Automated Transcription: 7 Tips to Build Healthy Relationships and a Divorce-Proof Marriage

7 Tips to Build a Thriving and Divorce-Proof Marriage: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Let's start with the prayer. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, amen. Dear Jesus, we ask you to be here with us tonight. Lord, help us to always follow your will. Help us to live out the vocation that you've planned for us. And for those of us who were called to the vocation of marriage, help us to build really good and beautiful marriages. So we can transform our culture into a Catholic culture where the human person flourishes and souls are saved. We ask all this through your mother, as we pray, Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee blessed art among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus, Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death, amen. Saint John Paul the Great, pray for us. In the name of the father and of the son of the Holy Spirit, amen. I'm honored to speak with you tonight. Years ago, I remember laying in bed at night feeling afraid with a question just burning in my mind. I was 14 years old at the time and I just started liking this great girl. She was an awesome girl, and unlike the serious romances I had in middle school, I wanted this one to last more than three weeks. But I was afraid because just three years prior I was 11 years old, my parents separated and pursued a divorce and it just shattered my world. It brought so much pain and so many problems into my life, and if someone would have told me the ways that would affect me for years to come, I probably wouldn't have believed them, especially the ways it would affect my future relationships.

And so laying in bed that night, I was terrified that my relationship with this girl that I really liked would end the way that my parents marriage had. And so the question that was on my mind is: how do I avoid that? Like, how do I not go down that path? How do I not make the mistakes that they had made? Because I wanted authentic love. I just had no clue how to build it. I think it's true for most of us. We all want love, but if we're honest, we're not quite sure how to build it. And I think a big part of the reason for that is there's not many great examples to look to. I mean, think about it - how many great marriages do you know? I know plenty of broken marriages, lots of mediocre marriages, but very few great marriages where I would say I want my marriage to be like their marriage. And the sad thing is the family is supposed to be the school of love. We're supposed to learn how to love, how to build a marriage within our families. But for so many of us, we saw such a broken model that not only was it not helpful, it was actually harmful, and we probably learned more about what not to do than what to do. Now, even if you came from a good family, there's plenty of broken marriages around.

And I think the result is that we all feel pretty discouraged. Right? We feel pretty doubtful that love can even last. And I think what we're seeing in our culture is a result of all this, right, where we kind of just give up on love, we give up on marriage and we just give up on commitment. And sadly, we often just settle for the counterfeit, and so I think what's needed, the solution is a really practical roadmap to build authentic love. Now, that's what I want to offer in this talk, a simple roadmap to build authentic love. I'm just going to give seven tips. These are very practical tips on how you can build a thriving and divorce proof marriage. Now, I'm not a marriage expert. I don't pretend to be a marriage expert. I'm sorry if you came here looking for that tonight. I've only been married actually three years, so technically I'm still a baby husband. But tonight the content is based on the Church's wisdom, especially the wisdom of the saints like St. John Paul the Great, Fulton Sheen. It's also based on research, based on time tested couples, couples who built really beautiful marriages and been through some difficult times. And then where it's helpful, I'll add my own insights and my own experience because I am someone who is trying to live this out every day of my life in my own marriage. And if you want to talk to my wife after, you can learn that I don't always do that perfectly.

Don't be fooled by the simplicity of these tips. As humans, we have this sophistication bias, we think less of things that are simple. But the truth is these things are simple I'm about to tell you, but they're difficult to live. And that's really where the rubber meets the road. It's great if we have all this knowledge, but if we're not living it in our lives, it's basically useless. This talk is for anyone who wants to build authentic love. Whether you're single, dating, engaged, married or whatever, you're going to get something out of this talk. It's a little bit more geared towards people who are not yet married. But no matter where you're at, you're going to get something out of it. This is not a chastity talk. Chastity talks are incredibly important. I was really impacted by one, I heard Jason Evert speak when I was younger, changed my life, it was amazing. But as important as it is to live the virtue of chastity in our relationships and in our marriages, it's not the guarantee of a great marriage. It's just not. I like to think of it as the foundation of a home. The foundation needs to be built right and needs to be strong. But there's more to build above the surface. And that's what I want to focus on in this talk. I'm not going to touch on much contraception or cohabitation.

If you want more info on contraception, what the church teaches about it, Jason Evert has an awesome talk called pure intimacy. Check that out. When it comes to cohabitation, you could honestly just Google this. Look up the research, the scientific research on it. It's super clear. If you want the greatest chance of making your marriage last, don't live together before the wedding. That's it. Now, the world doesn't get this. It's really confusing. I remember my wife when we were engaged, she was telling some of her co-workers how we weren't living together and some of them just had a hard time getting it. Like one of the girls looked at her and said, "So once you're married, are you going to live together then?" She should've tell her no: separate bedrooms, separate homes, like we're not going to live together. Well, a little confusion there. Also, this is not a theology heavy talk. Theology is so important. Beautiful. I love theology, not a theology heavy talk. One of my mentors says that we tend to over spiritualize marriage. Sounds kind of blasphemous though. Marriage is a sacrament, it's very spiritual. But tonight I want to focus on the very practical because that is needed as well, the human element. I'm going to throw a lot out tonight. And so I'm sorry if it's too much, but there's going to be a lot of good resources, too, because like I said, I don't pretend to be an expert.

I want to give you some sources that if you want to learn more, you can go to those. All right. Tip number one: build virtue. Very simple here, build virtue. It's kind of ironic, though, that if you want a great marriage, it has nothing to do, the first point has nothing to do with your relationship, it has everything to do with you. Why is that? It's really simple. You and your spouse are the lid on your marriage. Your marriage will only be as healthy, happy and holy as each of you are individually. Another way to say it is our relationships tend to reflect our personal condition. And what I've learned from the great marriages I've been blessed to know and study is that the more virtuous the spouses, the happier the marriage, always. And so build virtue. That's really it. Like we can probably end the talk right now, it's that simple. But but how do you do that? The catechism actually gives us a great framework. There's four points. One says: if we want to build virtue, we need education. Two: deliberate acts. Three: perseverance in those acts. And then four: God's grace. Now, I'm hesitant to correct the catechism at all. I don't want to sound that arrogant, but I think there's actually one prerequisite, and that is a growth mindset. What's a growth mindset? Basically, where you believe that you can change and you can grow. The opposite of a growth mindset is a fixed mindset where you don't believe that you can change, you don't believe that you can grow.

You kind of are the way that you are. And so we need a growth mindset. I'm not going to spend a ton of time talking about God's grace because I assume most of you are well-formed Catholics, but God's grace, grace is God's life in our soul. It gives us strength to do what is good and avoid what is evil. And so we need to flood our soul with God's grace, especially through the sacraments, through personal prayer. Personal prayer, by the way, it's so important, we neglect this a lot. We usually like to do, you know, formulaic prayer, all good. But we really need to have that deep intimacy, which is going to deepen our interior lives. And in your fight against vice, trying to build virtue, just remember that God will provide for you to the degree that you rely on him, and so rely on him greatly. When it comes to education, we need to learn the virtues in order to live them. A few sources that I recommend aside from the catechism: Back to Virtue by Peter Cruft. Back to Virtue, awesome book. Atomic Habits by James Clear. Atomic Habits, I see some fans in the back. And then The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. The Power of Habit. And in that book he he breaks down that there's three parts of a habit. This is really helpful if you want to, you know, change your habit or start a habit.

