Married With Benefits by FamilyLife

Shaunti Feldhahn: I will tell you for me that at the beginning of this, there was a lot of angst. I think that is probably the right word because I had been doing this for so many years. All of these big, expensive, nationally representative surveys, they back up what the Bible has said all along. It was so cool.

Suddenly, here I am with this one. I'm like, oh my goodness, does it matter if it works if it goes against what the Bible says? We can't do that. Then even more of an angst, why does it work if it's anti-biblical? It shouldn't work.

Brian Goins: I'm Brian Goins. Welcome back to Married with Benefits. In this episode, I'm going to be joined with my wife Jen because we got the advice, I'm sure you did too, never let the sun go down on your anger. Remember that verse? It comes out of Ephesians 4. We always heard, don't go to bed mad. Yet, I go to bed mad. Do you go to bed mad? I'm sure you do.

Shaunti is actually going to tell us that highly happy couples go to bed mad, too. They just wake up very different than the way that I was waking up with my wife Jen. In this episode, we're going to discover why they wake up differently. Let's dive in together.

I have the great privilege of being flanked by two incredible women. Not only do we have Shaunti Feldhahn, but I get my lovely wife. Jen, thanks so much for coming and being out here.

Jen Goins: You're welcome.

Brian Goins: Jen often joins me on Weekend to Remember. Obviously, we've been a part of the speaking team now here at FamilyLife since 2007. It's always fun to have an aspect of your life that you're doing together. Jen, thanks for joining us for Married with Benefits. You're my benefit to being married.

Jen Goins: Exactly.

Brian Goins: As Bruce, our producer, says, they keep us honest. Once we have our spouse on, I can't say I can't get away with telling that story quite not in their favor. Jen will correct me on the details. You learned that from Shaunti, right?

Jen Goins: Yes, exactly. Don't fight over those little tiny details. It's okay to evangelistically exaggerate, I guess.

Brian Goins: Jen will call me on that. That's true, you will. Today we are going to talk about the fact that once you put any two sinners under one roof, you're going to deal with anger. You're going to get frustrated. You're going to have problems, have irritation. Jen, we've been married now 27 years. It'll be 28 this year. In a few words, how would you describe how we deal with anger? What's our MO for dealing with anger?

Jen Goins: I think that we both have a tendency to stuff a little bit. We are not yellers. We don't have a lot of physical anger, but we tend to stuff. I tend to bring up sarcasm, eye rolls, things like that.

Shaunti Feldhahn: The sighs. Oh, that always works really well. Exactly.

Brian Goins: Yeah, those are some of the unhealthy ways we deal with it. Thanks for coming, Shaunti, and counseling us on how we deal with that.

Shaunti Feldhahn: Hopefully, I've been friends with you guys long enough that I can joke about it.

Brian Goins: I know Jeff's not here, but how would you guys say? What are the words you'd put to this is what anger looks like in the Feldhahn home?

Shaunti Feldhahn: This is definitely a Jeff will withdraw. It's usually that. We're not yellers either because that's a scary kind of thing to both of us, I think. Definitely the withdraw. For me, the anger comes out leaking out of my eyes. I cry when I'm angry.

Brian Goins: See, that's not fair.

Shaunti Feldhahn: I know. It's probably not.

Brian Goins: It's not for guys. All of a sudden, we don't know what to do.

Shaunti Feldhahn: I'm angry, but I start crying because I'm hurt and I'm angry. It reminds me of what Bruce, our producer, said about his wife. She's like, I don't get angry, I get hurt, sad, disappointed. I don't get angry. I kind of feel the same way, actually.

Brian Goins: Today we want to talk about how we deal with our anger and we want to blow up some conventional wisdom, which I always appreciate with Shaunti being here. She can blow it up and she can actually back it up with data and research.

Have you guys ever heard or were introduced in pre-marital counseling the idea don't go to bed mad?

Jen Goins: Yes, obviously. There's scripture to back it up, so you don't want to go to bed angry. Generally, it seems like a pretty good principle.

Brian Goins: It does. You brought up that verse Ephesians 4:26. Be angry and do not sin. I like the fact that Paul says be angry. Anger is a reality. I've often said anger is like that check engine light in my heart where I know something's off in my relationship and I need to resolve it. I tend to not resolve it. I end up sinning. Then it has that great advice, don't let the sun go down on your anger.

