FamilyLife Today®

Ann Wilson: I think we're living in a day and age where it's really easy for marriages to be tempted in every way. Unfaithfulness, we're bombarded with social media, we're connecting with people that we've never been able to connect with.

Dave Wilson: Are you confessing right now?

Ann Wilson: No. Welcome to FamilyLife Today, where we want to help you pursue the relationships that matter most. I'm Dave Wilson, and I'm Ann Wilson. You can find us at familylifetoday.com. This is FamilyLife Today.

We have been really careful in putting boundaries in our marriage. But I have a good friend that just happened to reach out to an old guy that she went to college with. They had five kids, they'd been married for quite a while, and sadly enough, she kept connecting, and it ended up in an affair. That was one of our best friends and best couple friends.

Dave Wilson: It was obviously something we then walked through with them. God did a miracle, because I literally said even God can't save this marriage. That was a horrible thing to think, but He did. He really did. But it highlighted how critical protection is—to protect your marriage, to set up boundaries, not just sexually, but in all different areas.

Ann Wilson: Younger people think we have been ridiculous. You guys are so overboard, because we've been very intentional about protecting and putting boundaries in our marriage.

Dave Wilson: So I think it's a great topic to talk about. We've got the couple in the studio to talk about it. We've got Debra Fileta and her husband, John. Usually, Debra's on podcasts and interviews by herself because she's the author. She wrote a book called *Choosing Marriage*, which you wrote without your husband, John.

But John's sitting over there in the engineer booth and we had lunch with him. We were like, "This guy's got dynamite insight."

Ann Wilson: I don't know how you guys pulled this off. He is amazing. He's a physician, he's smart, he's really wise. We're like, "Oh yeah, and Debra, she's amazing." She's a podcaster, she's an author. They're both mom and dad of four kids: one daughter, three sons.

Dave Wilson: Home-schoolers. You guys are just crazy great. You're both homeschooling your kids. So this is fun. Welcome to both of you to FamilyLife Today.

John Fileta: Thanks for having us.

Dave Wilson: John, let me ask you, why have you never done this?

John Fileta: I don't know. I live the adventure from behind the scenes, I guess.

Debra Fileta: He does so much behind the scenes. Maybe he doesn't do as much with the mic, but so much of the background of the ministry is because of him.

Ann Wilson: Debra, tell the story of when you were speaking at a large conference and you were selling books, and you had someone come up to you commenting about the guy selling the books for you.

Debra Fileta: He's like, "How did you get an ophthalmologist to follow you around the country and sell your books?" Well, he is my husband, so it works out.

Dave Wilson: You do homeschool, you do write, you're a therapist, you're an eye surgeon. How do you keep your marriage strong?

Debra Fileta: I would say it's something that we didn't get right in the beginning. When you first get married, even as a therapist at the time, I was a therapist in training, you still don't know what you're doing. It takes learning and experience, doing things wrong, and then getting it right.

Dave Wilson: John, did you ever say, "Stop being a therapist"? Did you ever say that?

John Fileta: I have definitely said that. I've heard those words a couple of times. I'm not a client, I'm your husband.

Dave Wilson: I would too. There's got to be times you feel like you're getting analyzed. Like I shared with Debra at lunch, when I'm up preaching and I see Jack Wilson—he's a therapist in our church—I feel like he's got to be looking at me like, "Oh my goodness, you have so many issues." Have you ever felt that?

John Fileta: I don't actually feel that. In reality, being totally truthful, she's usually right. Let's edit that one out.

But in reality, the fun is we've been learning together, growing together. It's been amazing to watch our marriage transform over the past decade. We're still learning today. It's not like we have it totally figured out, but we're on the journey together.

Dave Wilson: One of the things you wrote about in *Choosing Marriage*, but you also together have found you're passionate about, is this idea of protecting your marriage. I love your chapter title: "Always Use Protection." Obviously, we're tongue-in-cheek on that. But talk about protection. How do you protect your marriage?