So the first part is the cue or the trigger. Second part is the routine or the behavior. And then the third part is the reward. Now, how does this look? So let's say I'm hungry, right? The feeling of hunger is the cue. The routine or the behavior would be me going maybe to a fast food restaurant, getting food, eating the food. And then the reward is that the food tastes good. I would feel full. My body would hopefully get the nutrients that it needs. Now, let's say I wanted to change that habit and stop eating fast food. Well, I can't change the cue. I can't really stop myself from feeling hungry and I can't change the reward. My body's going to still want that reward. And so what I need to do is substitute one behavior for another behavior. And so let's say I start eating healthy food and then that, you know, I have the cue of feeling hungry. I eat healthy food and I have a similar reward where I feel full, get the nutrients that I need and so on. Now, one point he makes in the book is that we can't actually like erase a habit. Once the habits been encoded in our brains, we can't erase it. We have to change it. Using the method I just described.

There's four main barriers to growth: One, we focus on too much at once. Like we write down like twenty seven things that we want to do for Lent and then we like, don't do any of them. One recommendation, just pick on one virtue to work on a week, that's it. Another barrier: We don't have a plan, like we don't have a routine for growing. And so one thing that's really helped me that I want to share with you is once a week set a reminder on your phone and pick a different virtue to work on that week. When you wake up in the morning, ask God for the grace when you're saying your morning prayers to live out that virtue. And then at night, when you're doing your examination of conscience, think back: How did you do? Make a plan to do better the next day. And if you want to step this up a level, you can gamify it a bit. It sounds kind of nerdy and weird, but this stuff works. Like we know this works in sports; we know this works in business because what gets measured gets done. And so gamify it. Use an app, use a piece of paper, keep track of how you're doing and building virtue. Next barrier is a lack of discipline, right. Discipline is doing the things that we need to do even when we don't want to do them. And so experts say remember your why, you hear that a lot. And remembering your why is just your connecting this small action to some greater purpose. But my challenge for you is don't let that greater why be just some intellectual thing.

It really needs to be emotional. You need to feel it in order to have that work, to motivate you to actually go through with whatever behavior you're struggling with. Now, I think one of the most helpful things that the church gives us is mortification, right? Those small acts of self-denial to build self-mastery. So take a cold shower, you know, have one drink instead of three. When your alarm goes off tomorrow, get right out of bed. Don't hit the snooze button. Next barrier, our brokenness. After sin, the thing that holds us back the most from becoming the best version of ourselves is our untreated brokenness. I want to say it again. After sin, the thing that holds us back most from becoming the best version of ourselves is our untreated brokenness. In marriage, healing is not optional, it is required. Because in marriage, all your brokenness, all your imperfections rise to the surface. And so trying to build a great marriage without being willing to heal and address a lot of the issues that you have is like trying to run a marathon on a broken foot - ain't going to happen. Now, the danger here is that if we don't heal, we're going to pass our brokenness onto other people in our lives, especially the people that we love the most.

I've seen this time and time again, especially in my ministry. And so does that mean that you need to be a canonized saint to get married? No. But if there's any serious impediment that's holding you back from loving and giving of yourself, like an addiction, you really owe it to yourself and your future spouse, your children to take care of that before marriage. And I would even say, just heard Jason Evert say this the other day, even before you're dating. How do you heal? That's a whole another talk. Few resources, though. One, the podcast: The Place We Find Ourselves. The Place We Find Ourselves. See some fans out there. Awesome. Adam Young, great man, He is a counselor here in Colorado. He makes, you know, healing and he talks about trauma, really simple and easy to understand. And he gives you things that you can actually do, like actionable stuff in his podcast. Another one, John Paul the Second Healing Center, Dr. Bob Schuchts just interviewed him on our podcast. Awesome, awesome man. They have books, retreats, all sorts of great stuff. Beth Sri is going to come up at the end and tell you a little about a retreat opportunity to heal, especially if you come from a broken home and specifically for people who come from broken homes. You'll hear about that at the end. And then I'd humbly recommend our podcast, the Restored podcast. It's called, Restored: Helping Children of Divorce.

We talk about trauma, brokenness and how to practically heal. So check those out. So tip number one: build virtue. Tip number two: find a virtuous spouse or help your spouse build virtue if you're already married. Years ago, I had this awesome spiritual director who was just this gnarly, like bearded cassock wearing like priest and just very devout solid priest. And he shocked me one day when he told me, he said, "Joey, it's better to date someone who's virtuous and not Catholic than someone who's Catholic and not virtuous." And I was shocked because I know he wouldn't recommend marrying someone is not Catholic. I don't the Church doesn't ideally right? But it really stuck with me that we have to find a virtuous spouse like that's so, so important. And so what should you look for in a spouse? What virtues? There's so many, but just a few to highlight: The virtue of chastity. At the core of chastity is self-mastery. Like we hear about chastity a lot. At the core though is self mastery and self-mastery gives you the ability to sacrifice for the people that you love. And guys, one of the leading causes of divorce, as I'm sure you know, is infidelity by far. And so I've seen it firsthand, like lust will destroy your marriage. And so this is not something just for when you're single. Temptations don't end when you put the ring on your finger. You need to continue to live the virtue of chastity and find someone who does.

Humility: It's the foundation of all the virtues. But it's so important in marriage because you're going to be wrong a lot. You're going to hurt your spouse a lot. You're going to get hurt. And so it gives you the ability to apologize and to, you know, ask for forgiveness and also to give forgiveness. Happens a lot, more than you wish it would. Empathy: seeing through someone else's eyes. It's so important, I'll talk about conflict a little bit later in the talk, but empathy is just so important for a marriage. Find someone with a growth mindset, right? Why is that important? Because you don't just marry the person that they are today. You marry the person that they will become. And one of the greatest indications of who they will become is their attitude and the actions they're taking towards growth. Find someone who gets you. Now I'm not quite sure that men and women will ever really get each other, but there's certainly some people in your life who get you better than others, who understand you better than others. Right. And so I would say try to find someone like that, take time to build your friendship, because that is the foundation of a marriage. And and then with time, you can compare your relationship with this person to the other people in your life who really understand you, really get you. And like I'm saying, at the core of this is build a friendship because marriage is not just romance and sex, like there's so much more.

And friendship is the foundation that really holds it all together. When you're discerning, ask yourself the question, you probably heard this, do I want my children to be like this person? Talk about past mistakes like secrets that you may be holding from other people, you don't want to go into marriage holding that stuff to yourself. Those can be some really difficult conversations, but they can be extremely fruitful because they're so important. A great question. I heard from Emily Wilson, you might know her from the Steubenville conferences. She said, you can ask this question: "Is there anything you haven't told me yet that you're afraid to tell me?" Dangerous conversation, but super, super important. When it comes to revealing sexual mistakes you've made especially, be careful here. Jason Evert talks about this. He says, "It can actually be damaging to reveal too much about what happened." So keep it general - you'll be better off for it. Now there's debate about whether you should have a list or not. How many of you are in favor of lists? I'm just curious. Having a list of these are the qualities I want in a spouse. OK, maybe a lot of you are undecided, that's cool. OK, I see someone's like no, that's fair. I personally think they're good.