Since we're looking at all these pros, the people that are doing marriage right, they are highly happy, they are enjoying life with each other. I'm guessing that in your research, there's a ton of people that applied this principle, right? They did this principle?

Shaunti Feldhahn: Hate to tell you this, but this is definitely one of those areas that what they said to do, because everybody who's happy married gives advice all the time, what they said to do was often not what they actually did.

Brian Goins: Really?

Shaunti Feldhahn: Yes, and we were looking at what the highly happy couples actually did. We wanted because you don't always know what the advice is. It was actually pretty hilarious because we would be sitting down, Jeff and I would be sitting down across from one of these highly happy couples. Tell us your advice. We wanted to get that out of the way.

They would often say, it's really important to not go to bed mad. I would always say, oh, absolutely, I totally agree. Do you ever go to bed mad? They would be like, well, it's a really important principle. We were telling Steve and Genie the other day. I'm like, no, no, I get it. I get that it's an important principle, but Mr. and Mrs. Happy Couple, that's not actually what I'm asking you. I'm asking you, do you ever go to bed mad? Well, yeah, sometimes.

It was fascinating how in practice, many of the happiest couples, not every time, but certainly sometimes, they had discovered that when you have two exhausted, angry, upset people trying to duke it out at 1:00 in the morning, nothing good is going to come from that point on.

Jen Goins: So true. You like to emphasize HALT.

Brian Goins: Which I think is a pretty classic thing. When you're hungry, angry, lonely, or tired. I don't know the lonely part has always kind of confused me because I don't know how to immediately stop that, but the hungry, angry, tired, you can fix some of those before you have a conversation.

Jen Goins: Exactly. Or grab something to eat, take a nap, get some rest, and then you'll be able to deal with those things, the anger, a little bit better.

Shaunti Feldhahn: If it's 1:00 in the morning, the tired is usually big for both of you.

Brian Goins: Absolutely. I'm realizing this even as she's talking about interviewing these highly happy couples, they never came talk to us. So I feel like this is our season to find out what the pros do because obviously we're not pros.

Shaunti Feldhahn: I think we actually did talk to you.

Brian Goins: No, you did not.

Shaunti Feldhahn: I think we might have. I think we might actually have, yes. I think we did.

Jen Goins: Well, I would say that I'm a highly happy married woman, so you're doing something right.

Brian Goins: I'm supposed to reciprocate. Yes, we are. We are so happy and in love and I love you, honey. Everybody in the booth is like, ugh. So what does it mean? In other words, you discovered basically the title of this session. They would go to bed mad.

Shaunti Feldhahn: Yes, they would sometimes occasionally when they were both like, okay, if we keep talking, one of us is going to agree to something we're going to resent the next day. Somebody's going to say something that they wish they wouldn't have said. You can't take back.

So they had discovered in practice that there were times that they said, we need a timeout. We need to say we'll be okay, but we just can't do this right now and let's pick it up in the morning. What they found in practice is that sometimes just sleeping on it solved it. You know those times when you get up and you're like, what was that about? Was it really that big an issue? Was it really that big an issue that I left the bubbles in the sink? Right.

You can tell she's starting to think about that. But they had also discovered, and this is what we actually found in practice, this is where the statistics were really fascinating, is that if sleeping on it didn't solve it, if that issue was still there the next day, the highly happy couples didn't let it go. They addressed it.

Everybody else was far more likely, even the generally happy couples, were far more likely to just not want to deal with it and hope it kind of went away the next day. The happy couples didn't do that. They dealt with it. That was, it turns out, the difference. It wasn't what happened the night before. It was what happened the next morning.

Brian Goins: I think that's where for me, that's where my pain is in marriage when we deal with conflict. I am willing to go to bed mad, but it's not so that I can resolve it in the morning. It's not so that I can be fresher in the morning to deal with it. It's just that I so hope the problem just goes away on its own, that it just dissipates.

Certainly there's that verse in Proverbs 29:11 that says it's the glory of one to overlook an offense. There are things in marriage that you just need to overlook. It's not that big of a deal. Is this something that's going to affect me later in life? Is this something that affects our relationship or leads me to bitterness? We ask those questions and if it's not, then okay, that's fine.

