Jason & Susan

The study we are going through in HomeBuilders group is called Building Teamwork in Your Marriage, part of the Homebuilders Couples Series developed by FamilyLife. There are many couples series including Preparing for Marriage (we did this for our premarital preparation), Keeping Your Covenant, Building Your Mate’s Self-Esteem, Resolving Conflict in Your Marriage, Overcoming Stress in Marriage, and many more. They also have several parenting series.

The first session in Building Teamwork in Your Marriage is titled “Your Mate is Different: Admit It.”

Men and women are more than noticeably different. Understanding these deeper differences is important to building a good marriage.

“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” Genesis 1:27

The study lists a few practical differences between men and women.

• Women have a greater need for belonging; men have a greater need for achieving.
• Women are more sensitive than men; the expressing of feelings is more important to them.
• Men tend to see their work as extensions of themselves; women are apt to see their husbands and families that way.
• Men are more goal-oriented; women are more need-oriented.
• Men are more focused in their thinking; women are more intuitive in their thinking.
• Women tend to require more frequent reassurance.
• Men are more physical; women are more relational.

We all went around and shared a few ways in which these differences have manifested in our marriage/relationship.

Here are a few examples:

• When it comes to sharing feelings, Jason is emotionally constipated while Susan suffers verbal diarrhea.
• A romantic hand-holding-hand stroll out to the main street is often interrupted by Jason’s sudden burst and run towards the middle of the street, waving madly for a taxi.
• Jason must say “I love you” at least 100 times a day.
• Baking a batch of wheat-free cookies speaks louder than words.
• Last but not least (for the mature readers only), sex begins in the kitchen.

We are purposefully created differently so let us celebrate our differences by loving each other the way we are made.