I don't think you should be married to lists because you marry a person, not a list, but I think it is helpful. Just make sure you separate it between the "must haves" and then "things that are nice to have", OK? And then you can use that as a way, as a tool to help you discern. It's not the final judgment of whether this person will be good for you. But it's really important to have those "must haves". But be careful when you're discerning all of this, of course, because St John Paul the Second said that, as a rule, as a rule, always, we tend to exaggerate the goodness of the other, we exaggerate their virtue. And so we need to be brutally honest with ourselves. We need to make sure that we ask the question, is this person actually virtuous? Dr. Ted Sri talks about this in his book, Men, Women, and the Virtue of Love. And when we're discerning we can't do it alone as well, right? We need people in our lives. We need people in our lives who can tell us, hey, there's a red flag here. Hey, here's a little bit of feedback on this guy, on this girl, on this relationship. And so we need to involve them because love is blinding and we'll make some stupid mistakes if we're not listening to people who love us. Don't rush. This is another thing that's maybe up for debate. And it depends on, I think, where you're at in life.

If you're a little bit further along, obviously, you can move a little bit faster. But the danger with rushing and I've seen a lot of couples do this, especially Catholic couples, is that we'd end up making an emotional decision. And we need to make sure that we're discerning this carefully as well. And I'm not saying wait seven years to get married. Don't don't do that. But but make sure that you're thinking it through, you're discerning it well. And I think, most importantly, find someone who's pursuing God. Curtis Martin said it perfectly. He said, don't pursue your soulmate, pursue God and after a while of running after Him, turn to see who's keeping up with you. All right, for those of you who are married, I'm not sure if we have many married couples here, but how do you help your spouse build virtue? The first thing that you need to know is that people can change, but you can't change them. It's a hard lesson to learn. I learned this early on in marriage, early in our marriage. I'm a finance geek. You've heard that I studied finance, I have my MBA, so I love finance right? My wife was not in the same spot, but we purchased the Dave Ramsey course and we were going through all that stuff. And it was really difficult because it just wasn't something she was comfortable with. And that's just where she was at.

And that's totally fine. But I was like keeping track of every dollar I spent since I was like 14, a little bit of a nerd here. And and so there's just this huge mismatch. So we were butting heads on this topic, but I knew, how we both knew how important it was. But we were struggling to get through this course and get on the same page. And so my tactics were basically to like tell her, hey, we have to do this. Surprisingly, it didn't work. Not sure why, but eventually I learned some of the tactics that I should be using. I didn't do all this perfectly, but this is what I wish I would have done, where instead of forcing her, I just should have influenced her. Build the relationship, made it stronger. Take the slow and strategic approach to persuading her, not coercing her. Ask good questions, like when money topics came up I should have been more thoughtful and ask questions instead of just preaching at her. I did slowly share little videos and articles and podcast episodes, I know that helped a lot, I think? Did it? I hope. And then and then we did have some serious talks like heart to heart. So it's like, hey, this is why this is so important. It's not just important for us, it's important for our future children and so on. And then I give her the freedom to choose. And again, I didn't do this all perfectly and here to say that I screwed it up.

But I can now say that I think she's a bigger Dave Ramsey fan than I am. Like we went through the Financial Peace course. She listens to the podcast. She comes home frequently and tells me how people are really handling their money really poorly. And it makes her sad to see that. And so, got to remember - people can change, but you can't change them. And so we need to instead influence people. And what we've learned from the 12 step programs is that, if you really want to help someone just focus on your own growth. Become the best you and they're going to see you thriving and they're going to want what you have. So tip number two: find a virtuous spouse, help your spouse build the virtue. Tip number three: purify your idea of love. The research shows that if you want a great marriage, an essential ingredient is a realistic concept of love. Basically, we need to know the truth about love. As Catholics, we have an upper hand here. But there's all sorts of lies in our world when it comes to love. One of the lies I know I believed was that love doesn't last. Eventually it's going to fall apart, especially seeing my parents marriage fall apart, I believe this. Like, maybe intellectually I knew that love can last, but I didn't believe it could last, especially not for me.

But the truth is, of course, that love can last. Marriage can last. It can be so beautiful, can be so good. I've seen it. There's a few marriages that I just love, I admire them so much. I want my marriage to be like their marriage. And so I hope you have couples in your life like that who can prove to you, especially if you doubt it, that love can last. And also, love can last because we can make it last, we can choose to make it last. Another lie that I've believed that's so popular is that feelings equal love. We all know this. I knew it, but subconsciously I still believed it because I thought that feelings were the measure of love. So in my relationships, when feelings would change or start to fade, I thought that love was ending. Because more feeling - more love. Less feeling - less love. And so I got really anxious when feelings would change and I thought that love was ending. But the truth that I learned is that love is not merely a feeling. St. John Paul the Second said this: "Love is not merely a feeling. It is an act of the will that consists of choosing in a constant manner the good of the beloved to the good of oneself." And so feelings are a part of love, but they're only a part, and they're certainly not the measure of authentic love.

And so when feelings fade in your relationships and even in your marriage, don't freak out. It's actually just an invitation to a more mature love because it forces you to choose: do I love the feeling or do I love the person more? Now, I do think, you know, in a dating relationship, if you've never had any romantic feelings for the person, I do think that is problematic. But we have to be careful that we don't let our emotions make the decisions for us. Like when in life is that ever a good idea? We just tend to do that for some reason in our relationships and the danger is that maybe we'll walk away from a really good relationship or maybe we'll walk away from a marriage because we're not feeling anything. There was a study that asks divorced spouses, why did you get divorced? What were the factors that contributed to it? And one woman said she said, "I realized it was the lack of commitment on my part because I really didn't feel romantic toward him. I always felt more like he was a friend to me." How tragic. I've no doubt that their romance needed a spark. No doubt about that. But how sad to walk away from your marriage. I don't know if they had kids, but, you know, the research is so clear and the damage that divorce does to the kids just because you didn't feel romantic.

Another lie is that love is too risky. It's just not worth it. Like, it's not worth all the work. It's not worth the risk. And it's true, in love - I'm sure all of you know this on a personal level - you can be hurt. But what's more dangerous than being hurt? Not loving at all. C.S. Lewis said it so well, he said, "To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping intact, you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries. Avoid all entanglements, lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken, it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love at all is to be vulnerable." So the danger is that our hearts will become hard and the truth that I've learned is love is worth the risk, it takes work, it hurts, it's painful at times, it takes sacrifice. But if you work at it, the good can outweigh the bad for sure. And what I've seen and I heard Father John Napoli say this too, is that when you get married, especially, your life doesn't get easier but it does get better. It can get better if you work at it.

Now, for those of you out there, especially who come from broken homes, if you deal with an intense fear of marriage, of love, like I totally get you, I totally get you. In high school I dealt with this a ton, into college as well to the point where it paralyzed me from pursuing women from dating. And so what I had to do was in my friendships, gradually open up, become more vulnerable, practice that, like get that muscle stronger. And eventually I was able to pursue women, go on dates one at a time. And it was it was good because I was again, overcoming that fear to the point where I did not control me. I felt free. I was able to pursue my wife, got married. We're building a marriage and we're going to be welcoming a baby girl in July (crowd applause). Thank you. Thank you very much. To me, it's just amazing, like I think, God, I could not have done this on my own. I thank God and the good people in my life because I was so paralyzed by this fear of love to now being where I am. Thank God. And so if that's you. If you're afraid, do it scared, do it gradually and have patience with yourself. My challenge to you guys here is to purify your idea of love, make a list of the things you believe about love, like what do you believe about love. And again, not just on an intellectual level that has been told to you.