Jen Goins: But I think generally, I think that you and I both over time, we have gotten better at that where we don't have a lot of things that we've swept under the rug and kept there whether it's a day or two or three or four. I think we've gotten better and better at saying we are going to deal with this. I think that makes us a happy couple because we don't have things where maybe we're in a counseling office years later and there's so many things that have piled up. I think that is a key of a highly happy couple of dealing with things.

Shaunti Feldhahn: You just said something really interesting, Jen. That imagery, we haven't swept things under the rug and left them there. That's really, really good because that's a good image for people to go, is that what we're doing with these issues that are coming up? Are we sweeping them under the rug and then the next morning leaving them there?

Jen Goins: We have to give credit to someone from a Weekend to Remember who wrote into Weekend to Remember and said we got things out from underneath the rug. We'd been pushing them there so much that we could barely keep tripping over the rug. We read that a lot, so I can't take that for myself. It's from a Weekend to Remember guest who said we took things out from under the rug. It is a really good mental picture maybe to ask yourself, do we have things under the rug that we've left there not only overnight but for a long time?

Brian Goins: Exactly. Then you keep tripping over them and that's why we're struggling and may not be highly happy. You talk about in the book a little bit the difference between resolving the anger and resolving the issue. Why was that such a key?

Shaunti Feldhahn: It comes back to again the next morning. You've got all the emotions and all of that, those are real, it's fine, we're human, that's going to happen. You don't necessarily have to resolve all that before you go to bed.

But the next morning, what you're trying to do is actually deal with that issue. You're actually trying to say, okay, I could have hurt feelings and those are maybe even still there. But I can actually work on this despite these hurt feelings and actually tackle the issue without sort of making it an attack. All the normal things that we talk about in relationships.

Brian Goins: Let me break in here just a minute. One of the best things that Jen and I do as a couple is that we try to get away at least once a year just as a couple just to work intentionally on our marriage. Like we say, great marriages don't just happen. It takes some intentionality to experience oneness.

In a culture where we're moving so fast, where we miss each other all the time, the Weekend to Remember is a three-day event where you get to pull the emergency brake up on life and have the conversations that you most need to have but probably aren't having. If you like this, if you like Married with Benefits, you're going to love Weekend to Remember. It's a great opportunity just to get back on the same page with each other. All right, let's get back into the conversation.

What's the benefit really of going to bed mad?

Shaunti Feldhahn: Well, the benefit is remember that whole thing that the happy couples told us of yes, someone is actually going to start agreeing to something that they're going to resent the next day. You're setting up other problems if you keep trying to force this.

Give yourself probably there's two things: give yourself some emotional space and give yourself some mental space. The emotional space is this, you are just upset. You need to be able to sort of de-escalate.

One of our main executive producers, Jim Mitchell, was saying earlier that this whole step of going to bed, even if you're mad, that is a type of de-escalation. It's crucial and it's a willingness to say I'm not going to let my emotions take over here.

Brian Goins: There is a psychological term called flooding that our emotions actually flood our brain. It takes up to 40 minutes, I learned this from Art of Marriage, our new series where we talk about conflict, and one of our teachers on that series talked about how it can take up to 40 or 50 minutes for some of that flooding to dissipate from your brain just so that you can get into a better what you're saying an emotional state or a mental state.

Shaunti Feldhahn: The mental state piece is more recognizing that for some people, and this is stereotypically it is more common to be men, I can't actually quantify it and I can't remember the number right now but it was something like 75 or 80 percent of men need internal processing time. They can't think straight enough to actually articulate and so they instinctively want to withdraw, not in a bad way but in a way that's actually good for their brain to be able to process what am I even thinking? How do I even explain why I'm upset or whatever? There's plenty of women for whom that's the case too. But that mental thing is for whoever is the internal processor, for whoever needs a little more time, we need to honor that. We can't force the other person to have the same kind of processing as we do.

Brian Goins: See, honey, it's brain science. That's why I'm like a turtle. That's why I withdraw. My problem is I like to stay withdrawn. You know that better than most.

Jen Goins: I can remember a time and I've seen this played out in our life where there's times we've gone to bed angry but then we've worked on it the next morning. I can remember the time we were trying to figure out what we're going to do at a job. We were interviewing at a job in fact down in Atlanta. We lived in Charlotte at the time.

Shaunti Feldhahn: Could have lived near you.

Jen Goins: We could have been really neighbors. I would have been over at your house all the time, Shaunti.

