Marriage Expert: The Biggest Lie Christians Believe About Marriage

- You hear all the time, opposites attract. That is just not true. Do you think that there is such a thing as a soulmate? There I don't think so. That would be like God is sending us on some kind of cosmic treasure. Then how should Christians balance the idea that like God's gonna bring them a spouse, but also like being intentional about finding someone? So if you're just gonna be passive, then well God will just bring this person and somebody my doorbell is gonna ring. And yeah, there he is, there she is. Right is obviously ridiculous. When you got on date, you should know within two dates, whether somebody's worth pursuing or not. I mean, if you can't tell after two dates, you're not asking the right questions. Are there any misconceptions about marriage that you see Christians believing? Right there in the buckle of the Bible bell, Oklahoma, having the highest of horse rate. And we're both Christians, God's with us. So we're not gonna have any problems. That's the biggest thing that Christians lean into. Knive, how can disagreements make a relationship stronger? There's a researcher, his name is John Gottman. And he was able to predict with a 93% accuracy rate, whether a couple would succeed or not. Whoa, they solely on how they fight. What's going on guys? Welcome back to another episode of the Bryce cover podcast. I'm Bryce and today I am with a very special guest. I'm with Dr. Les Paret. Let's go. Man, the room comes alive. It does, all the applause in here. Thanks for coming. Hey, my honor. So fun to be with you. I'm so glad you're here. So whether someone is a single dating engaged or married, I think that today's episode is so specific for those people because we'll talk about red flags and relationships, good things in relationships. Things that people typically do wrong, divorce, all the things I really wanna talk about it. And you told me on the phone, you didn't wanna talk about this until you were married. You didn't wanna have anybody talking about marriage and giving advice. So I had that rule where I would never give dating advice. I would never take dating advice for anyone that isn't married. That's why we invited a marriage expert on the podcast. Then I wouldn't give dating advice 'cause I wasn't married. So I want to hold myself that standard. So the first day that I was married, being married, we were on our honeymoon. How did he even been married 48 hours? I got a few emails of people asking for marriage advice. But one guy, literally broke pro. He made married 48 hours. I mean, I've been married 48 hours. And this guy wrote me a literal like five page essay like dumping his life issues on me. And he was the only one I responded to it. And I said, bro, I have no idea. I've been married 48 hours. So, well, we're gonna see how everybody's relationship problems today, so. You're a clinical psychologist. A New York Times bestselling author and a marriage expert that spent decades helping people in their marriage to set them up for success. What's the biggest thing you wish people understood about love before they got married? That love is fluid. Love isn't a static thing that you fall into or you fall out of. It changes. And the kind of love you have today is not the kind of love you're gonna experience tomorrow. Certainly 10 years from now, love changes. Like a river, you can't step in the same place twice. But what do you mean, do you think, do you mean like, I don't know, let's say someone was like a high school sweetheart or something? Like, they fall in love with that high school sweetheart. And then 10 years from then, they're a different person. And so, the love is fluid that way? Well, it's fluid in that it's just you don't, it's not like something you check off your to-do list. It's something that requires work every day. It's something that requires intention. And it's something that you enjoy at different levels through different passages of time. The kind of love, less than I have, less than I've been married for over 40 years. Is that so funny, less than less than? Yes, with the same name. Was that on purpose? Or, yeah, I decided I wasn't going to marry anybody unless they had my exact name because I'm a complete narcissist. Just that fast. I mean, so I had that. I remember when we were teenagers. And we were actually on a ski trip and somebody called for Leslie. And we both skied over there and discovered, wait, we got the same name. That's amazing, yeah. So I started dating all through high school, all through college, got married. And yeah, so we've known each other a long time. It's confusing because I'm Leslie. She's Leslie. But my dad's name is Leslie. My grandfather's name is Leslie. I'm the third. And then I married Leslie. So lots of Leslie's. Well, they should call you trip. Trip, triple, you know what I'm saying? And so my friend from home has the third to be named in his family. We call him Trip. That's funny. So I, you know, the reason why I'm so happy to have you on is because I've been blessed by the stuff that you do, especially the savior marriage before it starts. That book has been one I've recommended to friends of mine, one that Maddie and I read through marriage counseling and stuff like that. I get, you know, I'm curious as to like what separates the relationships between the ones that make it and the ones that fail? Intention. People that are like, that's what I kind of mean by you. You can't. It's so fluid because you think, oh, love is just this feeling that's going to kind of carry me. Like the, like the drifting of the tide or whatever. It's just I'm going to go with that flow of love. And love isn't like that. There's a, there's seasons to it, it abs and flows. And so you have to be intentional. You just don't, you don't get on a boat and just go, well, let's just see where the ocean takes us, right? You have a rudder, you have sales, you have an engine, whatever. And you're going to have intention on that. But love is, is you read the book, saving your marriage before it starts. And we have a whole chapter in there on kind of how to think about love. And what we know is from research at Yale years ago, there's three ingredients to love. Passion is the biological side of love. That's what get, you know, you and Maddie together in the first place. It was just the hormones. It felt cool. I got to get to know her, right? And by the way, did you tell me you met in, you met her like in high school or something? So this didn't, you didn't get together until you moved out to LA. Yeah. So I'm outing myself right now because I'm going to sound weird. You're going to make me sound weird. That was my goal. So we met at a Bible study here. But we're both from Georgia, both from towns next to each other. And she went to a big public school, was a really beautiful and popular. She was like the pretty girl. And I went to a small private Christian school and I wasn't beautiful and popular. So I knew who she was from a fall. And she did not know who I was. So I just said, like, thought she was just this pretty girl from a fall and high school. And then we meet in LA. And that's where it all began. Crazy. So the passion for Maddie probably took a whole lot longer than it did for me because I was, I was years out, years out of me. But you had your eye on her way back when you had just, you know, just a little like an arm's length. Not stocking her, but yet not stocking her. Yeah. I'm glad you clear. Yeah. That's a good one. And is the biological side that gets two people together just because there's something here. There's some chemistry. There's some sparks. Right? And, you know, do you have passion out of 10 out of 10 every day of the week, every week out of the year? Your whole married life? Absolutely not, right? It ebbs and flows. There's another ingredient in that is, and by the way, this is known as, you ready? This is called the triangular theory of love. I know it sounds like a real sleeper, but passion on one side, the intimacy on the other side of the triangle. And intimacy is that emotional bond that connect, like, you get me, and I get you, like, nobody else on the planet. And that's a, you know, that's an incredible thing to have with somebody, right? There's stuff. Lessly knows about me that nobody else on the planet knows. There's stuff that we've gone through in writing our own love story that nobody can understand, but us, right? Our first baby, by the way, was born three months early. It was a micro print, just a pound. My wedding band slept over his entire arm, cleared it to his shoulder when he was a little one. Yeah. Oh my goodness. And they predicted all kinds of dire things for him and blindness and all kinds of stuff. He proved every doctor wrong and he's now getting his PhD, got married last summer. And is his name Leslie, too? His name? Well, so I'm Leslie, my wife's Leslie, my dad's name is Leslie, my grandfather's Leslie, so we named him John. So John, John Leslie, and his brother, Jackson, Leslie, of course. But yeah, so intimacy, I brought that up because less than I went through that crisis, you know, and you can, I can explain it to people. I can show you pictures and stuff, but nobody really knows what that feels like, except for us with this little guy, right? And that's part of intimacy. I get you. Like nobody on the plane. Have you ever been in a situation with Maddie like where you're in a social setting and something cracks you up and the two of you were dying laughing and you look around, nobody else is laughing? Yeah. Right? That's intimacy, right? Oh, I'm so glad I have you. You have the same sense of humor, right? And then on the base of the triangle, and of course you don't have intimacy at a 10 out of 10 every day of the week, either, yeah. On the base of the triangle is commitment and that's the willful side, right? So you can kind of think of these as the hot, warm, and cold ingredients of love, passion, intimacy, and commitment. Passion is biological, intimacy is emotional, and commitment is willful. That's the part of love that's a decision. And even that is fluid. That doesn't, it's not something you just kind of check off your, oh, yeah. The big guy, dude, that's, that's the big covenant, you know, commitment and marriage. But there's also an energy level that goes into commitment. And when you have a deadline. And you have physical illness and you have whatever, something that's occupying your mind, it's not like you're leaning into that commitment, right? There's not as much evidence of it. So the whole point is that love is very fluid. It's not a static thing that you fall into and fall out of. Wow. And do you think that, like, so I guess when you, when you talk about love being fluid, I think you can easily, in my mind, people can easily fall into the category of, like, love is the feeling. So like, oh, if you know, I don't feel this way about someone, then it's over. How do you define love? Yeah, that's the problem, is that you think, oh, I don't have that love and I've lost that love and feeling. So I must be out of love. Yeah. And the point is, no, you're going to have time, maybe even seasons where that love and feeling isn't very strong. And you have to cultivate that, right? You have to work at doing that. That means having date nights after your marriage and all kinds of stuff that brings that up. But your, your, your expectation about love, if you can calibrate that and recognize that love is always changing. And I have to be intentional about cultivating it. That goes a long way for marriage. What do you think is something that people think matters about falling in love when in reality, it doesn't in the long term. And that's an interesting question. What's behind that? Say more. Like, you know, for example, I guess when I think of that question, like me, surface level looking, like I hear everyone say, oh, looks, looks a thousand percent. Like I think it matters in the moment. And then we're 80 years old. We both are like a trash bag full of water. And it's like, okay, then the looks don't really matter. At that point, long term. But like, is there something deeper than just looks that you think that people, let me just say something about looks because looks are important. And the research is so, you know, we started the first ever online matching site. Have I told you this? Yes. E-harmony. Yeah. So Neil Warren and his wife, Marilyn and Leslie and I had dinner late at night up in the hills of Pasadena looking over the Rose Bowl. And he said, hey, you ever heard of this new thing called the internet? This is 26 years ago. And how old are you? I'm 23. I wasn't even alive. So all you know is the internet. Yeah. There was a day we didn't have the internet. And it was crazy. All right. And then the internet came along and everything changed. And he said, you know, this new thing, he said, I wonder if that could help you with your your B-hag. You ever heard of a B-hag? That's a big area audacious goal. A big hairy audacious goal. It's a business