Debra Fileta: First and foremost, I wouldn't be able to write these chapters if I didn't have a spouse who is helping me live them out. You don't just write it; you have to live it. This is something that I think we're both passionate about. Proverbs 4:23: "Above all else, guard your heart."

It doesn't say guard other people's hearts or other people should guard your heart. We're responsible for protecting what God has given us, and that's our marriage. So we're deliberate about that in a few ways.

Ann Wilson: John, did you guys start out like that? Like, "Hey, this is going to be something that we're talking about, this is important to us"? Did you start there and know that?

John Fileta: I don't think we knew it to start. I think we've always been totally committed to one another. But as we watch other couples falter, you see people make mistakes, you see it unfortunately on the news all the time, and you realize no one's immune to this.

It can happen to anyone, in any place, including us. You realize you don't find a great marriage, you make a great marriage. Part of making it is this process of putting boundaries around your marriage.

Ann Wilson: What's that look like, Debra? You have some principles. Start us off with how you teach this.

Debra Fileta: I would say three main things, and we can talk about them in order. We protect our emotions, we protect our interactions, and we protect our time. Those are the three what I like to say "the intruders," because that's where we're most susceptible to making a decision that's not healthy or going down a path that's not good for our relationship.

When it comes to our emotions, you realize that there's so many opportunities to either miss sharing your emotions with one another or ending up sharing them with somebody other than your spouse. So we try to be really intentional about making sure that we give the first fruit of our emotional connection to one another.

Dave Wilson: How do you guys do that, especially now? You've got four kids, you've got a six-month-old. Right now, you're probably just surviving some days. How do you do that?

John Fileta: I think now it looks like we're very deliberate with how we interact in our time. By 9:00 PM, we're fighting to get all the kids in bed. Kids know it's Mommy and Daddy time after that. There's no coming in the bedroom. I don't care who's hiding in the closet. It's our time.

They know that our room is kind of our sanctuary and we're very deliberate about spending time together. It's easy to hop in bed, turn on the TV, turn on Netflix. That's the quick, easy, relaxing way. But it's being deliberate about, "Hey, let's talk a little bit."

Debra Fileta: Tell them about our Sunday night ritual.

John Fileta: This is good. Something that we started early on in our marriage that I would actually say totally transformed our marriage. It's made it incredible and has transformed me as a man. In every way, it has made me better. It's our Sunday night check-ins.

Every Sunday night at 9:00 PM, initially, I had my iPhone alarm pop off. 9:00 PM comes, we've got a check-in.

Ann Wilson: I love that you set your alarm.

Debra Fileta: Otherwise, he wouldn't remember. That's how I knew that he was being intentional about this.

John Fileta: So our alarm goes off, we hop on the couch. The first time we sit there, there's just a lot of crickets going off. It was really awkward.

Debra Fileta: Especially for you, right? I'm used to the emotional conversation.

John Fileta: It was super awkward. I talked more in 10 minutes with her than I probably shared my emotions my entire life.

Dave Wilson: Did you ask some great question, Debra?

Debra Fileta: I don't recall that I did. I think it was just like having these big-picture check-ins. Like, let's talk about how we're doing emotionally. Let's talk about sins and struggles. Just kind of these big-picture things that we would both take turns talking.

Ann Wilson: If I said to Dave, "Let's talk about how you're doing emotionally..."

Dave Wilson: I was just going to ask John, what do you say? Because if Ann said that to me, I'd be like, "I don't know, I'm okay."

John Fileta: That's exactly what I said. I was like, "I don't know." And she's like, "Well, 'I don't know' is not good enough. You've got to think for a second, take a minute to pause, and what are you actually feeling?"

So then I said, at the time, I think I was in medical school. There's always this baseline test of baseline stress of, if I don't score high enough on my tests, I can't go into the field that I want to study. I want to be an ophthalmologist, which you have to score really high to get into. So I always was feeling a little stressed with school.

We literally were living on $2,000 a year, basically nothing and loans. We always had money issues. We had two kids, two little kids at the time. That's why we started this, because we were actually not at a good place. We were at a place where we were both defaulting to unhealthy patterns and not connecting well. This isn't going to work for either of us. This is not a good place.