Shaunti Feldhahn: I would have loved that.

Jen Goins: So we were looking at a job in Atlanta and we had gone through the interview process. I had been brought in on a little bit of that. Our kids were with us and we just had two totally different perspectives on this job opportunity.

Brian Goins: I was right.

Jen Goins: Well, we'll find out that in a minute. But he had one idea, I had another, and they were opposing. By the end of this weekend, we were tired from the weekend and emotionally tired and drained. Those are so draining, those kinds of weekends.

Exactly. We had kids with us. We were trying to figure out our life plans. Our kids were young. We had this intense argument, we like to say intense fellowship, where he was thinking one way, I was thinking another. Of course, me as a woman just feeling very emotional about this huge decision. He feeling very as a man, I want to provide for our family, I think this is right.

Anyway, all that to say, our van ride from Atlanta back to Charlotte after having that intense fellowship was completely quiet. We did not speak for four hours.

Brian Goins: It was three hours and 23 minutes.

Jen Goins: Brian, you were lead foot. You were speeding. Shaunti, what you said earlier was because I remember looking out the window, I couldn't even look at him. I was looking out the windows and tears would just slowly, I wasn't sobbing, I wasn't, but they were leaking out at times, not for the full four hours.

So we get back to Charlotte. We've had that quiet van ride where we were not speaking to each other. We were both angry, stewing in our frustrations. Not only did we have the emotional thing from the job, we had a long day, but we had driven four hours. We had our kids to put to bed and we went to bed and we really didn't even say hey, let's talk about it in the morning. We just went to bed angry.

There was just space between us. There was a lot of space. But the next morning, we got the kids off and I had a little bit of time to myself. I had prayed. I had been very sad about our relationship and knew we had to talk about this.

As we came back together that morning, the kids were gone, it was probably about 10:00 in the morning, and we were fortunate to be able to have that time. We just came at it at a different angle and we could really calmly talk about the pros and the cons, what we were both feeling. So yes, we went to bed angry, but it was a good thing. It would have been bad if we would have tried to.

Brian Goins: Maybe what would have been better, I don't remember, it's been a while, so I don't remember if we said let's talk about this in the morning, but we both knew that was coming and that we needed to address it quickly. I wish we had resolved the anger. I wish we had taken that time in that moment and that night to go, I know we're angry at each other. Just to acknowledge it. But we're still in it and we did not do that.

Shaunti Feldhahn: One key there though, give yourself a break on that because resolving the anger, that is a really, really hard thing to do when you're angry and you haven't had a chance to talk about it yet. So give yourself some break for that.

Brian Goins: Maybe acknowledge is a better word. Acknowledge it and say I'm still in this with you. That's what we didn't do. I went to bed not just angry, I was like nursing my deposition of why she's wrong and I'm right and I was ready in the morning to get up and fight. The stuffer was about ready to become the shouter. That's really what I was feeling in that moment and I think a lot of our listeners know those moments.

If it wasn't for Jen apologizing first, she did the mature thing. Talk about a pro tip. She came to me going, hey, I just want to own my part. I want to apologize for what I did and I should not have treated you like that. I still have strong opinions about where we're going, but I really want to say I'm sorry. That made me more mad because now we've actually got to do what we say at FamilyLife and forgive each other, blah, blah, blah. No, it did, it did diffuse. It helped.

To finish the story, she was right. It wasn't the right place for us and we didn't go to Atlanta. Sorry, Shaunti. That's part of it, honestly. But yeah, I was going to say it brought us to that place. Just that night's sleep gave us better mental space, emotional, and I would say spiritual, mainly because of what Jen did in just reminding us that God's in this too. If we actually not return an insult for insult, because I was ready to insult Jen that morning, she gave a blessing and said I'm sorry and will you forgive me? And now it's like, okay, now blessing can get back into our marriage.

Shaunti Feldhahn: That is such a good example and I'm sure it brings hope to many people who are listening who have done that van ride, who have had that situation. Literally, we had a couple, a young couple, at one of our marriage events. We were talking about this topic. The next morning, that was a Friday night and the next morning for the last couple hours on Saturday, they came up to us at the beginning and they're like, you have no idea how much that has set us free. Because we had felt so wrong about everybody knows the Bible says don't let the sun go down your anger, don't go to bed mad, that we had literally felt that we had canceled God's blessing on our marriage for each of those times. Like we tried, but for each of those times that we went to bed mad. It's like freedom that maybe it doesn't say quite what we thought it said.