term. Okay. And so our B-hag, especially back then, was to see the divorce rate reduced by a third in our lifetime in local churches. And so we, we were, you know, thought, how do you that's a big hairy audacious goal? How do you go about doing that? And so Neil said, if we started matching people well on the front end, it could lower the divorce rate. Anyway, that's what got us going on that whole thing. I brought it up because we used to have a thing at the Harmony in the hallways of people's pictures. And it was just astounding to us how people almost seem to go out of their way to look bad in their pictures. And we literally had to hire a coach to help people know how to post better photos of themselves on their profile. Yeah, on their profile. And here's the crazy thing. And the real reason I brought this up, when we first launched, we had these 29 dimensions to match people on that Neil came up with. And we thought, these are so important. It shouldn't matter what another person looks like. Yeah. Well, that lasted by, by about, you know, maybe five seconds, because people want to know what this person looks like. Right. And so looks are incredibly important. But if you're basing longevity in a relationship and fulfillment and satisfaction and meaning and all the stuff that you want in your relationship, just in how they look, you're going to be super disappointed because they're not going to look like that forever. Yeah. Yeah. I'm like, I know, well, I know Maddie's going to look beautiful forever. And then I'm going to, you know, I'm going to buy like 35. I'm going to look like I'm going to beat with a baseball bat or something. What is something that everyone needs to do to prepare themselves almost before they get married? Hmm. Well, a lot. But here's my biggest piece of advice. A million things they do. People need to be prepared. Here's the, like the thing at the top of the mountain, the thing that's the most important. I mean, you could talk about communication and manage conflict and all the skills that we talk about and saving your marriage before it starts. But the single most, if I could press a magic button for anybody that's about to get married in so many ways, it would just to be as the best version of themselves so they can be meaning they're healthy, emotionally healthy. And, you know, we have this little mantra that your relationships can only be as healthy as you are. Therefore, the most important thing you can ever do for your marriage, for your friendship, for your relationship with mom and dad, for anybody is to work on who you are. And to get healthy is, is so important because if you're, everything is driven out of that, all of your decisions. And life is made up of decisions, right? Big and little decisions. And the healthier you are, the healthier decisions are. I got married in my early 20s. It seems to be especially in Christianity, a lot of people get married in their early 20s. I think that there's a resurgence right now of a lot of young people getting married in their early 20s. What helps those marriages succeed in the early 20s? Yep. Well, I don't know that this is the answer that you're looking for. But the truth is that there's a sweet spot. If you just look at the numbers on people that do have longevity in their relationship and marriage, it's not the early 20s. It's the mid and later 20s. Well, what happens to the people in the early 20s? The early 20s, so many are naive, look doing things like we just talked about based on things on love. That doesn't mean that it's not a good thing. I'm all for it. Yeah. Both my boys got married in the early 20s. Yeah. Just got married this last summer. Oh, amazing. And so I, I'm all for it. But if you just look at the statistics, the research, there's a level maturity that comes when you reach 25 or so. You start to have a different perspective, different kind of, just maturity on your outlook and attitude. But it's so individual, right? Everybody's, everybody's traveling on their own path. Some people mature much quicker than other people do. So you're saying that the numbers would show that mid to late 20s, those marriages have a higher success rate of surviving than the people in the lower mid, lower 20s. Absolutely. Now, excluding numbers, what do you think is something that anyone in their 20s, like what it would help their marriage succeed regardless? Well, if you're looking at skill sets, things that you can actually do, it's the single greatest relationship skill set that we ever try to do as humans. I think it's the most challenging. I've written a book on it. I still wake up every morning starting at zero. And it's empathy, the capacity to put yourself in somebody else's shoes. Wow. That's a rarity. That's like handing somebody a gold bar to figure out what's going on for you. How are you seeing this thing? When was it? Don't answer this, but when was last time you did that for Maddie, right? But you literally were intentional about going, I wonder what life is like in her skin? I wonder what it looks like to look out of her eyes and through her glasses to walk in her shoes, right? When we begin to ask that question and make that a habit, life doesn't get any sweeter, especially the happiest couples on the planet are couples that are doing that for each other. Mutual empathy. Whoa. And it sits hard. It's really hard to do. No, that is a hard one. I'm like sitting here thinking I'm like, wow, like, but you don't even, you like sub, you subconsciously, you don't catch, like I don't catch myself doing that. You know, it's just the initial, you will never do that just by happenstance. You have to be deliberate. Yeah. You've heard me say intention at least six times in this interview so far. It is so intentional. And an empathy, it's one of those things that we confuse. First of all, most of us think we do that better than we do that we know this from research. Oh, yeah, I got that. I got a lock on that. I do that all the time. I am always doing that. And what people do is confuse empathy with sympathy. And I tell my counseling students at the university, huge difference between sympathy and empathy. Sympathy is standing on the shore and throwing out a life ring to somebody that's struggling in the water. And every decent human being on a planet does that flows with the adrenaline. Yeah. Empathy much more risky as diving into the water and risking your own wellbeing to bring that person back to shore. It's entering their experience. And that's so rare. What do we call those people? Heroes. And it's just as heroic when you do this in your relationships. And this is true. Not just in marriage. This is true in your friendships. It's true in your family relationships. Your work colleagues. Empathy. It's so powerful. It's difficult to exaggerate the value and importance of empathy. So I remember when I first became a Christian, I'm thinking of two different people in my brain right now. I had a friend who met a girl, dated, got engaged and married in three months to this girl. Okay. They have multiple kids. Their marriage is just awesome, killer, crushing it. I also know other people who waited a couple of years, dated a couple of years and they're married and then their marriage is not doing so great. In my mind, I'm looking at those scenarios and you would think, well, the second person has gone through more years, more experience, maybe had the opportunity to see that person in something difficult and in good moments. And my friend over here in Group Bay, I mean, three months is not a lot of time. I mean, you could still consider that like the falling in love, honey moon, that kind of vibe. How can somebody tell you people that know each other for at least two years have the highest success rate? Do they really? So I think that is such an interesting thing because maybe I can speak to a lot of Christians. I felt, so when many of us started dating, after about a year of us dating, I was like trying to have a marriage conversation. It was stressing Maddie out. But in my mind, I was like, oh, this is what Christians do. You just like get married quick. But I felt this like pressure like we had to get married quick. And it wasn't until my pastor from back at where I'm from. I was asking him talking through it. And I was like, every time I bring it up, Maddie is not ready to have that conversation right now. We've been dating for you and he was like, dude, I dated my wife for two years and blah, blah, blah. And I was like, whoa, that makes me feel normal. And I don't think people were intentionally trying to put pressure. But it just felt like that there was a little bit of this Christian pressure, which is get married super fast and like all this other stuff. Regardless of time, how can someone actually tell if they're ready to get married? Well, there's a lot behind that question. So first of all, it's a matter of emotional health. As you can tell, I'm a big believer and I'm a psychologist. I mean, your relationship can only be as healthy as you are. And by the way, those two couples that you mentioned, the contrast, just so it's really clear, the age that you get married is not the end all be all like, oh, like that determines it all. It's one of a million different factors. But if you look at the statistics on what we know that can measurably generate longevity and relationship, that's one factor that you have to think about. But just like emotional health. But how do you know when you're ready to get married? First of all, you have to have a sense of meaning in the relationship. In other words, it's not driven just by feeling and that there's some outside force that's doing this. Oh, we're waiting to have sex until we have married and I want to have sex. So let's get married, right? Which is a really poor reason to get married. Terrible motivation to get married, right? Yes. But I think people abuse that scripture sometimes. Like, you know, what Paul says, it's better to get married than to burn with passion. And I'm like, well, he also says that a fruit of the spirit is self-control and a completely different letter. If you got everything in his context. Yeah, yeah, for sure. But and then you come back to if both people are, you know, it has to be sometimes one person is ready to get married and the others. And it sounds like you were ready to talk about marriage before Maddie was in a significant way. I think I think we'll part of that reason. I felt like I kind of subconsciously felt that pressure. I was like, oh, well, this is what everyone does. This is the right thing. Then we just dated a whole another year. And it made everything 10 times more awesome. And so you eventually get into a state. By the way, before I came down here from Seattle, I sent you a little link to I felt it out my chart.com. Yep. And do you remember where you landed? Yeah, I remember landing. I can pull it up. I actually filled it out a moment ago. So what this does is look at the state of your relationship. You know, there's states that we measure and traits that we measure. States don't change. Like you're an introvert or you're an extrovert. You're an eight on the anyogram. You're an ENTJ on Myers-Briggs, you're whatever, right? Those are traits. That's how God made you. It's in your DNA. It's not going to change. And states, in comparison to traits, are always changing. And so the state of relationship is something to kind of assess every once in a while. And that's what this little tool does. It's free. Anybody can take it. MyHeartChart.com. Yeah. It took me literally three minutes. And then I got like a 14 page. Yeah. Like Heart Diagnosis Action Point, which that is also what I really enjoyed. Like when Maddie and I were doing the "Saving Your Marriage" before it starts. And like the, I know we were kind of talking about the walk through thing that we did as well. We had that chart because it looked at like kind of character qualities that both Maddie and I had. Yeah. And it was kind of like we were learning how to how to serve each other in those areas. And those are looking at your traits. Yeah. Right? Your personality. Yeah. Do you happen to remember it like like are you fast paced or slow paced? On fast paced. Right. And then are you task oriented or people oriented? I am a. Or in between. I'm a little bit in between. Okay. So you're in a kind of a trait of relation to personality type that I often liken it to Peter in the Bible. Like lots of enthusiasm and the person that's fast paced and they can be people oriented. They, you know, Peter was like when he saw Jesus, he was jumping out of the boat to go to him. Right? Like this guy was enthusiastic. Yeah. Right. Yeah. The Apostle Paul, more task oriented. This one thing I do, right? It wasn't just in Peter had lots of emotions and so forth. Those are all traits. Yeah. And by the way, you think about somebody like the Apostle Paul and his, he had this dramatic conversion wasn't at the waffle house, but it was pretty dramatic. And he had this amazing conversion. His DNA didn't change. His personality