FamilyLife Today®

Danielle Taylor: I definitely think that you have to speak up. You have to speak up. I don't want to sound cliché that a closed mouth doesn't get fed, but it's causing the marriage to implode. It causes your spirit to implode. Nobody has to know anything, but you owe it to yourself and to your family that's watching you. They need you to stay together. They need you guys to figure it out.

I think that it's important to first bring in Christ and pray about it, but then secondly, within your level of comfort, reach out to somebody.

Dave Wilson: Welcome to FamilyLife Today where we want to help you pursue the relationships that matter most. I'm Dave Wilson.

Ann Wilson: And I'm Ann Wilson. You can find us at familylifetoday.com. This is FamilyLife Today.

Dave Wilson: All right, May 17th, 1980. A week before our wedding. No, it was May 10th, 1980. Two weeks before our wedding we go to the FamilyLife Weekend to Remember because we were told you can't get married until you know God's plan for marriage and they're going to teach you that that weekend. Here I want to ask you, don't look at your notes, and we've taught it now for 30 years. But back then we taught God's purpose for marriage is three M's.

Ann Wilson: I thought it was M, I thought it was R. Mirror God's image. Mirror God's image.

Dave Wilson: The three M's are no longer the three M's because now we teach it a little different, same concept. But back then we said from God's word, the purpose of marriage is to mirror God's image, to reflect to the world who Jesus is. To mutually complete one another, to sharpen one another to become like Christ, and then to multiply a godly legacy.

Ann Wilson: I got two out of three. That's not too bad. You used to give that talk more than I did.

Dave Wilson: I gave it more than you did so I should know better. But anyway, we've got Howard and Danielle Taylor in the studio. You guys have a whole workbook on the purposes of marriage. It's called The Fundamentals of Marriage: 80 Essential Practices of Successful Couples. I feel like you have that same passion that we have, that marriage matters.

Ann Wilson: Absolutely. We need to know why God instituted marriage. You have two boys and a ministry called Marriage on Deck. What is that?

Howard Taylor: Marriage on Deck is birthed out of our desire to mitigate divorce. We started seeing what we call carnage around us. We're going along in our marriage and all of a sudden we see a friend get a divorce, a cousin get a divorce, a family member get a divorce and we're just like, "What is going on?"

Opposed to just sitting back on the defensive, we said it's time for us to go on the offensive and do something about it. That looked like sharing our testimony of why we felt very passionately about our own marriage and some of the principles that we're using to sustain what we felt was a healthy marriage. A lot of that was biblically based, so it was helping couples get married and stay married using biblical principles. That's the pitch behind it.

Dave Wilson: Now what's "On Deck" mean? Part of me went to baseball.

Danielle Taylor: We talked about this because he said on deck means that you're up to bat. And so we're like, maybe Marriage on Deck could be for people who are up to getting married or to me, taking the baseball out of it, your marriage is up. It's on the forefront. It's on top. It's here and it's in the present. So if you're already married or if you're going to get married, we want to encourage you and uplift you in your relationship.

Ann Wilson: Share your story a little bit with us, how you guys met and how this came about.

Danielle Taylor: Howard and I met in 2001 at Cal State Fullerton. I met him at a Bible study. I came in late with my friend, not because I wanted to be late, but because we were coming all the way from Rialto. So we came in late, I sat in the back and as I was sitting in the Bible study, I realized there's this guy in the front answering all the questions.

Ann Wilson: Oh, you didn't think, "Who's that cute guy?" You thought, "Who's that smart guy?"

Danielle Taylor: Who's the guy that knows the word of God? We were 18 and 19, but I was so impressed. I was newly saved two years, I was teaching Sunday school at church and so I was like, "Wow, this guy has a good command of the word." Then our teacher was telling us to turn here and he knew exactly where the books were at. It was impressive to me. I was like, "Okay, I need to see what he looks like." So then I got a chance to see what he looks like and I said, "Oh, he looks good. I need to get closer to him."

Howard Taylor: True story, when she came in late, I noticed her hair. It's so funny that off-air you were talking about her hair. I thought, "Wow, that's a pretty girl," and I noticed her hair. I have a fraternal twin who had introduced me to her in what we would call the quad section of our college campus. As twin boys, if your brother introduces you to a young lady, you pay zero attention. So I didn't realize I met her before.

