Category Archives: Marriage

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Five Questions to Transform Your Home

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What is the secret to a great marriage or a happy home? These are the questions that I am often asked as I work with families. People want an easy answer. I believe it only takes five questions to transform your home.

When you ask these families in what areas they most struggle, you usually hear fairly predictable responses. The most common response you initially probably doesn’t surprise you. “We have a communication problem” is by far the culprit of home dysfunction. But, when you did deeper you begin to see that this “communication problem” is really about more pronounced cracks in the relational foundation of the home.

Sometimes you can see that financial pressures are placing enormous strain on the family.

In other homes, you discern how busy schedules and lack of quality time together is creating emotional distance.

Still other homes are stymied by a self-centeredness that makes intimacy feel disingenuous or maybe even unattainable.

Of course, many homes are battered by more than one of these pressures at the same time—often resulting in the communication failures between spouses, dating couples, parent-child interaction, and other important relationships.

So, what is the secret to overcoming these communication challenges and positively transforming the atmosphere in your home?

It can be summed up in a single phrase—“Listen More”.

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Five Ways the Road Warrior Can Protect the Family

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I travel a lot. Some may say “too much”. Much of my travel is for my day job doing pharmaceutical market research. I fly around the country interviewing healthcare professionals and patients on behalf of my clients. I also travel for what I call my “passion portfolio”. This entails speaking for Marriage ROCKS workshops or other leadership and family seminars  and conferences.

While both my wife, Dalia and I conduct many of our relationship workshops together, for most of my travel I am on the road alone.

In some ways I like to travel. I like visiting new cities, meeting new people, and eating at different restaurants. And, what traveler doesn’t like to see those frequent flier miles and free hotel nights accrue as your Elite Status is secured.

But, in other ways travel, particularly the work-related travel, can be quite mundane as you frequent the same cities repeatedly, become annoyed with flight delays and cancellations, hotel gaffes, and just generally losing track of important details happening with your family—especially if you have school-age children or grandchildren.

The road is also filled with a number of distractions and even temptations that spell danger for the unsuspecting traveler. USA Today published a a very insightful article on the perils of work-related travel on marital fidelity, “Infidelity is in the air for road warriors”. The message is clear that many feel a sense of entitlement or maybe lowered inhibitions regarding extra-marital romance when on the road. In fact, salespeople call it the the 1,000-mile rule. This “rule” noted in the USA Today article suggests that you “play by the rules and don’t fool around when you’re within 1,00 miles of your home. But, beyond this radius, do what you want.”

Amazingly, there are even websites devoted to providing clandestine accommodations for those seeking secrecy. For example, ABC News reveals the top hotels  for having an affair. Really?

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Three Steps to Effectively Lead Your Home

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I’m excited that you are visiting my newly redesigned website, HaroldArnold.com. It has just received a major overhaul. You might call it a “fresh start”.

This was done to better serve your needs at home, at work, and even in ministry. The reality is that while my old website was good for getting me to this point, it was not suited to take me to the next level or help me reach my goals. It needed a fresh start.

During the past few years in working with couples, singles, and families I’ve come to what for me has been a stunning conclusion. Families lack leadership.

Sounds a bit odd doesn’t it? Well, this is because we don’t typically think of leadership as it pertains to our homes.

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The Need to Lead Home

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“Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others.” —Jack Welch

Over the past 5 years, I have had the opportunity to encourage hundreds of families on techniques for builder stronger marital and parental relationship skills.  I have certainly been encouraged by some of the results that I’ve seen.

For example, I recently received a message from a young man that my wife and I met at a marriage retreat that we conducted for a military group from Maryland. During the retreat, my wife and I had the opportunity to talk one on one with him and his wife. They were in the early years of their marriage. And, they were struggling—with even some talk about whether this marriage would last. Over the course of a couple of hours, my wife and I felt like we did the best we could to help them.

His message to me a month of so ago warmed my heart as he talked about how wonderfully he and his wife have been doing. I was elated. I just couldn’t stop smiling. During the email exchange I asked him what turned things around. His response was simple yet profound:

  • I stopped making excuses
  • I started living for my wife

As I think about this young man’s response, it reminded me of the quote above by the renown leadership guru, Jack Welch. Before we become a leader, we can legitimately focus on our own growth. But, once we don that leadership mantle, then success is about developing others.