didn't change. Right. Same person. It's just that he steered it towards something else. And that's what we're talking about here is knowing your, your personnel. So awareness and answering the question, how do you know when you do it? You have a lot of awareness, right? You know who you are. You psychologist like to say, awareness is curative, if, if you can't change anything, if you aren't first aware of it. Well, and the, I keep mentioning it because it genuinely had such a big impact on me. Your book, same your marriage before it starts. It begins with the myths of marriage. Yeah. Which one causes the most problems for couples? Did one stand out to you? There's four. Yeah. I'm curious to know what you think is the biggest, maybe numbers wise or just even through people that you guys have counseled like what is the one marriage myth that is like this is the one. No, it's the one for me. I've already mentioned it and that is, it's kind of, there's one myth that says everything good will get better, right? That's, that's a big myth, right? There's lots of things that just don't get better. You're still bringing all your baggage, all your woundedness, all your hurts into the relationship. This isn't going to automatically heal that. You're going to have this incredible high when you first get married and then you come back to, you know, the equilibrium where you started with the same pain and so forth. Everything good will, will get better and then everything bad will disappear, those, those to go hand in hand. But this person will make me whole is the biggest myth. That's the one that tops the list. Is, is that the one that almost everybody believes whether, you know, even unconscious? I think we believe all of them to some level, at some level unconsciously, but we, we think that this person is going to make up for all the things that I'm lacking, that they become kind of my pathway towards wholeness, they make, make up from the gaps in my life. That's such a, you know, God size expectation to put on anyone, especially. Oh, it's so much pressure broken you, broken human beings. And I feel like too, maybe with that, maybe you can correct me if I'm wrong, maybe there's a lot of unspoken expectation that comes with that, that's why, like, you know, you know, if you, if you feel like this person is going to make me whole and then they, you know, they don't do something that wasn't communicated. That was so minor, right? You know, I like when you swap the paper towels on the paper towels and then they don't do it. And it's like, oh, they're going to let you down, guaranteed every day, they're going to let you down. Right? That's the way it is. That's just how life is. We're humans. But this, this idea that the other person can make up for all that unlacking is one, like I said, it's unconscious. I, less than I always joke that everybody gets married with an invisible rule book and that rule book is just how life is supposed to be lived. And there's rules about how you're supposed to put dishes in the dishwasher and rules about how you're supposed to dress when you go to church and there's rules about how you're supposed to behave when you go to a restaurant, whatever, you know, we just have rules about everything because of the home that we grew up in, right? Or because in the home we grew up in, they didn't do it the way I think it should be done. So I'm going to do it this way in my relationship. And in psychology, we call those intro jacks. That sounds like a lot of psycho babble, but it's, it's the intro jacked as you take something from the home that you grew up in that it's internalized, even if you don't want it. Yeah, you know, yeah, it's still the kind of thing. I remember this is a silly illustration, but when, when less than I first got married, I had this expectation around, around dinner. I grew up in a home where mom would never put a bottle of ketchup on the table. She was just more formal. Like hamburgers, hot dogs, it doesn't matter. She just didn't put the bottle, she put a little dish, she'd spoon it out, you know? And I always joke my pink, my pinky just automatically goes up thinking about it, you know? And it's just going to find a thought, man, when I get married, I'm going to get a big Heinz 57 bottle of ketchup put it out there on the table, right? And we got married, had blessed and made hamburgers and she put a bottle of ketchup out there. And what do you think I did? I was like, what are you doing? You don't put a bottle of ketchup out on the table, putting a little dish, you spoon it out, right? That's an interject. I didn't even find myself wanting to do that, but it's because the silly illustration is something super surface level. But the idea here that I'm trying to say is that we absorb things from our family of origin that we don't even know about. And so we have this little rule book and we don't even know that we have those rules until the person we marry starts to break the rules. Well, we go, wait a second, that's not how life is supposed to be lived. Does that make sense? No, that makes complete sense. Do you think marriage was designed to make us happy? That's a great question because a lot of people think so, right? And I have a friend who likes to say marriage was not designed to make us happiest, designed to make us holy, right? And if you're getting married to increase your level of happiness, you're just going to be so disappointed because it doesn't, you bring your own happiness into the relationship every day, right? It's not up to this person to make you happy. It's not up to the institution of marriage to make you happy. I mean, just look around at all the people that are married, are they happy? A lot of them are most definitely not happy. So, yeah, I like that question because happiness is such an interesting phenomenon. And psychology didn't study it for the longest time only in the last 20 years or so to start to study happiness. But what we know is people have a set point. Like your level of happiness is different than mine. And everybody else, it's like your personality. That's why you see on twin studies, twins, identical twins tend to have the same set level for happiness. Yeah. And that's a bio DNA, that's a biological thing. And so if you get married to somebody, it doesn't have your set level of set happiness, you know, that's something you need to be aware of. Yeah. Is there a, are there any misconceptions about marriage that you see Christians believing in particular, specifically Christians? Yeah. Just the big one. And that is, Leslie and I, years ago, we got a call from the governor of Oklahoma and out of the blue. And he said, "My state has the highest divorce rate in the country." And he said, "It's impacting the fiduciary success, the financial success of this state because you can't have great success in any place, any community if you don't have a solid home life." And so, you know, healthy marriages, make healthy families, healthy families, make healthy churches, churches, make healthy communities and so forth. And so one of the things that we discover right there in the buckle of the Bible belt, Oklahoma, having the highest divorce rate, there was this mentality of like, "Hey, we're in love. We feel it. We're feeling all the love." And we're both Christians, God's with us, so we're not going to have any problems. It's naive. And even if it's not conscious, it's kind of a thing like, "Well, God wouldn't let us fail because we have these loving feelings towards each other, without being, you know, learning the skills, communicate." It is a skills, like any other job, right? Any other good work. It takes skills. Yeah. You got to learn how to communicate. How do you and Matty do? What's your level of communication on communicating? I would say it fluctuates, you know, every now and then sometimes we're good, sometimes we're bad. And so I would say the way that we feel about communication is, and if I can speak for Matty on this, is that Matty's the kind of person that is okay with taking time and talking about it later. And I am not that guy. I'm the guy that's like, "I got a monkey on my back. I got to get this thing off." Like we got to talk about it now. And that has it's like pros and cons, right, like the way that we go about confrontation, the way that we go about communication. And so I would say like sometimes we do a good job, but then again, like there are days that I fail at communication, days that she fails at communication. And everyone I ask, even non-marriage experts, they say communication, communication, communication, and then nine months of being married, I'm like, "Wow. We got a lot to work on in the communication factor." Well, there's no doubt about it. It's a lifeblood of a relationship. It will sink or swim, depending on how well you communicate. And so that's a skill set that everybody has to learn, doesn't matter whether you have Jesus on your side or not, you got to learn how to communicate. And that sense of urgency that you were experiencing, "Hey, let's talk about it now." And she's like, "No, I need to retreat. I want to rearrange the furniture in my head before I talk to you." You know, that is a personality. That's not going to change. I mean, get used to that because that's what you signed up for with Maddie. So what would you say, how would we conquer that in, you know, is, I don't know if this is the right way to phrase it, but almost like who's personality trait when it comes to communication gets prioritized. Is it hers because I'm the man and I should lead? And that's how it is. So I'm like, "God, I'm like, which one?" So we're going to vote on who has the best personality or just give it to Maddie. We got to give it to Maddie. Yeah. No, what ends up happening, like everything in marriage and relationships is that you find your way. You got to find your dance steps. And so, and it takes years to perfect, right? You know, I just know that that's a great example, by the way, where you're, I want to talk about it now. Get on with it. And she's going, "I need time to think this through." And that, that means you're an aggressive problem solver. Doesn't mean you're show aggression, but you're like, "Let's get on." Like, why are we still talking about this? Let's just do what we know we need to do, right? And so you live life with a little bit of urgency. And I know the feeling because it's the same here, okay? But you will perfect a dance with Maddie over the years where you realize in your styles of communication that there are times where, "Yeah, you put the gas on because we do need to resolve this now, not later." And there's times where you realize, "What a gift Maddie is bringing to my life to help me pump the brakes a little bit and take a little bit of time because I want to rush into that. I need to pray about it. I need to think about that. I need to talk to somebody else about it. They both have values." When it comes to personalities, you look at all the personalities and just look at, like, in the Kingdom of God, you think about different personalities like John the Beloved, so loyal, like very different than Peter that we talk about. No urgency. He's taking his time, right? Or you take a Thomas, you know, we sometimes give him that moniker of the doubter. And that's such a pejorative kind of thing. I mean, what a good quality to have. Like, "Hey, Christ, I need to see the hands. Do you mind showing me the hands? Like, let me touch those." He wants to know, like, we all bring and then you have Paul, it's hard driving and so forth. All these different personality types. One is not better than the other. Yeah. So it's not like, "Oh, does Maddie get to win because she has this kind of personality?" Or Bryce gets to win because he's got this person, "Oh, because he's the man," or whatever. "No, you perfect this dance together, where you're going to know sometimes without ever speaking what the other person is saying." Yeah. And that takes a while to perfect. Does that make sense to you? So that makes a lot of sense. It's so interesting that you're saying that because I'm like, "Oh, sometimes it's one or the other. I guess just time is going to help us tell how to diagnose certain situations based on. " Well, it's going to come back to one thing, see, empathy, seeing it from each other's perspective. This sounds like a made up statistic I'm about to give you. Nine times out of ten when you guys are in conflict, maybe you guys had a conflict in the last nine months of marriage. Yeah. Well, of course. What your last conflict was about? I put you on the spot. I do remember where I last got to share it was. Yeah, I will share it actually. So last night I was watching the show's-- Last minute. Yes, it's time. It was like a reminder thing. So what time is it? Last night, I'm watching the show's on TV and the dog is here and then Maddie's on the couch, like looking through Facebook Marketplace. And she just randomly looks at me and goes, "Hey, you haven't put up those shelves in the bathroom that you said you would put