be getting a lot bigger while the other person's world is staying very small and i know that can create um a lot of tension and and dissonance and feeling like you're not on the same page um so i do think it starts with that intention from the very beginning we had the sense we were going on an adventure together so we were always burning cds for each other which dates us if we read a book and it moved us we would pass it back and forth we would go to events together and we were always very careful if the one had had some sort of peak experience transcendent they traveled there and it blew their mind that the two of us would go back and some people are like well you that's kind of expensive just yes so is your marriage falling apart right so so sometimes this issue of do you want this because your intention and your clarity is the engine of the whole thing so if one of us had an extraordinary experience that really tilted things the question was how can i show you the thing that i just saw and so we would very intentionally go have experiences together the other day a guy says to me that his business partner he says my business partner lives in a big city in the south and goes to church with his wife and it's the church that his wife's family has always been a part of and it's a very conservative christian church and he says he goes and sits there every sunday and doesn't believe any of it but he goes there because he's married to her and doesn't want to rock the boat and hasn't said a word about any of this to his wife at least be honest with her and say i love you and that's why i go with you and i'm totally behind you but i need to tell you that i don't believe a word of it i don't even know what they're talking about it sounds completely crazy to me you have to understand that is affecting the space between you right they love you give them the benefit of the doubt well and one of the things we talk about in the book is that this idea of zimzam um you can return to that and that's a really good foundation for starting these conversations like i i just want to tell you again like i am for you i love you i want the best for you i think sometimes when you feel like you're on a different page or you're not growing together sometimes it's just important to step back and remember your intention when you got married just remind each other because we easily forget that we're loved um it's really easy to start thinking well they did this so that must mean this or they did this so they don't really care about me or they're they're only in it for themselves i mean it's just our minds are really good at creating all kinds of scenarios that aren't true and sometimes you just have to sit down and return to the truth right and there's an even element of like i know you're you are for me i know you've got my back and i know what you want me to thrive because i know how i feel about you and my intentions are that you would have the best life possible so i need to tell you about those that business trip i took and that book i read and i realized now over the past couple of years i am seeing things so differently than i used to and i don't want to freak you out i don't want to yank the rug out from beneath you but i know you want the best for me and i need you to help me sort this through um and the stuff where you don't get it let's just agree you don't see it i do it's okay even if you set up some sort of boundaries i'm reading some books you'd probably find really boring but they're itching exact they're scratching where you itch where you scratch your scratcher even just creating space because sometimes one of the partners is extremely intellectual and for them they have to go run around in the deep weeds that's how they make their way try to relate mike so for sometimes this person they have to try they have to go down every road and figure out which ones are cul-de-sacs and that's just how they are and others are like why be so complicated love your neighbor right um and so part of it is realizing this is this person and i love them quirks and all and that's just how they learn that's how they explore the word that's how they grow some people like physical danger they have to climb a mountain once a year they have to kill an animal whatever it is and like there's all these other ways in which people realize she watches dallas cowboys every sunday i don't even try to plan something during that time i don't know what marriage in which she watches the cowboys but you know what i mean people all the time make these sort but then you come to spirit you come to soul you come to faith and all of a sudden we switch gears and go i don't know but in all these other areas you are fantastically dialed in and oriented around their well-being so part of it is just realizing you already have some of these muscles to orient yourself around their well-being this just happens to involve like you know life and god and meaning and stuff right right and it does come back to the idea of adventure like if if you see your faith journey as an adventure if you see your marriage as an adventure then you can lighten up a little bit you can have a little room to flex and grow and explore and just because you say something today doesn't mean that's where you're going to land forever it's just there's just a little play in there and i think it's i think it's true with marriage as well like we can just get so heavy about things instead of saying you know what we're in a difficult season like this is stressful it's not always going to be like this let's just let's just lighten up and have a have some hope that we we're going to get through this it's not going to be like this forever i think i think the adventure thing can really can really help um because we seem to have a lot of fear about doing it wrong about um about we're the only ones who are like this everybody else has it figured out um what's wrong with us what's wrong with me we have all these like negative tapes that we play and if we could just let those go and like let spirit take over you know let let the love the grace