Blog Post: Reversing the Effects of Distraction in Midlife Marriage
For years, your children created a distraction from your marriage relationship. Even if you were thoughtful to avoid becoming child-centered, the distraction was inevitable. Raising children requires most of your attention, both functionally and relationally.
While you were distracted, two barriers to intimacy may have developed.
Blog Post: Inject a Dose of Fun Into Your Midlife Marriage!
For newly empty-nesters, you have spent the previous 5 or more years in an all out push to successfully launch teenagers into adulthood. Your marriage has been consumed with coordination of high school sports, activities, concerts, recitals, and special programs. Your time together was spent mostly in giving your full support to your children as they built their list of honors and achievements for college applications or job resumes. Launching teens can be stressful and exhausting!
Book Review: The 4 Seasons of Marriage: Secrets to Lasting Marriage, by Gary Chapman
Marriage relationships have their ups and downs: times of growth and times of atrophy; times of strength and times of challenge. Well known author and marriage counselor Gary Chapman describes these as “seasons.” In The 4 Seasons of Marriage: Secrets to a Lasting Marriage, Chapman describes the emotions, attitudes and actions that characterize each season, and he provides strategies for moving through difficult seasons and lengthening favorable seasons.
Book Review: Marriage in the Middle: Embracing Midlife Surprises, Challenges and Joys by Dorothy Littel Greco
Marriage can be difficult at every stage, but especially during transitions. Do you remember the struggles and adjustments that you made when you newly wed? Then the relationship changed again when kids came into the family. Chances are good you have avoided or left unresolved many issues over the last 20+ years. Now that it’s just the two of you again, those issues are going to come back to the forefront.
Book Review: Empty Nest, Full Life - Discovering God’s Best for Your Next by Jill Savage
Author Jill Savage offers a guide through the emotional chaos that confronts parents when their children leave home, leaving them with a sense of loss and confusion. This dynamic is especially potent for women who have spent most of the prior 25 years dedicated to raising children. For the primary caregiver, their personal goals, dreams and desires have been put on hold for the sake of the family. Now that the kids are gone, they are left asking, “Now What?” “Who am I?” “What do I do?”