We can't just let our marriage be on autopilot and just see what happens. So we were like, "This is what we need to be deliberate about connecting."

Dave Wilson: John, did you find yourself, because I'm thinking, okay, if I'm you and I have been you, I felt exactly those things in different times of my life. If I was being really honest, I would be saying, "I'm scared. I'm afraid. I'm stressed. I don't know if I can do it."

Is that the kind of things you start talking about? Just saying that out loud is like, "Oh man, this is going to be helpful."

Ann Wilson: If Dave said that to me, did you feel like this, Debra? Like, that's endearing. That vulnerability in that going deep.

Debra Fileta: It is. And if there's any bitterness—he's working too much, or I have too much on my plate—in medical school he's away, I'm home with the kids. That sharing dissolves that. It invites you into their heart. I feel like it's an endearing thing because it's an invitation to come and experience what I'm experiencing. Let me share this with you.

Why you have to protect your emotions is because it is such an intimate part of who you are. If your spouse isn't receiving that part of who you are, who is? Is it your mom, your sister, your best friend, nobody, or somebody outside that's inappropriate? That's where it begins, is having that comfort level to just be honest about how we feel.

Dave Wilson: At the Weekend to Remember marriage getaway that we do at FamilyLife, we talk about Level Five communication where one is sort of superficial, but five is like, I'm going to go and open my heart. So you're going there. Was that a struggle?

John Fileta: It was unnatural. My body's like, "Hey, this is Defcon 5, high alert here." And part of it too, like we confess to each other, we confess sin. At first, it's really awkward to say things you've done wrong.

Ann Wilson: What's that look like? "Hey, it's time for you to confess your sin." Dave can't wait to talk about their sin. Is that what you're asking? "Hey, tell us about your sin."

Dave Wilson: No, I'm just saying, how did you get into that? Like, "Oh, it's your turn, now it's my turn." How did you decide that?

Debra Fileta: You just begin to realize that it's easy to live in a way where you don't fully know each other unless you're intentional about asking those questions. And I am a therapist, but I was a newbie therapist at the time. So it's not like I had this extraordinary set of skills that the average person doesn't have.

It was just a matter of, what does it look like to connect with my spouse and to share my heart? James 5 tells us: "Confess your sins to one another and pray for one another so that you can be healed." I had accountability in college with some girlfriends. Why can't we have that in our relationship? And what does that look like for each of us?

Dave Wilson: Does this mean there's no secrets?

John Fileta: There's no secrets. No. We're open with everything. So it started early, like if I had an inappropriate thought, or if I looked at a woman inappropriately, I told her. You know what happens when you confess those things? You get freedom from them.

I realized if I have to tell her these things on Sunday night, you're highly motivated during the week to choose the right thing because you realize, "This is what I'm going to share, this is how I'm going to feel, this is how I'm going to hurt my wife, and it's going to make me feel horrible."

I'm wrong in doing this and it helps you become... that's why I say it's transformed our marriage, made me a better man. Because you live in freedom, joy, and then the fullness that you get to experience of being fully known, fully loved, fully accepted is deeper than anything you could imagine. It's unbelievable.

Dave Wilson: Now, are there things that you think shouldn't be shared, like emotionally or too far?

Debra Fileta: I always tell people that if your life is like a book, chapter by chapter, make sure that your spouse knows the summary. They don't have to know every sentence and every detail. Let's just even talk about that example of, "I had an inappropriate thought."

Well, I don't have to know who it was and what you were thinking and all the nitty-gritty details, or something in my past. I don't need to know exactly what you did and how you did it, but I just need to have a general idea of where you're struggling, and you need to have a general idea of where I'm struggling.

It's accountability and it's also freedom. I think there's something here for the church as well, but what if it started in our marriages?

Dave Wilson: Here's a question for you, and you're a therapist, so I'd love to hear your thought. A husband tells his wife after he's prayed one night, "I just prayed to God I'd rather be dead than married to you." Should he say that?