um there's a lightness to that right and so as you sort of mentioned it's journeying and you guys have been intentional about staying close in the journey together but sometimes there's difficult patches sometimes people forget their journey together and begin to sort of journey separately in it one point they realize there's a problem and one of the most useful metaphors i found in the book for how to start reconciling that space and getting your uh shared space to sing was the idea of the scorecard yeah i thought that was tremendously useful practical and beneficial so if you guys would mind just touching a little bit on the scorecard how that works yeah well the scorecard is what happens when you feel like you're the one who's doing all the giving and you start you start keeping track and what happens when you do that is that you pull away um and you withhold and you say well i'm not going to give any more to this relationship until they start giving and what happens is it's just a downward spiral and it just gets worse and worse and worse usually until there's some big blow up and in some cases the big blow up can be a good thing i mean because you at least you get all that stuff out but what we talk about in the book is that the best way to get rid of the scorecard is actually moving towards the other person in love that there's an amazing power to dying to yourself and moving towards the other person in love and it doesn't mean that you're not honest afterwards in talking about how you feel but sometimes you have to get back to that place of love and the the flow of love between you to have a discussion yeah and you have to charge in with here's honestly i've got the dishwasher i've got the recycling i've got taking the kids to school every day this week like i gotta i feel like i'm doing all this and then i walk in the door and you have your feet up and you're reading a magazine i need some space right now just to sort of tell you how it comes across to me because i got a score card built up here and i know you're for me i know you don't want me stressed and bitter i know you don't want me making tallies of the ways in which i think i'm carrying more weight than than i should be i know you have always said this was a shared partnership my problem is i got a list in my head and i need you to help me shoot it down and erase it and the power of that honesty this is how it feels but i'm giving and i'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and i need you to help me so that i don't keep building this up so part of it is you always return to this primal impulse that is what got you into this in the first place which is i am for you and you are for me and that does something between us and part of the art is you're furious you have a scorecard you are pissed off going wait wait wait wait wait what all of these things are telling me is that they're against me but i know they're not so i need to sit down i need to talk to them i need to be honest and i need to assume that somewhere in there there for me and we'll sort this out together and that got us that was because we were talking with a friend and her daughter just got married remember that and the daughter um the the new groom husband has been traveling which means she has to like she's been taking care of the apartment and this mom is telling us about how much resentment she has and we were like oh my words they're like three months in and scorecard about like cleaning the toilet in the apartment or something and this and the mom is telling okay how bad is the scorecard that the daughter is telling the mom when the mom is sitting in a restaurant telling us um when there's resentment there's no happiness no yeah i think a good gauge for me in our marriage that i've seen when this stuff seems so simple you know like prefer one another try to do that but but i love i love the idea of this zimzo in the picture where it's like um as i was reading it i i could it gave a new conceptual space for some of these just simple ideas how do you love each other and and seeing those arrows and your little sketches going back and forth and i can remember like in the in the healthiest times of our marriage the little arguments actually tend for not even argument like we're always where are we going to eat if we're not agreeing when we're really healthy places and those arrows are going right i'm saying no let's go to the place and i'm actually fighting for the place i think she actually wants to go right right right you know when she's saying opposite no i don't want to go this way it sounds good what sounds good yeah yeah and it's like we can't come to agreement because i'm wanting to do what she's wanting to do she wants to do what i want to do and i've noticed when we start like no i want to do this that's bad sign there's something exactly something's blocking those those arrows and and one of the things you want to do in the book especially with the stick figure drawing because if you can get a concept into a stick figure drawing now you're onto something is to try and give people tools for those moments because if you can get the concept as this or that as possible to make it as you can go left you can go right it is a or it is b it's actually creating a binary sometimes that is the most valuable thing oh that's the thing going on here with picking the restaurant right that's the thing here is i'm like pulling back a little i'm i'm not like where do you want to go let's go wherever you want to go it's i got things i want and i don't know whether or not you want one i want them yeah and i'm questioning whether you're for my best so that means i'm now going to have to protect myself because no one else is looking out for me and the most powerful thing in the world is when you know that somebody else is looking out for you i was thinking about that question you asked that that came in earlier about there's two people and let's say they came from a very similar world view but but let's say he's gone he's reading and questioning and struggling and he discovered science mike and whoa and she's