But what do you actually believe about love in your heart? Make a list of that, try to identify the lies that you believe and then seek out the truth to suffocate those lies. So tip number three: purify your idea of love. Tip number four: set healthy expectations for marriage. Again, the research shows that if you want a great marriage, another essential ingredient is having healthy expectations for marriage. Has anyone heard of the Paris syndrome? OK, interesting. OK, some of you guys. So this is a psychological condition where tourists go to Paris, right? This is especially prominent in Japanese tourists and they suffer extreme shock, disappointment and other symptoms. Why? Because reality, the messiness of reality did not live up to the expectations in their minds. I kid you not they have to fly these people home, it's bad. This has been documented by medical journals. I know it's shocking, but the same can be true I think in marriage. If our expectations are off, it's going to cause issues. And so to fix them, we need to start by really identifying the unhealthy expectations that we have. I'm just going to mention two popular ones. The first one is believing that the purpose of marriage is happiness. The purpose of marriage is not happiness. The purpose of marriage is holiness. Nowhere in the wedding vows is happiness promised.

I know, super romantic, but it's true. And it's so important because underneath every divorce, almost every divorce is this belief. Consciously or not, we expect our spouse to make us perfectly happy. And when they don't, well, we tend to think like, well, maybe I chose the wrong spouse, maybe I chose the wrong location, and we might even be tempted to leave. And so your marriage will suffer to the extent that you expect your spouse to make you perfectly happy - only God can do that. Fulton Sheen wrote about this in Three to Get Married, but it's so important that we understand this. Now, is there no place for happiness in marriage? No, of course there is. It's really good and beautiful thing to make your spouse happy. It's a good thing to experience all the marital bliss that comes along with marriage. But marriage is hard work, it doesn't show up in a prime box. We've become so conditioned to, like we want something, click a button, and one or two days it's on our porch. Marriage is not like that. Marriage is more like farming. You have to work hard and you have to have patience. You have to wait to see the fruit of your labor. But we all know this, right? We all know that the best things in life, they take work, right? They take work. Ask any Olympian who's won a gold medal.

They didn't win that gold medal by sitting on the couch watching Netflix. They won it by putting in the work every single day, especially when they didn't feel like it. Why should we expect anything less if we want great marriages? No, does that mean, you know, marriage will be miserable? No, it's going to be beautiful and challenging, joyful and frustrating, just like life. Like, why do we expect marriage to be so different than life? Another area where expectations, I think, are off for so many of us, especially in the secular world, is when it comes to sex. And so I just want to say a few things here, especially for Catholics who are saving sex for marriage. The first thing is around frequency, like how often do you actually have sex? So you don't have sex all the time. I can tell you that. And frequency is really going to depend on, you know, the couple, and one thing that's really helpful to know is that one of you is going to have a higher sex drive. Typically, that's going to be the guy. Not always, though, and that's going to create some conflict, some tension in your marriage. And so just have patience there. Have patience with that. And also, you're not supposed to be like going into marriage, being a pro at sex. Right. Ideally, you're not at all. And so it's something you learn over time. It takes months and even years. And so be patient with that.

You will get better at it. It's really helpful, especially for us guys to remember that sex is not the same for men and women. John Paul the Second wrote about this. Tell secular people that a pope wrote about all this. It's pretty amazing. He said this, its kind of long, but it's really good. He said: "Sexologists state that the curve of arousal in a woman is different from that in a man. It rises more slowly and falls more slowly. Non-observance of the teachings of sexology in the marital relationship is contrary to the good of the partner and to the durability and cohesion of the marriage itself. It must be taken into account that it is naturally difficult for the woman to adapt herself to the man in the sexual relationship, that there is a natural unevenness of physical and psychological rhythms so that there is a need for harmonization which is impossible without good will, especially on the part of man who must carefully observe the reactions of the woman." And it's kind of corny, but I've heard it said, and it's good to remember, especially for us guys, that men are like microwave's and women are like iron. We tend to get turned on quickly, women don't. And so it's good to take that into marriage. Another area, NFP is hard. In the church, we tend to glamorize natural family planning. If you're not familiar with what that is, it's just a natural way to space births while always staying open to the possibility of a baby.

And so if you and your spouse discern that, hey, it's not the right time for us to have a baby that involves abstaining from sex. I heard, "But that's not easy." I heard some guys say that's like three days of the month, right? It can be like up to a week and a half to two weeks, depending on the woman's cycle. And so it really requires self mastery. Also, throughout your marriage, there might be medical reasons that you need to abstain for some time. My wife and I, a year and a half ago, we had a miscarriage. And so the doctors told us, for six weeks, no sex. It was not easy. And I've known couples who they have to wait months. In one case, like a year. And so be prepared. That requires some serious self mastery. Two things that I think have really damaged our expectations of sex are movies and porn. I saw an article that said porn is ruining sex for everyone, so true and the blunt truth is that your sex life is not going to look like the notebook. It's not going to look like porn, thank God. And if we expect that on a conscious or an unconscious level, our marriage is going to suffer. Now, don't get me wrong, marriage sex is really, really beautiful.

It's really good. But porn and movies are fake, like they're literally staged. And so they set really bad expectations for reality. And so one of the things has been so helpful for me is talking with friends of mine, especially before I got married, who who were married, like guys that I knew who are married, got to talk to them about sex, get a better understanding, expectation about it. And if you've struggled with pornography, any sort of unwanted sexual temptations, then make sure you ask God to purify your memory and purify your expectations, because there's nothing more beautiful than a pure and intimate and innocent love and intimate love. Two practical tips to healthy expectations for marriage. One, build relationships with good couples. This is so helpful. It's been so healing in my own life because I didn't see it at home. So really build relationships with them and spend time with their families again, especially if you're someone who didn't see a good example growing up around you. You can also do this vision exercise which is really helpful, whether you're married or not. If you're married, go ahead into the future in your mind, three to five years, let's say five years, and then see what you want basically in your marriage. Like, what do you want to see in your marriage? Take a snapshot of that. And then if you're single, going into your future marriage, you know, imagine what you want to see.

Take a snapshot of that and then write it down like very detailed, write it down and be very specific. You can if you don't like writing, do a voice memo or whatever. And don't just say you want a good marriage. A good marriage is too vague. Right? It's not enough. Be very specific. We have to get clear on what we want and then we can figure out how to get it. So tip number four: Set healthy expectations for marriage. Tip number five: learn to handle conflict. This is so important. This is one of the things I wish someone really talked to me about before I got married. Conflict is the price you pay for intimacy. Conflict is the price you pay for intimacy. That was written by doctors Les and Leslie Parrott. They wrote the book, Saving Your Marriage before it starts. They're a married couple. Yes, they both have the same name. It's hilarious. Married couple and they write books they give talks, they help couples. And it's so true because in any relationship, but especially in marriage, when you get so close to someone, you inevitably are going to have conflict, without a doubt. And if you don't have conflict, that's actually probably a sign that one, you're either a saint or two, something's really off in your marriage. And so you're going to have conflict. The goal is to make it healthy. And so you've probably heard of Dr. John Gottman and him and his team of researchers have studied married couples in conflict for the past 30 years.

And what they do is invite a married couple into their lab, which is like a fancy apartment. And they have all these like sensors and they track them on different levels. And supposedly they can tell up to a 95 percent accuracy whether the marriage will survive or fail. And I know, it's crazy, but what they especially do is they observe how the couple handles conflict, like that's the main marker, and they're looking for four signs. You've probably heard of these. He calls them the four horsemen of the apocalypse. And if you see these signs, they know the marriage is in trouble, needs help, might not last. The first is criticism. The second is contempt. The third is defensiveness. Fourth is stonewalling. I'll explain each. All right. Psychologists say that criticism and complaining are not the same thing. They're different, right? Complaining is like a negative comment about an action where criticism is attacking a person. So that's the first one. The second one is contempt. It's similar to criticism, but it's different. Dr. Gottman says that, "contempt is the intention to insult and psychologically abuse your partner." What does that look like in a marriage? Basically, it looks like name calling. It looks like unhealthy sarcasm, mockery. And then this usually leads into and these all kind of happened in order, defensiveness. This is really the results of the first two of criticism and contempt where we feel so attacked, we put up our shield and it looks like making excuses, like blaming, being unwilling to take any sort of responsibility for the problems in your marriage or in your life.