Ann Wilson: This was our conversation our first year of marriage.

Dave Wilson: Were you the honest one?

Ann Wilson: I said that. I said it because we were told before marriage: share every thought you ever had.

Debra Fileta: I'm noticing some things about you, Dave. I really am. I'm noticing a lot of spiritual lingo used to tell her what you really needed to tell her. Remember when you said he brought you a list that he prayed about? And now you're praying again. You're spiritually abusing me is what you're saying. You're blaming God for a whole lot.

Ann Wilson: The second it came out of my mouth, this was in the first nine months of our marriage, the second I said it, I looked at her when I saw her face just drop. I was like, "That was stupid." That's one of those things that I didn't need to be that specific about. I really had just said that because we were really struggling.

Debra Fileta: You were annoyed. And that's the difference. I'm not sharing my honest opinion about what he needs to work on and change and what I don't like about him. This is an honest assessment of me—what I'm doing, what I'm struggling with, where I'm at. It's not me assessing him.

It's easy to be honest about assessing my spouse. "Here's what you've got to work on." But the key to freedom, I think, is learning to give that honest assessment to ourselves, taking the plank out of our own eye before we take the splinter out.

Dave Wilson: It's that vulnerability of exposing this is who I am and it's not pretty, and having our spouse continue to receive us is the gospel.

Ann Wilson: I think it's really cool that what you're modeling for us and every couple can be done by anybody. Part of me is like, "Well, you're a therapist, so you're really good at this," like, no, any husband and wife if they have the guts and the courage to say, "Let's do a check-in to be honest," this can really change their marriage.

John Fileta: And I think a great starting point is you look at your own life and think about, what's one thing I want to do better in? Or what's one thing I want to get better in? If you're a parent who gets super angry, choose that. Just check in that week, say, "Hey, how was... I struggled with anger this week with the kids. I responded this way, or when you told me this, I responded..."

I think if you look at yourself, we each have one thing that we usually struggle with or tend to go to. That's a great starting point. It's not going to magically change one day. It's a process of years and years. And then it's also building in the accountability, being open about things.

One of the things that we talked about for protecting your interactions, Deb and I are very deliberate about, I haven't deleted my internet history the entire time I've had my computer for seven years. She has total freedom. She can look in my phone, she can look in my computer. I have nothing I'm afraid of her to see.

Dave Wilson: So we've gone from guarding your emotions, now you're looking at how you guard your actions, your interactions.

Debra Fileta: Even in the ministry world, you're meeting a lot of people and there's so many opportunities to connect with people of the opposite sex. So we're always cautious about not accepting invitations where we're going to be alone with someone of the opposite sex. It's really not a big deal to throw in a third party.

And it's not even because we're worried or we don't trust each other. Some of it also is just so that there's no opportunity for anyone else to think something might be happening that's not. Not even a hint of an opportunity or a misunderstanding. So we're just really careful with our interactions.

If there's someone I'm interacting with on a regular basis via email or text, I'm always telling him what's going on. He's always telling me. We loop each other in. In marriage, you're one. Seeing that in the context of your interactions with people, it isn't weird to CC him into an email because we're one.

Ann Wilson: Dave and I do that all the time. I'll just include him on the text if it's with another guy and like, "Hey, Dave's on this," and it's just become a habit for us. Some people think it's ridiculous, but you're right, we're one. My world is Dave's world and we don't want to exclude one another from that.

Dave Wilson: And the last one you talk about is time. Like guarding your time, what's that look like?

Debra Fileta: This is the trickiest one, and I think something that we struggle with the most in the world because within seconds, you can be on your phone in the same room but doing completely different things. John can be playing chess, I can be on Instagram, and the time passes just like that. So I think protecting your time is one of the most important things that you can do for your relationship.

Ann Wilson: We really have struggled with this, just because screen time is just so accessible where it's in our hands. We can work, we can do emails, we can play games, and we have found that to be isolating at times. So you're saying the same thing.

Dave Wilson: How do you do it?