up." And she was like, "I want you to be a man of your word and put the shelves up." Whoa. And you're playing the God card. And I like, but it was like because it was super chill. It was chill. Like she was just like, "I just want you to be a man of your word and go, put the things up." And I immediately was just like, "What?" Like, you know, you told me to be a man of my word, like I'm like, "I'm over here watching the show's and I don't even know what's going on in your mind right now." And I remember like it was just like, but in her brain, and it took me a second to get there. But I was going, I realized like, oh, she was looking on Facebook Marketplace, probably looking at something to do. - Made her think of it. - And made her think of it. And I'm over here like watching the chosen, not even thinking about doing anything. In fact, I'm like winding down, which I like never do. And I'm not the type of guy to just like start a show. I'm like watching the shows and she's asking me to do something. And I felt like I had had a long day. And so there was just like, we just missed each other. - Did you have friction? Did you? - We just like talked about it. We ended up talking about it. At first I was upset. I was like, what, like what? And then we did both of you get your feelings hurt at some level that you had to resolve. - Yeah, I would say like a very minor level. And then we just were able to work through that. - So here's the stat. Like I said, it sounds like it's made up. 90% of the time, nine times out of 10. If you're having tension with another person, marriage or not, if you will just intentionally see that situation from their perspective, take the moment to look through their eyes, the relationship, the whatever it is that's causing the conflict will dissipate. It just goes away. That's the power of empathy, especially when both people are doing it, right? - Yeah. - And so that kind of conflict situation, 'cause you will have conflict. I often say conflict is the price we pay for deeper intimacy. If you know how to fight a good fight, it can bring you closer together. The goal is not to avoid conflict. I love that verse Romans 12, 18, says if it's possible, as far as it depends on you, try to live peace with everybody. It's almost scripture's acknowledging, hey, you're gonna have conflict. Try, give it your best shot. Do what you can, try to have peace. But you're gonna have conflict. So learn how to fight a good fight, right? Do that, have the skills, and that means you maintain respect on a whole lot of other things. But that idea of seeing it from the other person's perspective is what will 90% of the time resolve a conflict. - What do you think about the idea of soulmates? - Soulmates. - Do you think that there is such a thing as a soulmate? - Well, it depends on how you define soulmate, but I'll define for you. - Oh, good. - My person is out there. One person, God has chosen one person for me out there. That's my soulmate. - Yeah, so that's a cosmic kind of experience. - Have you ever heard of the invisible string theory? Have you ever heard that? So it's like a string. And one end of the string is attached to one person and the other end of the string is that one person and eventually the string will bring the two people together. - It's incredible how often that string is geographically located within the same high school or college. (laughing) - Yeah, it's very, very interesting isn't it, yeah? Is there one that one person out there? I don't think so. That would be like, God is sending a son some kind of cosmic treasure hunt for this. - Well, can believing in soulmates be harmful to a marriage? - Well, the idea of soulmates, so I wrote, Leslie and I wrote one of our very first books was called Becoming Soulmates. So I don't disagree with the phrase soulmate, but it's what you mean by that, right? And by the way, we used to do our seminars, many years ago, we're called Becoming Soulmates. And then we realized, guys hate coming to events called soulmates, so we changed it to Fight Night. And I'm not kidding you. - Did you really? - Yeah, yeah. So we've been doing Fight Nights all over the country for years. - And mail attendance increased by a number of little thirds, that's a little bit crazy. - Yeah, but the whole idea of Becoming Soulmates is a romantic notion and I'm not knocking that in any way. But if you're thinking that this is the one and only, right? I think you're setting yourself up for some serious heartache. You know from reading "Saving Your Marriage" before it starts, we talk about the A-frame relationship, where you have two people that kind of fused their identities. And on college campuses, you speak on a lot of college campuses and so do I. And you can walk around and see people that kind of almost physically lean into each other. They go to the dining hall together, they go to the library together, whatever, they're just always together. And we go, oh, and that's sweet and that cool. They're soulmates, right? That A-frame relationship, what happens when one person stumbles is the other person loses their footing too. 'Cause there's no individual strength to lift them up, right? There's no iron, sharpening iron there. And so that A-frame relationship, I often do this. I'll just pull two people up out of the audience, seven lean in on that and have one of them like, yeah, it's just a great object lesson in how we can't, we can't afford to do that in our relationships. I think that this person, first of all, is gonna complete me, that they're gonna make me happy and that they're my soulmate because they're the one and only. That's a lot of pressure to put on one person. Well then how should Christians balance the idea that like God's gonna bring them a spouse, but also like being intentional about finding someone as well? Well, I'm a big believer in intention. I believe being prepared and being on the lookout in anything in life, right? We call it agency. On the flight down here, I was reading a book, just came out by this famous psychologist named Martin Saligman called agency. He studied it for the last 40 years. And agency is the belief that I can impact my environment. I have efficacy, I can have an effect because of the choices that I make. And so if you're just gonna be passive and well, God will just bring this person someday, my doorbell is gonna ring and there he is, there she is. Right, it's obviously ridiculous. Well, that mean that's what happened. Me, I mean, my wife just showed up at our Bible studies came over, so it happens. Maybe I'm just the one and a million in this string like getting very short. When I tell you like when she walk in the door about crap, my pants, I was like because it was my, it was my roommate's Bible say the host had a my apartment. So it was like she walked in a my apartment. That is bananas, like you know what I mean? And you didn't, did you know she was living in Los Angeles? I had no idea, actually, she had just, she had just moved. And, you know, that's almost as crazy as meeting someone because they have your same first name, Leslie. Yeah, kind of wild, right? Well, I've sold me it, so you know, you know, the thing. So, okay, so let's say someone graduated college and they're not really meeting many new people. Yeah, what would you actually tell them right now if they want to get married? And they like want a relationship, but they're not meeting? Well, this is hackneyed advice. You've heard this before, but you want to become the person that you want to attract. That's for starters. And I know that's like, okay, yeah, next, next, right? 'Cause you've heard it before, but it really is important. And then the other thing is to, again, this is an old fashioned advice. But have you ever heard of Smokey Robinson from Motown back in the day? This is like way back. Got a Detroit, he had a song called, "You got a shop around." And my mama told me, "You got a shop around." And so I believe in that. There's truth in it. You gotta, you gotta have a list of your deal makers and your deal breakers. And again, kind of old fashioned advice, but it's really true. If you know what you're looking for, I told both my boys, when you got on a date, you should know within two dates whether somebody's worth pursuing or not. Well, not whether they're worth marrying or not, but whether they're worth pursuing. If you can't tell after two days, you're not asking the right questions, right? And so that idea of knowing what you're looking for and then not budging from that, right? You knew certain things in your mind, whether you were intentional or not. I'm just trying to make it more conscious, right? Think, I always say when you do this, you make up your list of your must-haves, you can't stand, think of your must-haves as kind of concentric circles. And what's in the very center of that thing? For Christians, it's gonna be, well, they would share my faith. It's the most passionate thing I have in my life. I wanna walk in the footsteps of Jesus. I want someone who'll do that with me, right? So that goes in the middle of it, right? Oh, I'm really into cars, right? And so I want, so it'd be really nice if somebody was into cars with me. Is that in the center? Probably not, right? Depending on how big a part of your life that is. So, but that's the idea is that you hear all the time, opposites attract, that is just not true. It's just the opposite. We're attracted to people that are like us. And the more they're like us, typically the easier life is. There's enough differences in the uniqueness of our personalities. We're gonna have plenty of challenges. So, but the more they're like us, especially when it comes to values, the easier life is. We used to say, "Hey, Harmony, opposites attract." And then they attack. I like these one-liners and these phrases. They're easy to grab onto and take. So, how do you know if someone is the right person for you? If you're, if you're telling people, you gotta be the person, you gotta become the person that you want to attract. It's the same thing. It's what I just said. It's having that list of must-have. These are the things I'm looking for in another person. So, there's no guessing. You don't make your list after you meet someone and go, "Oh yeah, she has this, she has that." Yeah, that's my list. Right? You gotta find out what is it that really set your compass, right? For your own journey, find out what is it that is going to get me to that place? That's the person. What about the opposite? What are the specific signs to tell somebody, "Don't marry that person." Like what are the biggest red flags someone should be looking for in a relationship? So if you're marrying for the wrong reasons, right, to avoid something, to send a message or whatever, there's all kinds of unhealthy reasons people get married. And that's why those relationships are short. Remember on the heart chart, my heart chart, there's commitment and there's connection. And if you have the connection, but you don't have the commitment, you can still get married. It's just that what do you hold on to? Right? That's one thing, another caution flag is that the person doesn't check all the boxes for you. Like, oh, they have all my, my must-have. They have all my deal makers, they're just missing these three. And when you begin to adjust and compromise, that's a caution flag. Wow. Another caution flag is where you're like, this is it, she's the one and everybody else in your life is going, wow, open your eyes. I don't think you're seeing something here. You got to be, you know, those are three or four important caution flags. What about not even dating? Let's go into like somebody has been dating someone and their concessor has it, has. They have been dating someone they're considering marrying them. What are some of the biggest warning signs that people overlook when they're in the process of dating someone? He said, I read this book called Single Dating Engaged Married by Ben Stewart. He just defines dating as a process to see if you want to join hands with someone. Well, what if someone's in that process and they're going, okay, maybe marriage, maybe marriage, maybe marriage. Like, what are the common kind of warning signs that you're saying, like, don't marry that people intentionally overlook because you said a moment ago, there may be three that people compromise on or two or four or how many are there any that are just like fairly consistent? Well, the core one is going to sound like a broken record here, but it goes back to their emotional well-being. You want somebody that's healthy, that has some sense of awareness that they're grounded in their faith, somebody that they're drawing their significance from their walk with God, not from anybody else. I mean, that might sound abstract and kind of really religious, but those are the healthiest people that they're not dependent on somebody else for their significance and they're not dependent on striving. I have nothing in store. I'm a total striver. I'm like the madman. I want to move the needle every