Brian Goins: Let's talk about the verse because that's really is it just going, okay, that's nice the Bible says that. What I've appreciated about your research is that basically all the data always ends up backing up scripture. So as a researcher, you're doing all this research and then you're like, but wait. I'd be curious for you, when you looked at that verse, how did that apply to your marriage? I would imagine Jeff's a lawyer, wouldn't he want to stay up and fight? Wouldn't he want to like, I'm just going to resolve this thing?

Shaunti Feldhahn: No, Jeff is the opposite. He is totally the opposite. He is definitely like, it's 10:00, I am past my bedtime. I am the stay up late, he is the early to bed kind of guy and he's like, my brain stops working.

I'd be like, but we need God's blessing on our marriage. We can't go to bed. He says now, you would wear me out. Then he would take the lawyer hat on. He'd put the lawyer hat on and he'd go, look, we did not start arguing till the sun was already down, so I have 24 hours. That's when you're really parsing the verse. That's when you're really getting into it and going, no, no, let's understand, the sun goes down at 6:00, so if we started this at 7:00, we got another 24 hours.

Jen Goins: I wonder if you have two people who do like to stay up late. They can still stay up late, figure it out.

Shaunti Feldhahn: Everybody's different. That's the issue. It's just most people are married to someone who's opposite. So someone's going to want to stay up late, someone might want to go to bed early. You have to really honor the other person. If they're using scripture as a bludgeon to go, you need to be like me because God's saying we need to stay up and fight, what does the verse mean, Shaunti?

Shaunti Feldhahn: Well, listen, I'm sure theologians have different ways of parsing it, but I will tell you for me that at the beginning of this, there was a lot of angst. Like you said, Brian, I'd been doing this for so many years and all of these big, expensive, nationally representative surveys, oh wow, they back up what the Bible has said all along. It was so cool.

Suddenly, here I am with this one and I'm like, oh my goodness, does it matter if it works if it goes against what the Bible says? We can't do that. Then even more of an angst, why does it work if it's anti-biblical? It shouldn't work.

I was actually sharing this angst with a pastor we were talking to at one point and he was also a licensed therapist. He started laughing. He was like, okay, first of all, there's a lot of things to unpack here. But he said, first of all, just be aware that this whole section of the Bible, it's not even talking about marriage. It's talking about living in a community.

Let's realize that we've sort of put something on this that maybe the verse never intended to be a part of it.

Brian Goins: Or I would say we've used it in so many marriage contexts that we feel like we have basically taken that verse and it's only applying to marriage.

Shaunti Feldhahn: But it is applying to community. So you're not going to go, hey, if I had an issue with the guy that I bought something from at the mall, that I need to go find his house and knock on his door at 11:00 at night. That would be a little weird. But okay, so marriage is a part of a type of community. Okay, yeah.

I was still angst-ridden and he took me to, he had a big Bible in his office and he said, go look up this verse. So I'm like, okay. And he said, you know when you see 4:26 there, you see the little caret where there's a little caret if you go look, you can look on your Bible app or you can look in a Bible right now and you'll see that there's a little caret and it shows that Paul was quoting a verse from the Old Testament.

The whole verse of Ephesians 4:26 is, in your anger do not sin, don't let the sun go down your anger. Okay, so we always quote the second part, for some reason we're not really looking at the first part. What was Paul quoting? This verse would have been very familiar to his listeners and he was quoting Psalm 4:4. So this pastor goes, go look up Psalm 4:4. So I looked up Psalm 4:4 and it says, in your anger do not sin, think about it overnight and remain silent.

Wow, how did we get that translation all off or weird? It's just not even I think the issue is we've so put that into a marriage context and we so focus on the second half that we miss that the whole point was really about the first, in your anger don't sin.

The pastor's like, look, if you need to think about it overnight and remain silent so you don't say something you'll regret and sin in your anger, do that. If you need to duke it out at 1:00 in the morning to not sin in your anger, do that. That's the bigger picture and that's sort of the way that we should be biblically processing everything anyway.

Brian Goins: I like one of the translations says, ponder in your own hearts on your beds and be silent. Ponder shouldn't be stew, which is what I tend to do. If you read the rest of that passage in Ephesians 4 where it's talking about don't give the devil any opportunity, then it talks about being kind to one another, harmonious.