And lastly, we end at stonewalling where we feel so overwhelmed with the problems in our marriage that we just kind of emotionally check out, we don't engage with our spouse. We just check out. And apparently 85 percent of stonewallers are men. I was given this talk for the Archdiocese of San Diego and I accidentally said that 85 percent of men are stonewallers, that's not true. It's fake news. But if you see these signs in your marriage, your marriage is not doomed, it just means that especially if these things become habits, it means that you need to get serious help. You need to get professional help like now. So how do we handle conflict well? Well, there's some great tips in that book that I mentioned, saving your marriage before it starts. So some of the things that they say, "pick your battles." In marriage, you have to learn to let the little things go. This can be hard, but you have to learn to let the little things go. Next, state your feelings directly. No passive aggressive stuff. Just say, "honey, this is how I feel." Practice empathy, put yourself in their shoes. This is so hard in marriage because there's so many emotions involved, especially when there's conflict.

And so make sure that you, you know, try to detach from those emotions, put yourself in the other person's shoes. One of the ways you can really simply do this is by repeating back, mirroring what your spouse is saying to you. So you really understand what it is that they're saying. Define the real issues, so they recommend that when tensions get high, pause the conversation and make sure that both of you can define what the real issue is that you're talking about. Because what often happens is the thing that you're fighting about is not that real issue. Take a break. So my wife and I've been to some marriage counseling, super helpful and one of the things our counselor has taught us is that when things get tense, call a time out. I call a timeout, take a break. And how this works, basically, it's a simple tactic. In advance, you set a time with your spouse where if someone says they need a break, you take a break for 30 minutes to 24 hours, typically on the quicker side is better. And so in our conversation, when things get tense, you say, hey, I need a timeout or we need a timeout. The person calls a timeout is the one who keeps track of the time. When the time's up, they resume the conversation. They're the ones who go and find you. And this is so important because our counselor is saying that when we're angry, when we're really emotional, our IQ drops by about 30 points.

And for most of us I know, for most of us, with like an average IQ that puts us at the point of mental retardation. And so it's really helpful to take that break if you need it. You can use this sentence formula that they recommend where basically you say in situation X, when you do Y, I feel Z. So basically, you know, the other day when you worked all day and didn't talk to me, I felt ignored. And this is really helpful because it helps to focus the conversation on the issue and not on attacking the person, which is always going to be a temptation. Next, I say rate the intensity of your feelings, so when a conflict occurs, you can rate it on a scale of one to 10, one being, this really isn't something that's important to me or ten being like there's nothing more important to me. And so you can tell your spouse, hey, honey, this is a seven for me or this is a two. Make sure to resolve conflicts like actually resolve conflicts. Growing up, I didn't see this, I did not see this like my parents would fight, it would get loud, and then they would both go different ways and maybe they resolved it later in private. I don't really know. But it really set this bad example of how to handle conflict that I had to and, you know, my siblings had to kind of undo it.

My parents would be the first one to tell you that this was a bad example. And so parents, future parents out there, make sure that you resolve conflict in front of your children or make sure that they know if they observe conflict that has been resolved. And if you want more tips like this, I highly recommend picking up the book, Saving Your Marriage Before it Starts. One of the key things, though, when it comes to conflict is building trust, building trust. Conflict is so much easier to handle when trust is high, when things are good in your marriage and you build trust through consistency and through vulnerability. Catholic business author Patrick Lencioni, he says that "trust makes conflict the pursuit of truth." Trust makes conflict the pursuit of truth, where it's not just two egos going at it just to be right, but it's a team together attacking an issue to find the best solution in that situation. Researchers say that the biggest area for conflict in a marriage is money. Money fight, one of the top reasons of divorce. And so when you're dating, when you get engaged, especially talk about money and get a plan together, take a course. I highly recommend Dave Ramsey, of course, Financial Peace University. Check it out. You don't need to agree with everything that he says. The benefit from it, by the way.

So check it out. You can just Google Financial Peace University or Dave Ramsey course. So tip number five, learn to handle conflict. Tip number six: love your love your spouse the way that they want to be loved. So in the book, The Five Love Languages, Dr. Gary Chapman, he explains that each of us have a real emotional need to feel loved. And more than anything, we want our spouse to make us feel loved. And when they do, things are great. The world is beautiful. When they don't, things are not good. The world is dark. And he explains, he says, in the context of marriage, if we do not feel loved, our differences are magnified. We come to view each other as a threat to our happiness. We fight for self worth and significance, and marriage becomes a battlefield rather than a haven. He uses this awesome metaphor, he says, inside each child, each of us write as kids is a love tank, an emotional love tank. And when the child is loves, that tank is full and they develop normally. They grow normally. But when that tank is empty, when the child does not feel loved, they start to act out. The same is absolutely true in our marriages. And so each spouse has an emotional love tank. When we feel love, tank is full, when we don't feel loved or feel rejected, the tank is empty. And when problems occur in our marriages, often the root is that the emotional love tank is empty.

And so what we need to do is keep the love tank of our spouse full and then teach our spouse how to fill our love tank. How do you do that? The best tool that I've found in so many people have found is the five love languages. Most of you have heard of it. You probably know your love languages. Some of you have probably even read the book. But if you're not aware, Dr. Gary Chapman is a marriage counselor, OK? And after working with hundreds of couples, he noticed that there are different ways that people wanted to feel loved. And so he kind of tested and refined these ideas over the years. And the result was his book, The Five Love Languages. And this book has helped tons of people. They've sold over 10 million copies. And again, if you're not aware, love languages are again, are just a different ways that you can love someone. There's five of them.: First, words of affirmation. Next, acts of service. Gift's. Quality time. Physical touch. Often the temptation that we run into in our relationships is we love the way that's just natural to us. Maybe the way that we want to be loved. But the problem happens when that's not the way that our spouse wants to be loved. And so what we need to do is learn how to love our spouse in the way that they want to feel love, because if we don't love them that way, their love tank is going to be empty.

And if that happens for long enough, they're going to seek some way of filling it. And what happens if you read the book you hear so many stories like this, it turns unhealthy, like they go seek to fill that love tank, to feel loved, to feel appreciated in another relationship, in an affair. And so this is not some cute little thing that high school girls talk about, oh the five love languages. This is like an important tool to build love that lasts. And so how does this look? It's simple, right? My love languages are physical touch, like every other guy and quality time. And so that's the way that I receive love. That's the way that I, you know, feel loved. And my love tank is full. My wife, words of affirmation and acts of service fills her love tank. Early on, I figured if I just, you know, touched her, loved her kissed her, that would be good, she would feel loved. And then I was surprised when that didn't work. One other guy that I know, he was like shocked when his wife didn't want to have sex with him, like, all the time. He didn't know what was going on. But it's just natural for us. We want to love that way. Nothing wrong with that.