day, but yeah, you're ambitious, exactly, but striving for my significance. I'm not looking for my wife to do that for me or having a certain amount of money or wearing certain kind of clothes or whatever. It's just that the whole point of it is that my significance doesn't come from anybody else external. Yeah. It comes from a relationship with God. Have you ever worked with a couple before where one of those warning signs became a serious problem later on? Of course. Yeah. It's all kinds of. It's all kinds of. You know, we have this assessment. Yeah. The Symbus assessment. That's why MBIS saving your marriage before it starts. It's the title of the book that you guys went through. And did you guys do the his/her workbooks with that, too? We didn't do the workbooks. So there's a whole thing you can go through on all that. One of the things that we hear from a lot of pastors that use that, I think it's the most widely used pre-marriage platform in North America. Over 2 million couples have gone through it. One of the things that we hear most frequently from pastors is one thing I liked is that it helped me to help them pump the brakes when they should get married, you know what I mean? And so because all you're doing is holding up a mirror and basically saying, hey, if you were given advice to a couple that look like this, what do you guys suggest they still get married? Probably not. So it's a really nice objective way to do that. Is that what you asked me in my answering your question? Yeah. I was asking, like, if there is a specific story you have of you walking with a couple where one of those red flags became a serious problem later on and they're in their relationship. Well, one story that comes to mind that's akin to that, we have a chapter in the book called the Habit of Happiness. And the Habit of Happiness is really just another way of saying your attitude. And that's your capacity to adjust to things beyond your control. That's all your attitude is. It's the shock absorber of your psyche. And so when you run into something rough, and you will, by the way, every good marriage, no matter how good it is, eventually bumps into something bad. Yeah. And sometimes I always tell couples, put your seat belts on because it's going to happen. There's something else that I never, in a million years, that, oh, we'll have a baby probably that will have all kinds of surgeries and, you know, major mountains to climb. You don't get married thinking that'll probably happen for us, right? But there's going to be something, it can be a physical illness, it can be a job loss, it can be something, you know, who knows? But when that bad thing happens, it all comes down to your capacity to adjust to that and have agency within it too, right? And so that, I was thinking of a story of this couple that they read Symbus and they went on their honeymoon and he wanted to surprise her. And so this is up in the Pacific Northwest where we live. And so he didn't make any honeymoon plans that she was aware of, he did all the planning. And so it still cracks me up. And so he ended up taking her camping on their honeymoon to Mount Rainier in a tent. And this was not her idea of a honeymoon, but he loved camping, he was a wilderness freak, right? And so he took it to the mountains and they're in the woods and it started raining and it was just miserable, they couldn't get a fire going and the tent was, you know, dripping inside of it. It was just terrible. And she said, I remembered in that moment, reading the chapter of the habit of happiness and it said, you will create these honeymoon habits that what you create early on in your relationship will stay with you kind of like a, either a groove or a rut. And she said, I decided right there and then that I wasn't, she said I was in the middle. I was crying. I feel like I was so angry at him, why would he take me on my honeymoon to do this and all that kind of stuff? And then she said, I was throwing a pity party for myself and I just, when I kind of thought back about what I read in that chapter, I thought, I'm not going to let that be my story. You know, well, I'm not going to let that be my honeymoon story. She said, I'm going to get it there. I'm going to help him. We're going to start laughing about this, how ridiculous this is. And then we're going to go to a hotel tomorrow night, you know, and change the story altogether. But that capacity to adjust things beyond your control, I wish I could give that as a wedding gift to everybody that wouldn't that be incredible? That would be amazing. It is hard to adjust, especially in like emotionally tense scenarios, because you're so hyperfixated on the problem, overcoming the problem, the emotions in the problem, the negative in the problem, especially someone like, I'm optimistic, I'm a half, I'm a half glass fool guy. Like I am that guy. And even in those emotionally intense moments, it is hard to adjust because we can't control everything, right? Yeah. And if we could control everything, we wouldn't have to adjust. But most of life is finding that, oh, this isn't going the way I anticipated. I always think about the Christmas season, the happiest time on the calendar, right? And it often turns out to be the worst time for families, right? They have big fights and misunderstandings and it's because the expectations are so high and they're beyond our control. We didn't know Uncle Bob was going to come in and start talking about politics and divide the family over the dinner table and, you know, whatever. So how do you adjust to things beyond your control? What is a red flag that people mistake as a positive one? Well, you're really hung up on these red flags, aren't you, Bruce? Red flag. You know why I'm so hung up on it is because every time I see even just general dating stuff online, it's always red flag this, red flag this, red flag like it's a red flag if someone does blank. I'm like, okay, like that is just the dumbest thing I've ever seen. So I'm like, what is someone, I saw this comedian a little while ago and she said, I was raised in a red flag factory and we just had furls of fabric that were all red flags. I mean, there's just all red that all we did was make red flags out. But all right. So what's your question about so-and-so red flags? What is a red flag that people mistake as a positive flag when they're dating someone? Well, this is maybe surfacy but little quirks that are endearing, the things that endear for us to each other. early on become the things that irritate us later. What do you mean by that? I have a friend who likes to say this little funny thing says, "What is now will be then only more so?" And so you have somebody and what's an example? Oh, he just, I don't know. He crunches his eyes when he drinks. He just loves crunching his eyes. And I don't know why. I just find that so you're so special or whatever. There's just all this romantic because it's all surrounded by hormones. And then after a little while, you just can't stand that he crunches his eyes when he drinks a, you know, his diet coke or whatever. So the things that endear us sometimes become those very things that push us away. It's, here's the stage that we go through. And this is based on a lot of deep research. We idealize whatever that thing is. You've idealized Maddie. And you've idealized marriage. We all do. You idealize. And then you monsterize. If she does that, what else has she been hiding from me, right? Can you think of anything in your marriage early on? You've been married nine months. Nine months, yes, so long. That's so much history. So in nine months, what about married life has turned out not to be what you expected. What is it about Maddie that he went, oh, I didn't know she was going to need this. I didn't know that we were going to have to do this as a couple. You know, I don't know. I feel like it was so many. And I had like a different maybe unconventional start to marriage because we knew that we had tons of travel and tons of ministry. And so it wasn't like we didn't have the traditional like, oh, after we come back from the honeymoon, like we go back to the apartment and we start decorating. And it's like, well, we didn't even have a place. Yeah. And then we got a place. And then we started traveling again. And then we did this and then we did that. Let me help you. When you guys are in, you're going out someplace that she take longer to get ready than you. Yeah. So I started telling her we needed to leave 15 minutes before we actually had just had to had to leave. Is that something you planned on doing before you got married? No, no, no, no. Because I want you were talking about earlier. I was raised where we always got places early, left early, even even though my mom typically was the last person out the door. Right. Okay. Has there been any kind of quirky thing with Maddie where she just says a lot of emotion about something or anxiety about something you didn't expect? It could be something about you picking her up on time. It could be something about how you do your food for dinner. It could be how you choose is what movie you're going to watch on Netflix, whatever. Any quirky things? I think, okay, wait, I know something that I think I do that's quirky that maybe it's on her nerves. Sometimes I'll like just start like acting like crazy, you know, like goofy crazy. I'll just start making crazy faces and noises. Right. At first, it was funny. And then now like I can tell it kind of a noise. Wait, you didn't do this before you got married? No, no, I did. I did. Okay. Because that'd be really weird. Yeah, yeah, it would be really weird if I didn't do it before. No, I did. We're like at first, it was like kind of funny. But then again, you know, you're like warming up to each other, then you do it more and more and more. And then now I do it. Like Maddie still thinks it's funny. Right. But then there are sometimes where it's like maybe not as funny and more like, you know, that obviously that's like a quirky thing. Two weeks ago, I was speaking in San Jose. Leslie and I were at a couple of things at a fight night. And we went to in and out. And they had a guy that was driving us. And then I had my, my board chair kind of manage a guy there with us. Yeah. And so we're in and out. And our lesson always joke when we're speaking because I always go, how are we going to start? How are we going to start? Like like like a little like many panic attack. What are we going to do to start? You know, and but we always start the same way. And I said, I want to shake it up. She goes, what do you mean? I said, I don't know. I'm just going to do something different tonight. And I stood up in the restaurant. And I just started being really weird. Just like like slow dancing. There's no music or anything. But just kind of, you know, doing some weird stuff. And it just blasted up Rangie, my friend that was there with us. And then the driver who was at a different table, you looked over like that. And then he just started dying laughing. And I said, I'm going to start doing that. Well, nobody thought I would really get up and stage and do that. But I did. And it was so awkward. It was incredible. Incredibly. Everyone's staring at me. They're just like looking at me. And then and then I kind of go like that. And then there's a couple people stood up in the audience. I started doing it with me. And then some more people. And then it became this thing. And I said, are you guys feeling it? You guys feel it? And they're like, yeah, I said, well, it is it. And then I said, it's weirdness. This is one weirdness. So I don't know why I told it. I guess when you said you got weird just after you got married and then it bothers her. But that that that idea, that little quirky thing, okay? It might have endeared her to you before you got married. And then you get married and like, could be in such a clown or whatever the thing is, right? And so you idealize and then you master size and go, I didn't know he's going to be like this, all right? And then as you mature, you realize those are the three phases of anything that typically tends to irritate us in relationship. We idealize it at the beginning. And then we yeah, we idealize it. And then we master size it because we think, oh my goodness, this is, this is terrible. What else is going on? And then we begin to mature and realize it. I know we've talked a lot about the red flags, but we think this is the red flag interview of my red flag. What I never had someone asked me more questions about red flags than price. Hey, well, there's a first for everything. So what are the green flags that that people should be looking for specifically that are maybe just, you know, so I know our audience is largely Christian. So maybe excluding just like the Christian. Well, no, let's talk about that for a second, because I think there's a big misnomer on how we relate to God in marriage. There's a lot of missteps on that. And it's the last chapter of saving your marriage before it starts. And I think that this, this is, this