Marital APGAR Part 4
Every marriage is different and contains its own nuances. If your marriage were a newborn baby, what would its APGAR score be? For those of you who don’t know, the APGAR score is what a doctor looks at one minute and five minutes after a baby is born. They check for five things: activity, pulse, grimace, appearance and respiration. I have adjusted the five categories tested in the APGAR chart to reflect what we do and how we respond to one another in our individual marriages.
Today’s topic is about GRIMACE. For the sake of BMWK, this category covers whether or not you and your spouse have the ability to fight fair with one another. Every married couple encounters disagreements and heated arguments. The key is how you, as a couple, deal with them. See the chart below: (click image to enlarge)
Prior to going into too many details, let me just say that if you feel like your marriage is in the 0 points category, please seek counsel. If there is physical or emotional abuse, you also need to seriously consider getting to a safe place and employing some tough love to ensure that your individual life is not in jeopardy.
My husband and I have definitely been in the 0 points category. Thankfully, we did not deal with physical abuse, but we both drained one another’s emotional bank accounts during our first 18 months of marriage. He was a ring bearer, and I was a flower girl, and neither of us wanted to take the adult route when we engaged in disagreements. We would run to our pastors, whom we considered spiritual parents, and tattle on one another, refusing to take the time to understand each other’s point of view.
Now we’re at the point where we realize how counterproductive that childishness is to a healthy marriage. We also do not have a dysfunctional marriage as part of our “Activity” category in our marital vision. If we don’t commit to keeping the lines of communication open, even in disagreement, we are apt to raise children that do not know how to communicate when they are angry, either.
We have learned to expose any adversarial attitudes that could possibly hinder our marriage. Our pastors gave us an exercise that we engage in quite often. We sit down with one another periodically, and say, “Let me tell you what the devil is trying to tell me in this situation.” Then we proceed with revealing every thought in our minds that either makes us feel belittled, or feel like we are purposely being hurt by one another, or any other kind of negativity that could potentially blow up in our faces down the line. Then we sit down and discuss it calmly, being transparent and vulnerable with one another so we can have a full understanding of one another’s viewpoints.
As a result, we have come to a score of 2 points in this category. Once again, by the grace of God, we have learned how to communicate our disagreements without hitting one another below the belt.
Do you fight fair in your marriage? Has it always been that way? What kinds of tools to you and your spouse use in your attempts to fight fair?
God bless!
~ Harriet
Harriet is a hilariously joyful married woman who resides in northeast Louisiana with her husband who is a restaurant manager. She works for a local University and along with her husband is the proud parent of a 3 year old son and a 10 year old stepson (who lives in NC).
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King James
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Anna
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Harriet
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