But we have to learn to love our spouse the way they want to feel loved. So for my wife not to put myself up on a pedestal by any means, just to show you how this works, some of the things I've learned is like if I can make coffee for her in the morning, she loves coffee, make coffee for her in the morning, have it warm and ready for her. That's an act of service that makes her feel loved. If I leave a little note, that's like the perfect combo because words of affirmation there, and she says it works, I think. At least it seems like it. But it's just some other insights on the five love languages that isn't necessarily mentioned in the book. Everyone has about, I think, two dominant ones. And the way that we receive love is not the way that we usually give love. They can align, but they don't always align. So again, for me, physical touch, quality time, that's how I receive love. But the way that I give love is through physical touch and acts of service. So my wife and I align there, which is really helpful. Our families obviously play a huge role in forming our love languages. I think it's either we saw one example growing up, like maybe, you know, your family was gift givers. And so that's just naturally the way that you love, maybe that's the way you feel loved, or maybe it's something that you lacked.

Maybe your family wasn't very affectionate. And so you really crave that affection in a relationship. So the book covers a ton more, but it can really help you as a couple, especially when you're married, to discover maybe why you don't feel loved, because you should feel loved in your marriage and it will help you fix it, fix it for you, fix it for your spouse. And the result is that you're going to have a better relationship and have deeper intimacy, more beautiful marriage. And it's just amazing tool to build love. And so my challenge for you, if you know your love languages that's great if you've done that, if you haven't done it already, there's an assessment online, https://www.5lovelanguages.com/ That's either the number five or the word. Doesn't matter. You can take the assessment on there. You can do it with, you know, boyfriend or girlfriend if you want as well. Buy the book, study it. But most importantly, guys, if you know this stuff, awesome! Knowledge is good. Do something with it. Like put it into action. So that's my challenge. So tip number six, make your spouse feel loved the way they want to feel loved. Tip number seven: make things go right, don't just fix things that go wrong. I mentioned that we went to marriage counseling and early on in marriage or we were just having some conflict, we were butting head and we wanted to figure out like how do we deal with this whole conflict thing.

So going in there, I expected I had done counseling for years in the past, I expected the counselor to teach us some tips and tactics like what to do, what to say in these situations. He didn't do that. Instead, he just asked us about the overall health of our marriage, like you guys going on dates? Are you having good conversations or having fun together? And so he was trying not just to treat the symptom, but to go under and treat the root cause and related, really valuable lesson that I learned in the book The Anatomy of Peace, is that we have to spend more time in our lives making things go right than fixing things that go wrong. What does that mean? It's really simple. Instead of waiting, you know, for a triple bypass surgery in your heart, like work out, like take care of your heart, be healthy in little ways every day instead of waiting for your car engine to blow up, like do little periodic maintenance on it to keep it running. Well, and this is so simple, right. This isn't complicated, but it's so difficult to live. And so the struggle is won in the small daily battles. And that, I think, is why it's so difficult, because it seems insignificant. It seems like nothing. How do you make things go right? Researchers say that there's like four areas that you need to get on the same page with your spouse.

If you can agree on these things, your chances of having a successful marriage is so much higher. So first one: God. Second, money. Third, parenting - like how many children to have and how to parent them. And fourth, in-laws. I recently heard Father Mike Schmidt say that intimacy was another one that you need to be on the same page with. So you really need a plan for each, you need to be talking about these things, especially, you know, when you're dating, into engagement and into marriage as well. Some other things you could do to make things go right and I'm going to give you guys a bunch, see what sticks for you. Pray together, make use of the sacraments, try heartfelt prayer. If that's not something that's you know, if you're not used to that, that's OK. Might feel kind of awkward at first, but when you do this, I think it really can build spiritual intimacy with your spouse. Play together. Barney Brown says that this is so important for adults. We just like stop playing when we grow up, but we need to play together, especially as a married couple, we need to have fun. So what you can do is you can make a list of things that you enjoy, and your spouse can make a list of things that they enjoy, and then you can find the overlap. Any nerds out there, you can make a Venn diagram of this.

But it could be said that the family that prays together and plays together stays together. It's so important that we play together as well. Go on weekly dates. We hear this a lot, right? Some of the barriers to doing that, we don't have ideas, like I don't know what to do. Let's just watch a movie. We need to take some time and actually make a list of date ideas, talk to other couples, take 30 minutes, take an hour to do some research on date ideas in your area for different seasons inside, outside, all sorts of things. Another thing that can be a barrier is if you have a irregular schedule. My wife's a nurse and so her schedule changes all the time. And so what we do is like set a reminder for the beginning of the month, task comes up on my nerdy task list. And so then we plan the dates out for that month, just four weeks. Do that 12 times a year, not that complicated. Have a weekly business meeting, our counselor taught us this, and this is some are just starting to get into this is helpful because it gets all the logistical, like boring maintenance stuff out of the way in a 30 or 60 minute meeting once a week. And I hear it's especially helpful when you have kids because there's things that you need to talk to and it prevents those things from invading your time together when you go on dates and spend other time together.

Spend time with couples that you admire. I've mentioned this a couple of times, I hope you're tracking with that. Ask an older couple to coach you, to mentor you. This is so helpful because Olympians and pro athletes have multiple coaches for different parts of their games. If you're a baseball player, you have a hitting coach, you have a fielding coach, you have a strength and conditioning coach and on and on. And so we need the same in our lives. We need people to help us in our marriage and our faith and our spiritual life, health wise. And so get someone to coach you, spend time with a couple that you admire. Don't isolate yourself, dating couples I'm especially talking to you. Like I know this is hard, especially during covid times, but like it's so important not to isolate yourself, especially if you're trying to live out the virtue of chastity. But also beyond that, love can't grow in isolation like John Paul the Second in theology of the body. He talks about this and it's in the nature of love to expand, to diffuse itself. And so don't isolate yourself. Get out there, find creative ways if there's some restrictions on you. Build a culture of appreciation. So the five love languages are going to help there. But our counselor taught us one simple thing that you can do is just write little notes, like in just one sentence to your spouse, give it to them once a day in some creative way.

It's helped us a lot like it's really helped us. It's so simple, but it's helped us. And it might feel awkward at first, especially if you're not like a words of affirmation person. But just do it. Just take that first step. When you're married, make sure you prioritize your sex life like this is important, it's something that we don't talk about. It's not just some after thought, like, oh, when we have time, when we feel like it, like this is really important. And if you want a good Catholic source on this, the book, Holy Sex, I recommend that it's written by Dr. Gregory Popcak. He's out in Steubenville and his style is a little bit strange, but he says a lot of good things in it. And all of his stuff is based on Love and Responsibility, which is based on John Paul the Second's teaching. Another thing, be vulnerable, even if it's scary because there's such a temptation in marriage, especially if you've been married a few years, to just close off your heart and just to not be vulnerable. Like I've had to deal with this myself. And so make sure you're intentionally being vulnerable with your spouse, because vulnerability is the foundation of intimacy. Become a servant. We have to take the mindset of a servant, John Paul the Second said when he was in D.C. years ago, that to maintain a joyful family requires much from both the parents and the children.