is something that so many Christians like, like, do you got, do you and Maddie have like a spiritual routine with each other? Maybe that you even talked about before you got married. Hey, we'll pray before we go to bed every night or we'll read through the Bible. So I would say the biggest spiritual routine that Maddie and I have is that we do these marriage meetings, marriage meetings typically once a week, where we talk about how we feel about our marriage physically, emotionally and spiritually each of us. And then after that, we talk about three ways we've each been a blessing to each other that week leading up to that. Okay. And then what is one way we can, we can be a blessing to each other, the upcoming. Oh, this is a big meeting. It's a big meeting. It's a big, big agenda there. Big meeting. I love it. That's awesome. So you do that once a week? We try to. Yeah. So I have noticed that just since we started implementing this, like, let's say like, like this, this is, I think one of the reasons why like we had a minor conflict last night and maybe we're bumping heads more frequently at the past couple of weeks is because we miss two weeks of those meetings because of travel and schedule and busyness. And then, then maybe we just had some minor pent up things that we haven't communicated in. Like that for us is like our big communication point. Not that we don't communicate outside of it. But that is such a big place or like, one way I can be a blessing to her. It's a nice way for telling me, hey, this is something I want you to do that you have it done, you know, and it's such a nicer way to be like, okay, like, you know, I'll go do that thing or I'll be better in that way. So that is probably the biggest spiritual routine. So a lot of people that follow Jesus think we'll get married and we'll do, you know, have some spiritual journey together that we share, which obviously we want. But so many times, the way one person feels closest to God is not the way another person feels closest to God. So Leslie is a, my Leslie is a contemplative. She is. Yeah, when you say Leslie, I'm thinking of of your granddad, your dad, you know, I'm like, which one would you want? Land over what your granddad popped my brain when you said that is. We open each other's mail and Christmas presents. Yeah, that must be hard. It's a painful thing. But, you know, Leslie will just, you know, she just loves, she's contemplative. Like, I came out this morning because I had to get up early to come down here. Thank you. And I'm not usually a morning person. And so I came out and there she is, had two or three Bibles and books and I said, do you relate? Are you with God? And she goes, yeah, I'm with God and is kind of an inside joke. And the reason it's inside joke is early on when we got married, I'm not contemplative at all. And I'm more intellectual in my faith. And so I like to talk about construct, let's talk about grace and what goes into grace and, you know, that kind of stuff. Yeah, I love doing that. Leslie is much more contemplative. And so anyway, when we first got married, she would go off to Starbucks or something and take her Bible and her journal and a prayer guide or something and she'd be gone for hours. like two, three hours. And she'd come home and go, "Where are you been?" She goes, "Oh, just been with God." Like, "What have you guys been doing?" I mean, that's a long time to be gone. And, you know, for me, it just didn't, it just didn't compute. And I tried to convert her more to my pathway toward God. And I wouldn't say she was trying to convert me to hers, but she, we all think our pathway is the best. That's the real way to relate to God. You know, if you relate to God in social settings, you know, everybody should be in a small group, or if you relate to God in nature, everybody should be out in, you know, creation and so forth. There's all kinds of some relate, feel closest to God when they're an activist and involved in, you know, whatever. So you find your sacred pathway. And what I highly recommend, and Gary Thomas, a friend of mine, who wrote a book called Sacred Pathways, he says, and I so believe this, "Respect what your spouses or your friends sacred pathway is to God." And hopefully they do the same for you. And then create a new sacred pathway together. So, for Leslie, I mean, it was worship. And we've really leaned into worship together. Like, that is a way that both you guys, yeah. Wow. But on our own, neither of us are kind of hardwired to do that just individually. Interesting. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. So I just want to bring that up because so many people feel, I remember we thought we were going to read through the Bible together. Somebody gave us a one-year Bible. Yeah. And we were going to have devotions every day. Yeah. And by the way, our latest book that you were so gracious to put behind me, the positive mental health devotional. It's a one-year devotional. And Leslie and I thought, well, we're going to do a one-year Bible and read through that. I think we got through the first four chapters of Genesis before we gave up on that because we just couldn't, you know, it was like, you read first because I'm going to start fall asleep while you're reading it. Yes. So, well, let me add you a nuance to that question. Specifically, more on the dating side of things. I hear mix, a mixed bag on whether people think it's okay to pray together as a dating couple. Specifically, like praying together and then reading your Bible together as a dating couple. Do you think that's completely inappropriate for dating couples to do that? Or do you think it's okay? Most definitely okay. Why do you think so? Well, the argument is that it's creating intimacy. And you shouldn't have that. But remember, love is passion, biological intimacy is emotional. Right? Yeah. And you can have emotional intimacy without if the goal is, oh, we shouldn't do that because then we're going to want to have sex because we just had this great spiritual experience. That's just, I just don't, do you buy into that? No, no, no, I personally don't buy into that. I just see the mix bag online and I always, which is like, I'm like, okay, look, if you have a personal conviction, we're like, for you, you can't pray with the person you're doing. Well, I'm like, that's totally fine. Yeah, that's your thing. I just think that the reason why I was so pumped to sit down with you, because I think that relationship advice, particularly online, is so like, this is what worked for me, so it has to work for you. And if it doesn't work for you, then there's a user error on your side of the problem. And I'm like, oh, my gosh. Like a narcissistic later approach. You know, speaking of statistics, are there any statistics that couples that fart in front of each other pre-marriage? Do they last longer? That is something I've never studied. You know, I'll be asking another research for that question. So I'm planting that one in your and your, you know, I've always heard that, you know, like that you, if you don't fart, if you fart in front of someone like a level of comfortability, I don't know, I don't know if that was a thing. That's a personality thing. But you're, you're the whole idea of if we, if we walk a spiritual walk together, that it's too intimate, so we shouldn't be doing that. I think just so counterintuitive to and counterproductive to the kind of relationship that you want to have, a god-honored relationship, why wouldn't you do that right from the start? Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. So I've been excited about this particular question. And I know we've kind of like talked a little bit about it. Is this the sex question? This is actually not the sex question. But we will get there. We will get there. How long is this interview? Well, I get, it's my first time, but Dr. Les, I gotta get as much out of you as possible. So the fighting, the fighting portion, and the reason why I wanted to talk about it, I know I mentioned this to you on the phone, but when I first became a Christian, I had met a preacher guy who was married almost 10 years, had kids who'd said he'd never gotten in an argument with his wife for the moment they met dating, gauge marriage, even up to that point. And so for me, I thought that like, okay, well, successful marriage relationship was, yeah, you don't fight. The goal is not to fight. Right. And then when Maddie and I had our first disagreement fight, whatever you want to call it, I felt so much shame. Really? Yeah. And even now, sometimes I do feel shame. It is such an awkward thing for me to talk about because for some reason, and that was such a small blimp on the radar and moments and conversations I've had in my life. But that thing, just like, I carry so much shame on if I, you know, if Maddie and I get a disagreement or something like that because it makes me feel like, oh, I'm doing something wrong because we have an argument or have a disagreement or whatever it may be. I guess, you know, my question is how can disagreements make a relationship stronger? Yeah, instead of weaker. Yeah. Like I said earlier, conflict, I think, is the price we pay for deeper intimacy if you know how to fight a good fight. Right. Yeah. And so you got to develop the skills for doing that. Empathy is a big one. But the, the, the whole point of it is not to avoid conflict. It's, because conflict's going to find you. It's just inevitable. There's a very, very small percentage of the population that doesn't have fights. I mean, just like a little tiny thing if you had a big pie chart. And it's because of their personalities and their, their peacemakers. Yeah. Two peacemakers got married together and they don't want to have fights. Well, guess what? There's a bunch of stuff rumbling underneath the surface and those relationships that needs to be talked about because it's coming out in weird ways. I have, you know, when you repress stuff, it has a high rate of resurrection, man. It is going to come out because there's wounds there and you step on that wound and you don't even know why, why is she freaking out? Because you stepped on a wound that the two of you haven't talked about yet. And so conflict is really a valuable thing. There's a researcher. His name is John Gottman. He happens to live up in Seattle where I do. And he's all smart guys live in Seattle. Yeah. All the marriage, all the really smart marriage people live in Seattle. Just come to our city. Yeah. I won't go off on that jagged. But he, he, he's done more yoga and work, more incredible work on conflict than anybody else on the planet. And he can predict and he has a thing called the love lab. And I've been in it. It's at the University of Washington. He's retired now. But the love lab. And you'd have these couples come in. And it would do you like any other day for them. They'd be there all day. But they'd be have little cameras on them. And there'd be a team of psychologists behind this mirror looking at the videos and stuff and real, you know, in real time. And noting every time certain things kind of happened in their interactions. And they were given tasks to do build a tower out of this paper and stuff like that. But then they were hooked up to all this biofeedback equipment. So they're, there's galvanic skin response. How sweaty their palms get their, how tense their forehead is their heart rate and all that kind of stuff was being measured. Yeah. Well, they solely on how they fight. Not whether they fight. Not how often they fight. Not what they're fighting about. But how they fight. And he found what he calls these four horsemen of the apocalypse. And those are the four things that you want to avoid in relationship. And it all starts with just something some criticism. Every conflict begins with the critical comment. Hey, you didn't ever do the the shelves. You said you were going to put up. And then she added on to that. I thought you were a man of God. Is that what she said? Oh, no, no, no. She was just like, uh, I want you to be a man of your work. Because I didn't tell her I was a word. I did tell her I was going to do it. I said, I was going to do the shelves. And I forgot. She's like, I want you to be a man of your work. But still. Yeah. Let's get in there. Yeah. So, but, but it starts with that you heard that no doubt as a criticism. Yeah. She's criticizing me for not doing that. And criticism then will lead to, um, if you're not careful, contempt and contempt is where it begins to get to a character assassination, which is what she was bumping up against. I want you to be a man of your word. That's questioning your character. That's not just that you forgot to do something, right? I'm not, I'm not harsh on Maddie. This is all of us do this. Yeah. And, uh, and then we, we get to stonewalling. Uh, I think I missed, did I say defensiveness? Oh, no, no, no. You said, uh, you went from criticism criticism and then defensiveness. Yep. which is only natural. put up your shield. Yeah, I'm going to get to it. Relax or whatever you said, right? And then so criticism, defensiveness, and then contempt. And we should pass laws in Congress against contempt and marriage. It's so toxic. It's so lethal. You know, we're to go genius, regular Einstein, you know, that kind of stuff. That is so toxic. It just tears at somebody's character. And then the last is stonewalling where you just if you don't leave physically, you leave emotionally, you just shut down and comes off as rejection, comes off as apathy. And those are the four things that we want to avoid in conflict because if all he knows, if Dr. Gottman, if all he knows is that that's what's going on in relationship, he can tell you whether or not this relationship is not incredible. 