While many of us think about the importance of leadership development in our vocation and places of business, we are often remiss in considering our leadership in the most important venue—HOME.

As such, we spend countless hours investing in those outside our home and often little, or no, time developing those most close to us.

And, just a glimpse into pastors’ struggles, reveals the cruel realities of this leadership deficit at home:

  • 77% of pastors surveyed felt that they did not have a good marriage themselves
  • 50% of pastors’ marriages will end in divorce
  • Almost 40% of pastors polled admit to an extramarital affair since beginning their ministry

What is the message?

We must first lead our homes. And, this blog is dedicated to that topic. Yes, leadership topics will be addressed more broadly. But, it has to start at home. Without that, the trajectory of your life will fall far short of its intended impact.

If you are a spouse, you have the leadership responsibility to develop your spouse into the person s/he dreams to be.

If you are a parent, you have the leadership responsibility to guide your children along the path to fulfill their destiny.

If you are a sibling or a caregiver of any nature you have leadership responsibility.

How you handle your home often dictates how you will lead in the other areas of your life. And, as important, it will prepare those within your sphere of influence to indeed be leaders themselves.

Marriage is an opportunity to lead the one to whom you are committed through the mountains of success as well as the valleys of difficulty. Herein lies its beauty and its challenge.

I’m so thankful that my young friend above realized early in his marriage two important aspects of leading home. We all have to stop allowing excuses to exonerate our poor behavior. Let’s own it.

Then, we have to realize, “it’s not about me”. At least it is not only about me. We each have to focus on the needs of the others in our path. When we do, the course of our relationship exponentially shifts.

Now its your turn.

Why do you think pastor’s marriages struggle as they do? How, if at all, might these statistics shift if pastors could adapt those two suggestions made by my friend?

Can’t wait to hear your thoughts.

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What Business School Didn’t Teach Me About Marriage

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Husbands and wives think that “understanding” is the key to success in marriage. Wives believe that if their beloved just understood how they feel about a situation that the tension and frustration that often exists would melt away. We husbands assume that if we could just get our wives to understand the details of the situation that they would inevitably see things our way. These beliefs lead spouses to undertake various measures to “market” their viewpoints to give the other understanding.

You might question my use of the word “market.” That sounds so manipulative doesn’t it? Marketing is what businesses do to sell a product, right? As I think back to my business school education, Marketing 101 instructed me about the marketing mix entailing product, price, and promotion. Selling a product depends on the elements of this mix.

Here’s what I’m wondering, how much of the tension in my cross-cultural marriage is about my approach to selling my point of view to Dalia? If I think about my perspective as the product in question, I am able to see all of the steps I go through to sell or “promote” it to Dalia. I can give her details of the situation in calculated details. I can explain the trade offs and the cost-benefits of seeing it my way. If all of these rational measures fail to make Dalia understand, I can insert or remove emotion as the situation dictates.
If and when I become desperate for the sell, I always know I can manipulate the stakes or the “price.” I might start off with a light reference to a past incident when I was right and she was wrong. If she still doesn’t get it, I can always rachet it up to a minor rebuke for being so irrational or so emotional that she can’t see the obvious. If I’m forced to raise the stakes even higher to get my point across, then I have to make it even more personal. And, I certainly know those hot buttons. After all, it is about selling understanding—at any cost. But it’s worth it if she gets it. She’ll see it my way. And, this will be better for our marriage, right?

I’m ashamed to admit that I have done all of these things. Don’t get me wrong. I never thought about it as selling my perspective at any cost. But, my actions prove otherwise. Here’s what I’ve learned. Marketing 101 is best left in the Business School rather than in my cross-cultural marriage. Marriage isn’t about making Dalia understand my perspective at any cost. Rather, it is about accepting that which I don’t understand.

Understanding between cross-cultural spouses can be difficult when each person has developed a perspective that comes from a very different set of assumptions. This is where grace enters the picture. Grace is learning to accept that which I may not understand. Why should I accept what doesn’t make sense to me?

The answer is profound yet simple. Integrating our viewpoints creates a co-constructed paradigm that is richer. Put simply, Dalia and I are better together than apart when we replace our natural push to sell with a sincere effort to accept that our differences have value.

What else can couples do to show grace in marriage?