Happily married now but healing many wounds from my past.

Cherish: The One Word That Changes Everything for Your Marriage

I really recommend the book "Cherish" by Gary Thomas.

Has anyone else here read it?

My husband and I read it together by passing it back and forth because of our schedules and kids. Then we'd talk about what we read when we would make time later.

This might be the best book we've ever read for our marriage.

I don't think we'd put that much thought into how when we married we promised to "cherish" one another and what exactly that meant, but with two busy careers and three kids 5 and under, we fell into a pattern of not prioritizing the cherishing in our marriage the way we could have been. We were being "efficient." Effective... but hardly romantic.

But then enters this book! Now we have changed our priorities.

My husband even had a few "aha" moments when he realized some of his previous actions had been undermining me with the kids or generally being un-cherishing toward me. He had never realized that doing those things were maybe not bad if we were just independent people out in the world, but that because of our relationship and the importance of it that those actions were actually harmful. (Like he would take the kids' side in arguments or would be really grumpy if he didn't want to go to a festival that meant a lot to me. Stuff that mainly originates from natural expressions of our different personalities.)

Essentially what I'm trying to say is that this book helped us communicate, put things into words that I hadn't figured out how to yet, and it's brought us closer together when I already thought we were pretty close. And that's kinda cool.

ETA: Gary Thomas is a religious author. I believe most of the ideas stand strong on a secular-level too, but if religious bits peppered throughout a book would take away from it for you, then this one probably isn't for you.

[This message edited by Bumblebee23 at 10:00 AM, June 12th (Tuesday)]

3 comments posted: Tuesday, May 15th, 2018