But I noticed her come in late and I said, "This is a pretty young lady." In that session, Danielle's noticing me and I noticed her. After the fact, I told myself I'm going to speak to that young lady after the Bible study. Like a church kid would, unlike Danielle, I was raised in the church and so I had my highlighter and my little notes. I approached her and we sparked up conversation and I basically said, "If you want to call me sometime."

Ann Wilson: Wait a minute. "If you want to call me sometime."

Howard Taylor: This was providential though. I write my cell phone number on an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven piece of paper really big with a yellow highlighter. Danielle took it politely and we eventually sparked up conversation on her birthday. She eventually called me.

When she called me, we had one of those moments where you talk for four hours that night. She told me that she had been talking to a young man who was a police officer at the time and a lot of guys had been approaching her. She said, "The next guy who asks me for my number, I'm going to tell them where to shut it." So it was providential that I didn't ask for her number. I felt like with her I should just give her my number.

Ann Wilson: The spirit led you to do that. That was a God thing. It just went well with you because she was the greatest gift.

Howard Taylor: I was 18, Danielle was 19. I was an incoming freshman and Danielle was an outgoing senior at 19 years old. She graduated high school at 16 and she got her master's at 22.

I met somebody who was truly incredible and she would go on to be my first professional mentor. Me, my buddies, and my college roommates, Danielle would come to our apartment and help us with our schoolwork. She was in her career. She was incredibly kind and amazing. For me, I was raised by a single mother who was a very intelligent woman herself, so I just thought Danielle was incredible. I was attracted to how incredibly kind and intelligent and driven she was. The rest is history.

Dave Wilson: Were you married before you graduated or how long did it take?

Howard Taylor: My senior year. I was a double major so it took me six years to graduate. My sixth year we got married in 2005. Met in 2001, dated for four years, got married July 30th of 2005 and we moved into our house in Victorville, California. Danielle was out of school and I was finishing school.

Ann Wilson: Had you had much marriage mentoring or training?

Howard Taylor: No, we're from broken families.

Danielle Taylor: I had marriage mentoring on what not to do from my parents. My parents were married and they got divorced when I was in ninth grade, about 13. That was my dad's second marriage and that was my mom's second marriage and then she got married again after that. But they're still together. They got married the same year as us. They're still together, yes. So no, we didn't have good marriage examples or role models. I didn't want to get married.

Ann Wilson: You didn't because of what you've seen?

Danielle Taylor: Right, it just didn't look fun, it didn't look edifying, it didn't look productive. It just didn't seem like fun at all.

Dave Wilson: So how did it go when you got married?

Howard Taylor: I think we had a very great start. I would say we still love our marriage and we have peaks and valleys, but it was incredible. The reason why it was an incredible start for us, we had no trepidation in getting married. When we started dating, we both had a very strong spiritual base.

So what was unique about our connection is it was very much based off of our spiritual relationship with Christ. We made this commitment that we would read the Word and pray daily during the four years that we dated. We were both virgins. We had this like-mindedness about saving ourselves for marriage. At least I did. Danielle was not really planning to get married, but she was saving herself nonetheless.

Dave Wilson: You wanted to be single?

Danielle Taylor: I was more career driven. So maybe single, maybe date.

Howard Taylor: But I knew I wanted to be married since I was 12 because my mom and dad never married. My father was out of the home at five. So I felt like all the perils that I faced in my life were because of the absence of a father and the absence of having a stable family environment. To me, I needed that.

In sports, I always saw a father show up at the gym with the dads and it assisted them with the coaching relationship. All these little nuances I was watching. Plus, my mom, the greatest gift she gave us, she did get us into a good church. The pastor really affectionately loved his wife and his brother-in-law loved his wife. So I would watch these guys just love on their wives and raise their families and I knew that's how it should be.

Dave Wilson: As you started moving on in your marriage and obviously having kids, how did you start to develop these fundamentals that you call the Fundamentals of Marriage?

Howard Taylor: We started to develop the fundamentals from day one. We established in dating we had our "10 commandments of dating" type things.