Each member of the family has to become in a special way, the servant of the others. And so my challenge on this tip is to build a strong foundation in your relationships, again, spend more time, more money, more energy making things go right than just fixing things that go wrong. Now, I hope these tips have been helpful because there's certainly more that can be said, there's been whole books written on this stuff, but I've heard it said that at the end of the day, if you want a great marriage, there's really just two things that you need. You need God's grace and you need a strong will. So flood your souls with God's grace and have a stubborn will, stay true to your wedding vows, regardless of what happens, regardless of what your spouse, stay true to your wedding vows. And you probably never heard anyone say this in a talk, but be ready for the temptation to quit. Be ready for the temptation to quit. And it might not happen to you, but for most couples, it does. Expect things to get difficult, Expect days or seasons in your marriage where you just want to give up. You just want to quit. You don't want to be married. And for some of you, that's going to be right away. For others, it's going to be years down the road. But but be ready, because this is so important, because if you think about it, like if this just shocks you, then why do we make a vow? Why do we make a vow? If desire alone was enough to hold the marriage together, the vow would not be necessary.

And most spouses who who end up struggling, they tend to think they have two options. One, stay married, be miserable. Two, get divorced, be happy. There is a third option, thankfully, and that is healing your marriage. First thing you need to do that, ask for help, can't do it alone, you cannot do it alone. Find a mentor a couple, find a marriage counselor, go to marriage counseling alone if you have to. If your spouse is not willing to go with you. Finding a Catholic one is best. But keep in mind that just because there's a counselor is Catholic does not make them competent like they need to be good at their craft as well. And so here in Denver, we have, you know, St. Rafael. I highly recommend them. That's where we've gone. And so check them out. They have some good counselors over there. Rely on your friends and resources that are going to help you stay true to your wedding vows. And, you know, that's hard to do sometimes even in the Catholic world, to find people who are really going to back you up. But thankfully, you know, we're in an awesome diocese here, there's a lot of great resources. Two books, two resources that I recommend for you.

One, Marriage 991. And this can be for you in the future. Hopefully not, but maybe you'll need it. Or maybe a friend that you know who's struggling right now. So Marriage 911, awesome book by Greg and Julie Alexander. Their story is incredible. Their marriage was literally hanging on it's last thread. They both cheated on each other. It all came to light. It blew up. It was a mess. They wanted to just be done. And so they met with a priest, hoping to get an annulment and the priest just challenged them, he said, "what's God's plan for marriage?" For so long they had just been living marriage for themselves, they've been so selfish. And so he challenged them, first, discover God's plan for marriage. So they went through this process and in the process, their marriage was healed. It was incredible, incredible story. In the book, they tell the whole story and, you know, now they coach struggling marriages. So they have an organization called the Alexander House. Check them out. They've helped 5000 couples over 20 years. Their success rate, I kid you not, is 98 percent at helping the couples stay together and build a really beautiful marriage. And so check them out. The Alexander House, google them. Marriage 911 is the book. Another book, Impossible Marriages Redeemed: They didn't End The Story in the Middle by Leila Miller. The bishop of Phoenix, he asked Leila, he said, "We need a book that we can give our priest especially, but also couples who are struggling with stories that show that really messy marriages can be redeemed.

And so that's what she did. She put together this book of 50 stories of these super, super difficult, messy marriages that were able to be redeemed. And some of these marriages, like there was infidelity. There's all sorts of bad things going on. But by God's grace, they're able to heal the marriage. And so check out that book, Impossible Marriages Redeemed. There's so much hope in it. One of the things I noticed in that book is that for the couples who rescued their marriage from a really bad situation, each of the spouses eventually took ownership of the problems in their marriage. They took ownership of the problems. They stopped blaming even when the other spouse was totally in the wrong. They took ownership of their piece of the pie and they just avoided this victim mentality. Now, for any of us who've been actual victims, like you need to heal, like you need to grieve. That's not something to take lightly. But we're not meant to remain victims because if we do, we're going to go through life feeling powerless. We're going to go through life blaming people, feeling helpless and just waiting for someone to come in and rescue us. And God is the only one who could rescue us, but even he won't do it without our help, like he wants us to work with him.

And so stop blaming, like when marriage gets hard, stop blaming. Take ownership. That's something I have to work on myself. Just to be blunt with you guys, fix yourself so you can heal your marriage and hang on during those hard times. The research shows that if you can get through those really difficult times in your marriage, you can work out your marriage, heal your marriage, your marriage is going to be so much stronger in the end. And toward the end of our time together, I wanted to share a few pieces of an exhortation that used to be read at Catholic weddings to couples. We don't use it anymore, sadly, but it's really beautiful. It's long. So I just picked out some snippets. It goes like this: "This union, then, is most serious because it will bind you together for life in a relationship so close and so intimate that it will influence and direct your entire future from this day forward. That future with its hopes and disappointments, its successes and failures, its pleasures and its pains, its joys and sorrows is hidden from your eyes. Not knowing what is before you, you take each other for better or for worse, for richer, or for poorer, in sickness and in health until death. Truly, then, these words are most serious. Whatever sacrifices you may be hereafter required to make to preserve this mutual life, always make them generously. Sacrifice is difficult and trying.

Only love can make it easy, and perfect love can make it a joy. If you allow love, true love and the unselfish spirit of perfect sacrifice to guide your every action, you can expect the greatest measure of earthly happiness that may be allotted to us in this valley of tears. The rest is in God's hands. Be assured that God will not fail you and your needs. God pledges you the lifelong support of His graces and the holy sacrament which you are now going to minister to one another." Beautiful. In closing, I think you all would agree that our world is very broken. To fix it, I think there's two things that we need. One, we need to become saints. We need to do God's will. Saints transform every culture that they live in. Two, we need to build good marriages and holy families. John Paul the Second said that "as the family goes, so goes the nation and so goes the world in which we live." In other words, the condition of society will always reflect the condition of the marriages and families within it. And so to fix society, we need holy families. Holy families are built upon strong marriages, strong marriages are built upon virtuous individuals. And so if we do that, if we build virtue, if we build strong marriages, build holy families, I truly believe that we will transform our culture from a broken culture into a Catholic culture where the human person flourishes and souls are saved and there's nothing more important.

And so my challenge for you leaving this talk is, you know, I threw a lot at you guys. Again, not complicated stuff, simple, but difficult to live. And so just pick one thing from the talk and then put it into action in your life. Like, what's one thing that resonated with you? Put that into action in your life this week if you want more content. My ministry has a podcast series. We did it last year. It's a love and relationship series. We had different episodes on navigating single life, dating, engagement, first year of marriage, struggles within marriage, all sorts of things. We bring experts in and interview them. So if you want to listen to that, you can go to https://restoredministry.com/blog/loveandrelationshipsseries You can pick an episode that's relevant to where you're at in life and then listen and learn. And on the table, like Mary had mentioned, those little brown wood cards wood looking cards have a QR code in the back that you can go to our podcast page and just listen on the app that you prefer. So, guys, I hope this was helpful for you. I hope it was really useful. Thank you so much for your time. So much for being here. God bless you guys.

*Mary takes the microphone and starts talking: Thank you so much, Joey. That was incredible. I feel like there's a lot of wisdom jam packed into that talk and I love what you were saying at the end, just that holy families and holy marriages can truly transform our culture. So thank you. One of the things I wrote down, a few zingers that you said, one was "marriage doesn't come in an Amazon Prime box", and then, "our IQ goes down 30 points when we're like being emotional or irrational". And then on the more profound side, "if desire was enough a vow wouldn't be necessary". And that trust makes conflict the pursuit of truth. So, Joey, thank you so much. That was beautiful. One more round of applause. Really appreciate it. We have a few short moments. If anyone has a question. If you want to be courageous and come on down, Natalie will help you get the mic. But we have time for a few Q&A. If anyone has a question, come on down and ask. And I think to launch, can you share more about why you started Restored? What was it in your life where it became a ministry or what was that motive in your heart that made you really want to make it into something? And then if you have a question, come on down to Natalie.