freaking out and now he's listening to gunger and he's trying to talk about how he's telling people to love wins and she's like he's just gone off right okay and he the other day he used he he used the word atheist i mean we're talking um here's what i would say to her on what planet is somebody holding out for genuine faith a bad thing a person's search is simply i refuse to believe things i don't believe i refuse to not live from my heart i love this word integer a whole number i refuse to not live with integrity in what situation are you not for integrity wholeness and convictions that are held with the heart and so when she's freaking out and he's using all these words hear all of those words that probably have a bunch of baggage attached to them that aren't even true in the first place but remember that everything is telling you and every time you share some new thing is what he is saying to you is i'm taking steps into authenticity and the problem is people get all these attachments to all of this they're reading so so and so yes they are because they believe that they're living in god's world and that it matters this matters the problem is for many people they think this is a step away but it's a step into so if you're really serious about the relationship and you're really terrified cheer them on because if you're ever going to come back together you want a genuine person is there a time outside of abuse one of the questions was asking outside of abuse or you know serious abuse from infidelity whatever that it's time to just throw in the towel or do you just always keep fight how do you guys see that divorce what is divorce ever a good option if it's not like abuse like something well some marriages are dead they've been dead for a while so there's been there's been form but no life so sometimes yes it was divorce but it was actually honesty you parted ways a long time ago he just happened to be sharing a few activities of daily living yeah and we do talk in the book about there's there's always if two people are in it and they can have that intention of i'm for your best and you are for my best there's always hope and we have seen we have seen marriages resurrected the truth is that some marriages die and so we're the first to acknowledge resurrection miracle possibilities to always always always hold up that this thing new life can be breathed in it and you can work through the stuff the truth is sometimes for the two people honestly they got married so young they went down such different paths there's so much blood on the tracks we know people who have gotten divorced knowing this parting ways is actually the best shot that there will be love between us it is important to be totally honest and open about what spirit is capable of doing without attaching undue magical mythical importance to the marriage bond it is both the most sacred holy union between two human beings and there are times when you have to be honest at a gut sort of rubber hits the road level um and honestly sometimes you never should have gotten married the statistics on divorce for people who get married later the divorce statistics are so much lower and um it just makes sense i mean you when you're young you don't know who you are you're still figuring it out and and um you can get married and really grow apart and that's what goes back to this idea of marriage as a contract that has morphed and evolved over the years based on agriculture based on economy based on industrial revolution and kids start going into factories my grandfather in denmark working on a farm where all of the kids in their teenage years are hanging out in barns which have hay and lofts um i mean you know what i mean this this particular relationship and so now all of a sudden think about it 2000 years ago a woman has her first period of 13 and now it's time to get married and have kids and he's 15 or 16 or 17 by the time you're 20 you have a house full of kids and life expectancy is 40. now you have kids whose bodies are ready to go at 13 culturally and especially in religious environments told whatever you do don't do what every cell in your body is telling you is natural and thousands and thousands and thousands of years of human productivity that brought us by the way us right um go against that and if you do violate that you will have we i mean in the youth group that is the worst thing you could do and then you have the economy and the nature of the u.s employment and the nature of a lot of people now a graduate degree is needed in a lot of fields and that involves rent and that and feels student loans you know i mean like there's so many other factors and the world has drastically changed one of the things that we were very keen to point out in the book is underneath it all you want somebody to go on the journey with and that is the power of marriage so we have an incredibly high view of marriage hopefully we also have a very respectful view of the way in which marriage is shaped by all these other factors so it's both something that needs to be taken much more seriously and something that needs to be held much more loosely and that is the art of the whole thing so the most timely and a relevant book on marriage today is out it's going to be in the notes of this episode the liturgist.com podcast you can go click on it go straight to the book check it out get your copy it's wonderful you can also catch up with rob he just launched a podcast of his own called the robcast we'll have a link to that as well of course we'd love to hear what you think about this episode your impressions how you're moving how your marriage is doing you can also go to our website but uh michael and i probably check the twitter feed at the liturgists and the facebook page slash the liturgist a little bit more often thanks for listening um i feel really good about this episode and i hope that you guys are able to approach marriage in a way that is uh beautiful and encouraging and divine and that peace may enter your homes i'm science mike kristen bell rob bell michael gunger have a great week thanks for listening