93% accuracy rate. And I've seen him do it. I've been in a love lab. It's incredible. So what is the difference between a good fight and a bad fight? Well, you got to recognize, first of all, what happens? You know, why does a fight happen? It's all about differing perceptions. You had a perception of when those shelves are going to be built. She had a perception when they're going to get built, right? And it's because we have different experiences of time. I'll do it after a while. It was after a while, three months or three minutes, right? Everything is up for interpretation. And so we have the, you know, we project stuff on each other and all kinds of stuff. So understand why it happens. That's why it's inevitable. But then what do you do to have a good fight? Know how God designed you? We all manage conflict uniquely. And some of us are very much talkers. We want to process it. And others are not. I'm getting the sense. I haven't met Maddie, but I'm getting said she may not be a processor. She's going to think about it and come back to you. Yeah. Maddie leans more on the processing side. I lean more on the talking side, but one is not right or wrong. It's different. There's their personalities, right? And then the other dimension to consider when thinking about how to have a good fight is how you are kind of hardwired for being open to other people's input. In other words, do you have like, we all have agendas, right? You have an agenda about what you're going to do after this interview ends. You have an agenda about dinner tonight. Agendas about what vacation looks like, what your next event looks like. You have a genders, right? And so to set that set, whatever agenda is, you have a side is a real sign of maturity because most of us are obsessed with our own little agendas. But some people are much more flexible with that. Others have their agenda. This is how things should be done. And this is how we're going to do it. Whereas other people, yeah, I'm open to it. Whatever you think, right? Where you are on expressiveness or you want to process it now or you want to kind of keep it and just do it internally, that will determine your fight type. And that's a really important awareness narrative, a really important thing. It's kind of like putting that handle on the hot teapot. Oh, I get it. You're that cut. You're a competitive fighter, which is what I am. If you want to fight, let's go. I'm not shy. I'm not I'm not afraid of conflict. Bring it on. Leslie, not so much, right? She is she's she wants to process it. She wants to be heard. She wants to be seen in it. But she's not looking for fights. That's for sure. Okay. And so understanding that, Leslie and I wrote a book called The Good Fight when we talk about these four fight types. So if you're interested, you go look into that. But that's that's probably the single most important thing in my opinion for learning how to fight a good fight is know how your hardwired to manage conflict. Because that gives you empathy for how your partner is hardwired to. So what's going on internally with a couple if they keep having the same argument over and over and over again? Yeah. Well, that's called a script. And it's just like a script in a play. We just keep putting on the same play. I told you not to put your your shoes over there. And by the way, thanks for the shoes again. Hey, of course, those I don't know. You gave me a beautiful pair of tennis shoes. I just had to mention it. Give me some props. But but that that script, you don't put your shoes away. And every night, they just seem to go through that. What's what's happening there is that that there's some unspoken kind of ritual that is accomplishing something for them. And that's a deeper thing. I mean, Paging Dr. Freud. This is time to get deep. But you got to look at why would we keep having the same fight over and over. And it might have something to do from their family of origin or some wound that you have or whatever. But it's probably some tenderness that's in there. And you're you can even be testing, you know, like they would never even be conscious. Well, I put my shoes there to see if you'd ever pick them up for me just because you're a loving person and put them away for me, you know, whatever. They're not going to be consciously thinking about that. But you know, you want to do a deep dive on what's happening. Is there is there? So the typical even just argument advice show is here is, is you never say, you know, you are that you never do the definite claims about people like you were this or you always, I've always heard the typical. It hurts me or like, I feel like this when you do blank. Like does that make sense? Like instead of saying like, you always do this thing or you are this thing. It's like, you always and you never those declarative statements that that's when we get to care to character assassination. That's contempt, right? Is that the thing? You're always late. You never show up on time. Those are the things you never say in argument. You don't want to be. It doesn't it won't serve you well. It just instantly increases defensiveness. Has anybody ever had an argument where by getting more defensive, they won? No, right? And so you have to have to recognize that when you say those really kind of declarative, big sweeping statements, you're always you never, right? It's going to cause defensiveness. So how do you bring something up then? If you know, it's going to start a fight. Yeah. If you have a tender topic, what you want to do is, first of all, make sure that you are rested. Both of you are rested that you're not hungry and you're not preoccupied by something else, some big deadline or something. Statistics just say that increases the chance that that argument you want to be at your best. Yeah. If you have something heavy to process, right? And then the next thing you want to do is give them a little bit of an on ramp to it. Yeah. Hey, I got something on my mind and it's it's something that deserves some of our attention. I don't know if this is a good time for you to do that or not, but it's a tender topic for me. And I feel like I just I want you to know how I'm feeling about something. Yeah. And if you're hardwired like Bryce, you're going to go, what is it? Yeah. Right. And it might be, you know, for Maddie, she's going to say, yeah, but this isn't the best time. But I want to talk about with you later. Yeah. Whatever. So just give them a little bit of an on ramp to it. And then when you do get into it, the third thing I'd suggest is that you are just talking about you. Like it'd be easier if we had a real exit. Do you have something on your mind that you want to that's like that? Not mean not necessarily. Okay. But if if there was something, you would just talk about how it's relating to you and how you're feeling about it. Instead of projecting on to them, how there are a problem about it. Yeah. Hey, when you when you keep showing up late to to pick up our kids after school, I just want you to know, my heart, I just like have this incredible anxiety every time you're picking them up. And I know you're busy and blah, blah, blah. But for me, blah, blah, blah. And just get what you're doing really is helping them empathize with you and to see it from your perspective. So you mentioned it earlier. The hard questions. Even just notoriously hearing about relationships. People would always say, you need to have an intimacy conversation, a money conversation, how many vacations, conversation like these specific conversations. And this is an area that I really failed in as in like trying to lead Maddie and I in our engagement season going into marriage. And it's not because I didn't want to have those conversations. It was because I didn't know what specifically to ask. And I would hear people say this all the time. And I would say, well, what is the money conversation? The money conference, you just have the money conversation. I'm like, yeah, but what is that conversation? They'd be like, you know, you talk about money. Yeah. But and I read books and try to search stuff up. And it wasn't until after we got married, I'm going to use money as an example. Like our money conversation went, well, what do you think about money? It's like, well, I don't really care about it. Oh, yeah, me either. Okay, cool. Yeah. And then we just started creating a budget. And we just started going, okay, well, we disagree on maybe how much money we should spend on groceries and how much money or how many vacations, those kind of things. And I was like, whoa, okay. So that's kind of what it look like. So I guess like when it's specifically let's talk money first like what kinds of specific questions should couples be asking each other when it comes to finances in hopes of marriage? So you know that sometimes I do some speaking with my pal Dave Ramsey who's a money guru with the smartest guys I've ever met on money and I just so buy into his philosophy of living debt-free and so he often would say when we're in front of a big group of people that most couples don't have money problems. You have marriage problems that are seen through money, all right? So what does he mean by that? It has to do with how you relate to each other. Your relationship can only be as healthy as you, right? And that's certainly true when it comes to talking about marriage. I mean talking about money and so money is a source of conflict because it represents control in a relationship and some people are very comfortable with other people controlling them and some aren't and it may depend on the day but money always represents control. And so that means you need to understand each other's relationship to money. There's a relationship there. In your home growing up, how would you finish this sentence? In your home growing up, money was, money was not something stressed about but was stewarded and given generously, okay? All right. That tells me a whole lot about you and your relationship with money. Do you have any idea how man he would finish that sentence? I do know how man I would you get. Yeah. Maddie's and money was something that was stewarded extremely down to the tee, down to the penny, like very careful how it was meant. Okay. All right. So understanding you're, we all grow up with a relationship with money, intentional or not. So understanding that narrative that I have about money is really important in, in explaining my style with it. Can you see how much of what I say comes back to empathy? Yep. Yeah. The secret sauce for relationships. It really is. It really is. And so seeing that, I had a friend, he's a professional football player and he got stuck in a snow storm in Dallas at his wife's parents' home with her for an extended period of time. And so just for entertainment, they started bringing out old movies of the family and they started washing it. And he said, I saw my wife as a little one from a baby to a toddler to a little kid in grade school. And I'd never even given much thought to what she was like as a little kid. And he said just seeing her progression, right? Yeah. It really changed how I related to her. Yeah. And so we need to go back when it comes to important topics like money and understand what was that like in your home growing up like that. And then the next thing is to recognize what is it that you're, what's the main driver for money for you? Is it security? Is it freedom? There's lots of different reasons that were motivated by money. And so understanding your motivation for that. And there's a good chance to be different. And then you want to get to the practice stuff that you've already mentioned having a budget, right? What kind of car? How many? Yeah. Yeah. Do we live beyond our means? Do we believe in credit cards? Do we, you know, whatever? And so that, it's the number one source of conflict and marriage because it represents control. So it's worth getting control of your money. So you're controlling it instead of the other way around. And that kind of conversation is not just one and done. This is a conversation you continually have. Lastly, and I, at this stage and our relationship, we're just, we've had major conversations about generosity over the last couple of months together, really pragmatic stuff and really exciting to us about how we can be more generous at this stage of our