That's actually what I should be stewing on in my bed is how do I start moving towards oneness? How do I start owning my part? What am I going to do to actually move back towards my wife or whoever I have an issue with? This doesn't just apply to marriage, it can apply to everything else.

You think about all the other verses. It's amazing how we take one verse and we make this massive practical theology out of but Proverbs 29:11, I love that verse where it says, a fool gives full vent to his anger, but a wise man keeps himself under control. Sometimes in the moment that you're angry is the worst time to actually talk about it because I'm going to give full vent.

Shaunti Feldhahn: And you're going to do damage. You are. And that is actually one thing that we did see that was relatively common amongst the not highly happy couples, happy couples or the so-so and struggling couples, that was actually a pattern. That it would be healthier to think about it overnight and pick it up in the morning.

Now, I will say one caveat to that and this is something that every guy who's listening to this, I want you to take note of this, which is that statistically most of the time the woman, the wife, one of the reasons she wants to resolve it is because there's this sense of anxiety and there's this sense of are we okay? That's me. I just don't want it to be lasting. It is hard to go to bed with that there because the common thing that we heard over and over is the husband rolls over and goes to sleep, the wife is staring at the ceiling for the next two hours.

Jen Goins: That is true. You start snoring immediately and that makes me even more angry because I have to think about it and you can go to sleep.

Brian Goins: It's a spiritual gift, of snoring. I can just tune it off. I can compartmentalize and go to sleep.

Shaunti Feldhahn: Every wife is so jealous of the whole ability to compartmentalize things. But what this means is that when you talk about a wise man keeps himself under control, one of the opportunities here for an actual husband in this situation is to say before we actually go to sleep to say the words, I'm angry, we have to pick this up in the morning, but I want you to know we're okay. I love you, we'll pick it up in the morning. Part of keeping yourself under control is being willing to say that instead of withholding it.

Brian Goins: I think that's one of those little steps that we talked about. It's the little steps that are going to make a big difference, but it's the little steps going in the right direction, it's going in the same direction. I think that's one of the great ones and it reminds me a lot of what we're doing in Art of Marriage. We've talked about this series that FamilyLife just launched. We're excited about it, has six sessions, and I want for us just to listen and watch a clip real quick because I think it gives some real practical little steps of what you can do in that moment when you're mad. We're not denying the fact that you're mad of what it's going to take to actually move back towards each other. So let's watch this.

Vivian Mabuni: With every conflict in marriage, Darren and I always have a choice to make. Are we going to react to each other with the dysfunctional patterns we saw growing up, or the way we often see conflict handled in our culture? Those things don't work.

Or do we do what Paul says in Ephesians 4:26 and 27, be angry but sin not and give no opportunity to the devil. Whenever I let my anger cause me to blow up or just avoid Darren, I never move towards oneness, never. But when I let the Spirit guide me, it's usually against my instincts but it helps move me back towards Darren.

So we needed a new pattern for when our anger was driving us to unhealthy places. So we try to do these three things. First, we call a timeout. We remind ourselves our spouse is not our enemy. Second, we need to own our own part, focus on the person inside the circle. Third, to intentionally start to build the bridge back to oneness.

Brian Goins: That was Vivian Mabuni. She's one of our teachers on Art of Marriage. She does a great job. But what did you guys, when you're hearing that as far as in the moment, are those three good principles?

Jen Goins: I think so. I also really like the idea of kind of what the world or our instincts want to do is usually not the right way. We want to go our own way and so I think to really take the time to focus on that and to switch our minds. We've got to have a new way of thinking if we're going to move towards oneness.

I want to go back to one thing that you said, Brian, that I would think that if a man or a woman, but I'll speak as a woman, if my husband would say to me, hey, I'm angry right now and maybe even might not have the tone right or whatever, but would say I'm really angry right now, but we're going to get through this and I love you. That would just soften me. Even through gritted teeth, I love you. And even if you were mad about it, that as a woman I would think we might be okay.

Shaunti Feldhahn: I think it was something like in our survey of women, I think it was something like 95 percent of women said that would help solve it.

Brian Goins: I'm not a mathematician, but 95 is pretty good. I would have taken that on an algebra test. 95 percent. It's interesting, I was taking notes on what she said and one of the things that I thought was so good about the practicality of that when she said, okay, call a timeout and say your spouse is not your enemy. De-escalation is so important in those situations. Own your own part.

