I know me and my wife have had a couple gridlocks in the past. We have had issues or things that we thought were correct. I think a lot of these gridlocks are for how we want to raise our children. We don’t have huge fundamental differences. But on some other things we do have a difference in opinion. Some is from our own personal experience and some is because we were raised in different households. But I think the most important thing is that we work at it until we have the solution. Sometimes we both can be stubborn and not want to change our opinions. But we need to talk through it to find the best solution that we both can be happy with.

I read the book Drawing Heaven into your Marriage by H. Wallace Goddard. Something that really stood out to me was this quote “he only way to build a truly healthy marriage is by being a truly good person.” I found this to be so profound because I do think that to be in a truly good health marriage you do need to be a good person. I feel like character is a lot of how a person thinks or reacts. We need to be a good person to be able to work for our marriage and to love our spouse even when the going can get tough.

I think it’s funny how Gottman uses the term “marital poop detector” but I think it comes with such great message. We need to figure the small issues first and soon, so they don’t become things that ruin our marriage. I think we need to use such principles to avoid feeling alone or los because we see this problem and don’t know how to tell our spouse. Or our spouse isn’t seeing the issue and then it won’t be fixed.

Overall, I would recommend Drawing Heaven into your Marriage, H. Wallace Goddard and The Seven Principles For Making Marriage Work by Gottman to be some very insightful reads. I think there are a lot of great principles that can be taken away from both.