John Fileta: I think it's realizing that anytime you say "yes" to something, you're saying "no" to something else. You just be aware of the choices you're making. So with technology, I try sometimes, and I'm guilty of this, I'm on my phone in the evenings checking things, but being deliberate about, okay, this next hour through dinner, whatever, I'm going to put my phone on the desk.

There's nothing really urgent I actually have to get to. I don't need to know this fact on Google immediately. I can wait. So it's putting our phone away.

Ann Wilson: You don't need to know what the score is of the game at that moment.

Dave Wilson: I'm not even going to look over there.

John Fileta: That's why I have the watch. So I can look indiscreetly. Just checking the time, honey.

The other thing too is just learning to do things together, like our hobbies, instead of having separate hobbies. Doing things that we both like. I did a survey of a thousand married couples and over 50% of them said they have separate hobbies and interests.

Think about how much time is spent in separate things with the little time you have that you could actually be doing something together. So we've learned to take up things that the other likes, or learn about something that the other person likes, or do something together that's new for both of us and just kind of learning to guard our time in that way.

Ann Wilson: I felt like I should probably start playing golf.

Dave Wilson: You don't have to play golf. Tennis is good enough for me.

Debra Fileta: Or you can both take up something new together.

John Fileta: And it also looks really different in different seasons. When I was working, at one point of my training, 100 hours a week, we had young children under five. The reality is when you have no time, you have no time for hobbies. So you need to accept: I can't go out golfing for six hours.

That's just a poor choice that's going to separate me from my wife. So when you don't have time, you don't have separate time. That's just the reality. I think sometimes as Americans, we try to squeeze everything in, go, go, go, go, we don't pause and stop.

And that's where we tried to be deliberate about choosing hobbies together, like we'll go for walks, we'll go hiking. I love playing chess, random game. She learned how to play chess so she could play with me.

Debra Fileta: I don't love it, but I've learned how to do it.

Ann Wilson: Look at you go. That's awesome.

John Fileta: And I think, ultimately, this idea of trust, the fruit of it is that you end up experiencing the deepest joy, pleasure, satisfaction, greater than any of these other things appear to give you, but you get to experience in your marriage.

Dave Wilson: Well, I think as I'm listening, the whole idea of protecting your marriage, when you choose to do that, it builds trust. That's probably the biggest thing I'm hearing is like when you say, "My life is not mine, it's ours," and so my interactions, you're going to know. My internet history, you're going to know. My conversation with other people, my time, my emotions.

That builds trust, and a marriage has to be built on trust. And if I'm withholding that, that creates distrust and the marriage starts to fall apart. So what a great gift this conversation I think has been for couples to say, "Okay, you have given us really practical..."

I mean, even if couples just said, "Okay, let's start with the Sunday night or Monday night, whatever night works, or day, just do a check-in and say I'm going to be open with my heart and my life to you," that's going to start something new in a marriage that could save the marriage.

Debra Fileta: Every single one is like a string, a new string that connects you to your spouse. The more you have, the more deliberate you have, the stronger your marriage is.

Ann Wilson: And I love that you guys have been incredibly intentional about your relationship and about your family. It's inspiring to see how God's using you.

Dave Wilson: And I love having John on the broadcast. You are awesome.

John Fileta: Thanks for having me.

Ron Deal: Hey friends, Ron Deal here. Did you know that for 50 years, FamilyLife has been working around the world and in your backyard to teach couples, parents, and families how to love God and love one another? And thousands of churches utilize a FamilyLife resource to teach biblical principles for life and love in their community.

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Ann Wilson: Okay, I love these guys. Debra's amazing. She's been in here several times, but when you get John, her husband, to come in with her, it's like the jackpot. It is. And Debra's book is called *Choosing Marriage: Why It Has to Start with We Over Me*.

Dave Wilson: And you can get your copy by clicking the link in the show notes at familylifetoday.com. FamilyLife Today is a donor-supported production of FamilyLife, a Cru ministry, celebrating 50 years of helping you pursue the relationships that matter most.