Part of that could be as well, I'm angry, we are going to need to deal with this, but let's do that in the morning, I'm going to own that in the morning. But then the issue, I love she said build that bridge back to oneness because you can do all the de-escalating in the world, you can say all the right things the night before, but if then in the morning you just kind of let it go and hope it goes away and you're not willing to deal with it, you're on one side of an unbuilt bridge. There's a gulf there. So to be willing to say no, we need to actually come back together and we need to be able to talk about it if it's still there, if that issue is still there.

Brian Goins: What an incredible secret. When you look at the pros and say what is it that keeps them together, it's not because they have a lack of conflict. It's because they know how to deal with conflict and they've put these fundamentals into place. Like we talked about, it might feel like for me dribbling with my left hand. It didn't come natural and it hasn't come natural in our relationship.

My natural for me is exactly what Vivian said. I learned it from my parents. They were both stuffers. I never saw them resolve a conflict very rarely. I think they've had to grow out of their own past which was a lot worse than my past. So I'm not blaming them at all. It's just that I didn't learn those skills and so now to have to apply these skills, they don't feel natural, but the more we do them, they become natural. That's why there is no natural golfer, there is no natural golf swing. It's because they've practiced it time and time and time again.

So that was great, those little steps that we can take. Call a timeout, de-escalate, remember that your spouse is not your enemy. There is an enemy, but it's not them and the devil wants nothing more than to put you at odds to each other because God cares so much not just about the vertical relationship but the horizontal relationship.

I think about with communion, He says don't take communion if you've got an issue with your brother or sister. Go resolve that first. He cares more about that than the communion. Get that right and then come back to me. Same thing is true in marriage.

The third point was to build that bridge back, to actually do something about it. You can't just keep putting it under the rug because you'll keep tripping over the rug.

You guys might not have noticed this, but I have a post-it note right here and I have been keeping track and I just want you to know with Jen here I was like, I'm going to put those five Fantastic Five principles into place.

Shaunti Feldhahn: I actually saw you leaned over and you put your hand on her back and I'm like, that was kind of nice of him but how interesting. We're sitting in a studio in front of our individual microphones. Oh, that's so sweet. Did you do all five?

Brian Goins: Well, so I was going to rattle them off again because I said in the last secret about these Fantastic Five and they're amazing. I was like, I'm not going to remember them, so I wrote them down on this one and I just started checking them off throughout this whole session. So I took your hand. It was a little awkward because we're standing weird and so it didn't feel like I was holding you, you probably wondering what I was doing because I told Shaunti that's the one I don't do naturally. That's one I need to work on. I told you that to keep me accountable.

I realized I did not leave you a text. Shoot. So I'm going to have to do a text here. I did put my arm around you. I did say you were beautiful right at the beginning. I don't know if you guys noticed this, but I was really a little I had a funky moment for about a minute during this when you were in a bad mood and you pulled yourself out of it. I was in a bad mood. I was feeling bad about the podcast, the direction it was going. I didn't like some of the things that were said, the reminders of the van story, and I was in this funk. Then I pulled myself out of it. I felt like I really resolved and we were we were all friends in the end.

I'm looking into the booth and I see the two women in the booth going, yes. Jen, thanks for joining us on this secret.

Jen Goins: Thank you guys for having me in your little club here.

Brian Goins: We'll have you on for another one if you'll come back.

Jen Goins: I would love that.

Brian Goins: So that's we're down three secrets. We have got because we're doing an extra secret, right? So we're doing one that's not in the book and so we're going up to 13 and so keep listening for the next secret. So thanks for joining.

Thanks for joining us for this episode. If you enjoy this podcast, please hit like or subscribe. Please leave a review or a comment. It just helps get the word out to more couples so that they could find hope for their own marriage. Listen, if you haven't picked up Shaunti's book that we're talking about all this season long, The Surprising Secrets of Highly Happy Marriages, you're going to want to get that and maybe grab one to give away. That's really what we're about here at FamilyLife. We want to help you experience oneness so that you could impact your corner of the world.

Listen, we've got a lot more help and hope for your marriage and family at FamilyLife.com. You can find other articles, you can find podcasts, you can find shows, small group resources, you'll want to check that out at FamilyLife.com.