Danielle Taylor: We made our own 10 commandments in dating. One was "no makeups to breakups." If you get comfortable breaking up and we get married you'll be comfortable getting a divorce thinking that it's okay because you're used to breaking up all the time. If we got into an argument, which we had plenty of, you could not bring up the past. We both can't be the victim at the same time. If I'm telling you about a problem I have, you can't turn around and say, "Well, you're saying this, but my problem is..." It's like, no, I'm the victim right now so you need to listen. We need to address the current problem.

Howard Taylor: For us, it was like you can't tell me to shut up. It was very practical. We could never tell each other to shut up. We could never hang up on the phone. Those things were birthed out of Danielle and I probably should have broken up in our first three months. Our communication was horrible. We were both young, we were immature, we argued. We call them darts now, but they were jabs and punches then.

Danielle Taylor: We weaponized our words. That was our example. When my mom and dad did talk, they argued.

Howard Taylor: So when we met each other, we loved each other and liked each other, but we were going to have a brouhaha with our words. We came to this defining moment right around the time Danielle was going to graduate where it was like, if this is going to work, we need boundaries. We sat and we talked about it and we pulled in biblical principles. "A soft answer turns away wrath" and all these little things. We created our little boundary sheet and we stuck to it. It made us very disciplined.

Ann Wilson: "I want to hang up on you right now, but I'm just going to breathe into this phone until we mutually get off the phone."

Howard Taylor: That was huge for our discipline. As fiery as we were, we taught each other that we were worth it. We knew that we were worth it because we just wouldn't cross that boundary. If ever we did flirt with it or cross it, it was like you have to come off your high horse and apologize. You just broke a commandment. It seems elementary and fundamental in some respects, but it was huge in our marriage.

Danielle Taylor: Following those throughout our relationship, a lot of people, even though we were really young, a lot of people would come to us asking for advice. "You guys look so happy and look like you guys really like each other and respect each other." Although we may have been married five or ten years, they're coming to talk to you guys who've only been married one year and we just couldn't understand why they were asking us. What do we know? We don't know anything.

As time went on and more and more people came to us, we saw our cousins and our family members' relationships falling apart. In the midst of all of this in our careers, we started a couple businesses on the side and things were going great financially, but spiritually things were not good. Fast forward to 2016, usually at the end of every year we go on a fast and ask God, "What do you want us to do for the following year?" We had been so on fire with growing our careers and advancing and making money and buying houses and just doing all this stuff.

Howard Taylor: So we went on this fast. "We're going to wake up every morning at 3:00 AM for a week and pray and seek God's face to find out what does God want us to do for 2017."

Dave Wilson: Why 3:00 AM?

Danielle Taylor: We want to have a sacrifice to God. We just wanted to feel like a sacrifice, like you're exhausted, you're tired. We set the alarm and got up.

Howard Taylor: One of the things that we did when we would fast, it wouldn't always be a solemn food fast. It would be, "What do we feel like we need to starve our flesh in most at that moment?" So sometimes our fasts were really tailored to Danielle and me. What we felt in that season was we were giving everything else our first. Business was first, everything in life, our relationship, our careers were first, but we weren't inconveniencing ourselves and stopping our schedule abruptly for Christ.

Dave Wilson: Which of you said, "Hey, how about if we do this fast and get up at 3:00 AM?"

Howard Taylor: We fast every year, but I think the 3:00 AM God dropped in my spirit that we needed to make this extra push and sacrifice. So we knew we were going to do the fast, but the 3:00 AM was like let's challenge ourselves to wake up at 3:00 AM and see if God's talking and just give him this intentional time.

Danielle Taylor: At the top of our fast we say, "Okay, we have a little list of what we would like God to talk to us about or get answers on." Then just, "God have your way, what are we missing, what are our blind spots, what do you want to say?" At the end of this fast we really wanted to know what was our life's mission spiritually. We had not found our spiritual purpose as a couple. I remember creeping up on the final day of the fast and not feeling like we got the answer.

Howard Taylor: This happens to us all the time. God does not speak until the last day for us. It's like he tests us to see if we're going to push through.