*Joey responds: Yeah. So like Mary said at the beginning, Restored, we help teenagers and young adults who come from broken families, we give them the practical guidance and the support they need to heal and grow so they can feel whole again. And for me, yeah, after my parents divorce, I got into all sorts of bad things to cope with the pain that I was experiencing, like pornography and other all sorts of, you know, unhealthy things. And thankfully, I was able to hear Jason Evert speak, got over that. Started to live a pure life, learn my faith, met Catholic friends who are like, really happy and joyful. And so I started to be like them, but I still felt broken. And so, like I mentioned, I realized this principle in life that after sin, once we get that out of our life, the next thing we need to focus on is our untreated brokenness, because that holds us back in life. It leaves us feeling stuck. But I looked around for resources to help me heal. Like, how do you actually heal? I would ask people like smart people and they always give me these really vague answers, like abstract answers. And so I wanted something practical. And so Restored is basically just what I wish I had grown up, especially for teenagers and young adults, like I mentioned. And so, again, we just make healing simple. That's what we're trying to do. And we do that through our content. So podcasts, blog, putting out books, talks like this, through coaching, we're building networks of counselors and spiritual directors who really get this issue, who can help people who come from broken homes.

There's so many of us out there, like according to U.S. Census, the U.S. Census Bureau, there's over a million children of divorce each year, one million. So if you take just the 1990s, that's 10 million. All right. That's that's what, the size of Sweden. OK, that's just 10 years just from the US not to consider the rest of the world, this is a huge population of people that have been greatly, greatly neglected. And so what we're trying to do is really connect people. We're not trying to be the experts on everything. We want to help as much as we can, but we want to connect people who need help with people who are able to supply the help. And the last thing, aside from content and coaching, we have community. So we have an online community. If you go on our website, you can find it and join if you want to. There's just a place for people to speak in a private safe environment, because a lot of us don't speak out about this stuff because we're afraid of hurting our parents, which totally makes sense. And so this online community gives people a space to find support, get advice from other people, have maybe been through certain situations, because when your parents, you know, their marriage breaks down, it doesn't happen just when the divorce happens, it happens years prior too. There's so much pain and a lot of problems that enter into our lives that no one really teaches us how to deal with. And so that's we're trying to do. We're trying to build this thing that really is needed and hasn't been done.

Question 1 from the audience: Hey, thank you so much. Your talk was gold. My question, and maybe it's a little bit more oriented towards the female side of things, but I'm curious. So you hear, you know, there is this sense of being a team and building virtue together in a marriage. And how do you reconcile that with the whole Ephesians - wives submit to your husbands - and how have you seen that modeled in a way that's healthy?

Joey responds: Yeah, no, that's a difficult thing. I think there's a lot of misunderstanding about Ephesians there. I'm no biblical scholar, but in scripture, it says, you know, wives be submissive. And the word submissive means under the mission of, and what's the husband's mission, of course, to be Christ, to die to himself on the cross. And so what does that look like practically, though? Honestly, like for us, we've pretty much tagged team everything. Like it's never been a point in our marriage where I've said no, I'm, you know, using my trump card to say we're doing this. It's always been teamwork. We haven't always agreed like we bump heads, but it's never been that situation where I would say it's been like me, you know, coercing. It's always the, again, dialogue, trying to figure out like what the best solution is. And so I think the danger there, like, I totally get where you're coming from. The danger there is that maybe husbands would become like dictators. That's not what scripture is saying at all. And so it's really important, I think, to take that team mindset. Was there something else under the question? I'm just curious, like what does this look like, an example in a relationship?

Question 1 from the audience continued: So like being influenced by the feminist culture, but really, um, you know, really buying into the Catholic value system and buying into this idea that, you know, I think women naturally we are drawn to men who are leaders like that is part of the natural order. And so, but having this influence of feminist culture, you know, brings a lack of humility that makes that difficult, makes that being submissive difficult. And I think, you know, reconciling that with what I think is a healthy idea of being a team and building virtue together rather than, you know, completely in the hierarchy. It's just a hard thing to balance.

Joey responds: It's a difficult balance for sure. But yeah, no, you nailed it. Feminist culture is like, yeah, toxic femininity is, as people call it, which I think is so accurate, is like super damaging to marriages because it gives women this false idea that to be valuable, you have to be like a man or better than a man. It's like, no, I'm a man. You're a woman. We both can complement each other. There's obviously some conflict that can occur naturally there because of the fall and because of the brokenness. But, yeah, I think, you nailed it, men should be leaders. And that's one thing that, you know, you see in some marriages where the man is kind of passive and weak. That's a problem in my opinion. I mean, personality can be a factor too, like some people just aren't as strong of a personality. And I don't think, you know, not every man needs to be this like macho-like Jocko Willink, a person that is a Navy SEAL. You totally can have like a different type of personality.

But it is important that the men are practicing leadership for sure. And yeah, toxic femininity is just ruining that I think. So I don't have necessarily perfect advice for that situation, but I totally agree that the husband should be the captain. Yeah. And then, you know, the wife is right there as an officer, like with them, they're making decisions together. But we need to lead. And this especially happens when it comes to spiritual life, making sure that, you know, as a husband, I've seen this tendency in myself that I just don't intentionally pursue and say, hey, honey, we need to do this thing, like this is why, use the influence tactics. I might just be kind of passive at times, so I have to fight that in myself. So I think it's important. And one of the best things for men to develop that leadership, I think, is being around good men because we learn it more through just spending time with men, not reading a book, not going to talk as helpful as this stuff can be. But really just being with other men who are good, strong men, masculine men, I think that's so helpful. And a woman who is secure in her femininity feels no need to compete. Just doesn't. Like we bring different things to the table, so I hope that's helpful.

Thanks.

Joey: All right, one more.

Question 2 from audience: Ok, this is a question from the Zoom chat. OK, this is from Father Mike Rapt. He says, Thanks Joey for the brilliant talk. I want to connect married couples with each other. What actually works these days? Dinner parties, prayer groups, bible studies, bingo?

Joey asks the audience: Who would go to a dinner party? Uh, medium. Um, bingo? Yeah? Um, what other ideas did he have? Like a couples Bible study? No, not really. How about like a study on theology of the body, or Love and Responsibility or some book that's like really practical? Meh. Well, any other ideas? We're going to crowdsource this. Any ideas to help connect married couples?

Crowd responds: Bible study. Domestic church.

Joey responds: Ok, so domestic church is a group started, it's like an organization, I guess, or just like a concept started in Poland, a priest leads married couples, usually grouped by different stages in their marriage, like they've been married for so long. And they go out into the wilderness sometimes? Each other's houses. Dang it. I thought John Paul the Second would be happy. I think we need that. Father Mike, take people into the mountains, do sick stuff. I don't know. That's just my opinion. Who would want to do like Mountain Adventures? That one is the most popular. Raise your hand again if you want mountain adventures. All right. We're a little biased here in Denver. That's a great point. All right, Father said, we're all going climbing. That one seemed to be the most successful, but no, yeah, I think the wisdom is in the crowd, not in me. So I hope that's helpful.

Mary: I also heard of a thing called Together in Holiness. It might be similar to domestic church, but they dive through the teachings of Saint John Paul the Second on family, and they get together and watch a video talk about St. John Paul the Second's writings on family. And that seems to be really fruitful too. Awesome, thank you, Joey. That was incredible. Thank you, Brigid, as well, for letting your husband share the wisdom to the crowd. So grateful.

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