life. And so I just think money is, is, you know, there's that little phrase, money talks. And so can we? You got to talk about money all the time. I know sex is like so awkward for some reason for people, which I don't, I mean, I don't think it should be awkward because it was a gift from God, but again, the confunds of marriage. What is something about sex and intimacy that surprises couples after they get married? But they don't talk about it. Hmm. What do you mean? It's just they're afraid to talk about it. It feels personal. It feels invasive. It feels hurtful. It feels like I could embarrass you or me. And so they stop talking. When you say talking about it, like you mean talking about, like what, what do I, what do I like and frequency and, and where and just all the details of what's your fantasy life like? That's a scary question to ask your spouse. You know, what kind of damages have you seen pornography due to married couples? You probably know the research on this. It rewires your brain in so many different ways and just read, jiggers your expectations. And it's a toxin in so many ways to creating some really bizarre kinks and stuff and relationship and a marriage relationship. And that's what happens when you don't talk about it. And I can't tell you every week in our offices, we get painful, you know, inquiries mostly from women, from wives that just say, I just discovered my husband's been addicted to pornography and explained so much of our own intimacy problems and all that kind of stuff. I think we're going to see that with AI too. Well, that was, that was my next question. That was how, how do you think AI and modern technology will impact dating and marriage in the coming years? Yeah. What it already does is we know. And so it, we're all hardwired for intimacy. Yeah. We all want to be connected. Yeah. And if you're not finding that in your marriage, you're going to go find that somewhere else. Yeah, true. And so it can be with another person, it can be with an activity, it can be some obsession, it can be sports, it can be your, your computer, your phone. Yeah. That's so far. I've been, I've been using that in sermons lately about how like, in TLC used to have a show called My Strange Addiction. There was a dude who had a romantic relationship with this car. Right. And everyone thought that was weird. I mean, that's why he was on the show. Right. And then now people have romantic relationships with AI. Yeah. So the car doesn't seem as crazy. Right. But the issue is the same for like both of those people, which actually, so we have some members, one of our members, Alejandra watched her parents marriage fall apart after years of them being best friends. And she's afraid the same thing could actually happen to her. And what would you say to her? And what can couples do to keep a strong marriage from drifting apart? Well, I'm going to come back to Broken Record Intention. Your marriage will sink or swim based on how intentional you are around it. If you think you can just put this thing in autopilot and it's just self-driving, you're going to have problems. So you mean that isn't like, I know a lot of people think that like marriage is the finish line. And that's what you mean. Is that that's literally what you mean? Yeah. It's like, I check the box. Yeah. We're in love. And God's with us. So hey, we're all good. Yeah. That's why that I was telling you, I don't know if you know if I finished my paragraph with you a long ago when we were talking about Oklahoma and the buckle of bio, but you just thought, I'm with God. I don't, you know, we should just be okay. But you need to continually, if you have something that matters to you, something, some hobby or something, you're continually studying it. If you're into history, you're can you just like, oh, there's new book on history. I got to learn new documentary. You know, whatever, you're going to use psychology. Yes. Exactly. So you're passionate about those things. So you've got to be passionate about your relationship. In other words, continue to learn about it. Celebrate your successes. Let me just say this, right? This is the greatest relationship God ever gave us is marriage. It's incredible. It's just the best relationship. You become a better person. You live longer. You have a healthier lifestyle. There's all these side effects to marriage that happen to people, you know, fewer diseases and all kinds of things. So if you've been honored with a relationship from God and you have this incredible gift called marriage, treasure it, take care of it. Don't just think this can be on autopilot and you're going to be fine. It's not. So that means learning communication skills, what works for the two of you and managing conflict, because that's inevitable and understanding conflict. And just on down the list, all the things, money, management, all the rest, spiritual intimacy, physical intimacy, they all take intention. So spiritual warfare was something I briefly wanted to hit on with you. And the reason I'm bringing it up is, so we just did some college campus debates. We did four. We're going to do five. One of them got canceled. And then day before I'm leaving, for the very first one, I remember Maddie and I were on our way home from church and we just disagreed over literally the most random thing. You and Maddie? Yes. Okay. And it turned into like a big, big argument. And for the whole drive home, like 30 something minutes home from church, just that's the LA drive to church, 30 something minutes. We're driving back and it's just disagreement after disagreement. And I'm upset and she's upset over the smallest thing. And then right when we put it. pulled in the driveway, I went, wait a second. We're getting upset about the dumbest thing right now. And Maddie knows I'm about to be gone. She's going to be doing other stuff. I'm about to be doing something else. Like, I really think, and it was something major. We never stepped out into the debate thing. There was a lot of fear and anxiety about it. So I was like, well, we think that I was like, I just stopped. I said, Maddie, you know, I'm not trying to disregard how you feel, how I feel, what's going on here. I just, I don't think it's a coincidence that we're disagreeing right now as I'm literally about to go leave, to get on a plane and go do the singing. You're going to go do this other stuff. And she was kind of like, whoa, yeah. Like I think that's kind of interesting. And we were just able to pray. And that was like, that was it. I thought that was interesting. And I'm not really the kind of guy to just immediately be like, all spiritual warfare, spiritual warfare. But in that moment, it just felt like, wow, Satan's really trying to get in between us. When we talk about like spiritual warfare and marriages, dating relationships, things like that, what does that actually look like in a marriage? So I don't use spiritual warfare language very often. And I don't spiritualize things too much. And part of the reason for that is I believe it reduces our agency that the Holy Spirit being able to do something through us and inviting the Holy Spirit to do that. That doesn't mean I discount it or look down on that. And I do believe that exists. And I'll be I'll shoot straight with you. Leslie and I, we don't fight. I mean, we hardly ever fight these days. We've been at this a long time. But we had a fight last night before I came down to it. There was the stupidest fight that I can remember us having. She came home. She was speaking to the thing for women in Seattle. And I was at home and I was working on a project. Oh, I was actually working on a Bible project. I have been working for the last three years on this Bible project. It's a positive mental health Bible. And so I've written commentary going through all the scriptures. It's been a huge, huge project in my life. So here I am doing Bible stuff. And Leslie comes home and she walks into my study down the hallway, library hall, comes into my office. And I get up and I hug her. And she goes, give me a minute and I'll connect with you. And so I go back and I'm finishing my thoughts. Now there's two kinds of if you're people oriented, you can interrupt anything for another person. If you're task oriented, you want to finish your little task. You'd be fully present for the person. So I was in the middle. I just needed five minutes. I got to finish this little paragraph. I'm on my heads in it. I don't want to lose it. And so she comes, she comes out and she just walks back in. And as she walks back into my office, I said, I'll be out there in one minute. Because I knew if she was in there, she'd get her feeling sort of if we weren't talking. I'm just still writing. And so she laughed. And then she started to just go to bed. And it's like it's at 10 o'clock at night. And I said, I said, where are you going? She goes to bed. So did you not going to say anything to me? She goes, I know you need to finish your thing. I said, it's five minutes. And it was just like became this thing all of a sudden that was so stupid, right? I don't immediately go to, oh, that's spiritual warfare. I go to, oh, that was a colossal breakdown in communication and some assumptions that went on. And we can do something about that rather than kind of going, no, what's the devil doing here? So how do you think Satan gets in between husbands and wives? Then, well, I tend to, whenever something significant is happening in the kingdom of God, I think that those dark forces try to interfere with it. And it's easy to do with us humans. And so I think any time you're trying to do something big, I think that that happens. And that's when I tend to pay more attention to the kind of spiritual. We're doing this, this Idaho marriage initiative right now with the governor of Idaho. That's one of the highest of horse rates in the country. Idaho does. And a plummeting marriage rate. And so we're doing a lot of work there. And so I was talking to some people in Idaho just not too long ago that have stepped up financially in a big way. You know, it's multi-million dollar project. And I just realized, man, there's such friction on the team right now. And I think whenever something is happening that's significant and big, those dark forces come about. So, you know, what you did is what I would recommend. Pray, pray about it, pray through. I honestly suggest because I just said that don't ever use prayer as a weapon in your marriage, like you're in the middle of conflict. And so it's like, well, we just need to pray about this right now. Yeah. You're like, I'm the sanctimonious person here. Let me bring you into the presence of God here. You know what I'm saying? Yes. No, no, that makes sense. I give you a minute. It's like, don't, yeah. Don't be like condescending about the prayer. So that's what I mean about just over-spiritualizing. I bathe our relationship in prayer. And let's say I enjoy that and we pray for our kids and everything else. But there is a, I've seen people do that. I've seen good, I've seen pastors do that. And it's just like, what are you doing, man? Well, I'd love for you to pray for everyone just as they're navigating marriages, relationships. I know there's a ton of people that are waiting for God to bring them their person. So, you know, you got to pray. It got to send someone their way. You know, all that. But I would just love for you to pray for everyone. I'm going to pray that God doesn't just send it their way, but they're out there on the hunt. Look at the person too. Amen. All right. Let's pray. Father, thanks for this incredible opportunity to be in front of this microphone with Bryce here. And just to feel your presence as we talk together. And for everybody that's tuned in, that's watching and listening, I would just first of all pray that they would feel your love in this very hour, in this very minute, that they would feel that. And that you would show us the pathway to love other people more effectively, not just in the romantic sense, but in all the ways that you describe. And it's hard, you know. So we just ask your Holy Spirit to help us do that. And help us to remember that we have the Holy Spirit as a friend to help us do that. And then for that person that's out there struggling, they've listened to this whole interview and they're going, man, I just want to find the love of my life. I'm like feeling the pain on that. I would just ask a double portion of your peace on them right now that you would give them that sense of peace that you will reveal things in your timing for them in the path they need to take. Give them the discipline to be the best version of themselves that they can be as they're waiting. And we just pray for those people that are already in a relationship that they might have been thinking as we've gone through some of this. I need to be more god-honoring in this relationship. And just pray that the Holy Spirit would empower them to do just that. Father, we love you and help us to love the people around us and your Holy Name we pray. Amen. Amen.