On the seventh day, he told us at work separate times. Danielle at a separate time from me. God told her that we need to go on social media and just start talking about our marriage. I was the hotel general manager in my career, a hotel executive, so I was sitting in my hotel office and God told me, "You guys are going to have to talk about your marriage. You're going to have to do it on Facebook Live." At that time we felt like it was cringeworthy, so we didn't want to do anything like that.

I came home today and Danielle said, "God, I think I got the answer." I said, "God told you we need to go on social media and talk about our marriage on Facebook Live?" And she's like, "That is exactly what God told me." I just knew. It wasn't audible, but it felt like it was audible.

Dave Wilson: We launched Marriage on Deck just talking to everyday couples about everyday marriage issues. A lot of people suffer in secret in their marriage because they don't want to shame their spouse. By us just talking on social media, because we're transparent, we were letting that thing hang out about our own lives because we knew it would help people. We knew it would help and it was worth it to be honest about how we were struggling.

What would you say to a couple listening right now that's suffering in silence? What should they do?

Danielle Taylor: I definitely think that you have to speak up. You have to speak up. I don't want to sound cliché that a closed mouth doesn't get fed, but it doesn't do any service keeping it a secret. It's only causing the marriage to implode. It causes your spirit to implode. There are counselors that won't tell your business. Your family and friends don't have to know that you need counseling. Nobody has to know anything, but you owe it to yourself and to your family that's watching you. There are people in our family watching our marriages that will never say anything, never applaud you, but they need you to stay together. They need you guys to figure it out.

I think that it's important to first bring in Christ and pray about it, but then secondly, within your level of comfort, reach out to somebody that you trust and share what's going on with your heart.

Howard Taylor: The symptoms aren't going to go away. A lot of things that we face in marriage we liken it to like cancer or sickness. You could avoid not talking about it, but you're showing symptoms. There are showing signs. Most of what we do in marriage coaching, most of what people talk about and complain about are symptoms of a larger issue that they're not addressing. Then eventually they get to the doctor's office because they can't walk or they can't talk or it's the end of the line and they say we're divorcing for irreconcilable differences.

If you would have addressed it early on like they always encourage you to do physically, get to the doctor early so that it's not something that's fatal. Likewise in marriage, we feel shamed and fearful to address things that are causing us to have symptoms that we're blaming our wives and our husbands for. Really, if you go get help from a trained professional, whether it's a Christian counselor or Christian coach.

We always will say pray about it and read your word and get deeper into your word, but we would say bring a partner alongside of that, an accountability partner whether it's your pastor at a church. Often times when you hold things in, you think that just you're going through it or just your husband does it or just your wife has this issue. The reality is when you talk about marriage to somebody, nine times out of ten they've either gone through it or somebody that they know is going through it.

That makes you feel like you're a part of a fraternity in some respects. It takes some of that secret shame off the issue and you can begin to deal with the actual root issue of the problem and then you see the symptoms begin to dissipate. But you can't hold it in because in that your symptoms are going to get worse and you're going to begin to target each other and ultimately the marriage does implode. So you got to talk about it.

Dave Wilson: I always say that if you are struggling with something in the dark, whether it's personal sin or a marriage secret suffering, the dark wins. The second you bring it out of the dark into the light, now healing can begin. FamilyLife has so many resources that put people in small groups with other couples. When you sit in a group and you go through something like the Art of Marriage or Vertical Marriage and people start sharing their stories, that's the biggest thing that happens in that group. You go, "We're not the only ones."

Ann Wilson: So good. I'm so inspired by you guys too. Even your fasting and your praying and getting up. If we put that effort into our marriage, God always hears. He always hears those prayers.

Dave Wilson: We've been talking with Howard and Danielle Taylor and their book is called The Fundamentals of Marriage: 80 Essential Practices of Successful Couples. You can get the link in the show notes at familylifetoday.com.

Ann Wilson: If you need help in your marriage, and we all need help, we have put together some of our best material just for you. It's at familylifetoday.com/marriagehelp and it's free. We just want to help you. It's there for you. Go there now and get help.

Dave Wilson: FamilyLife Today is a donor-supported ministry of FamilyLife, a Cru ministry, helping you pursue the relationships that matter most.