A Heart That Beats for Home

38. 25 Lessons Learned in 25 Years of Marriage: Avoiding Strings of Bad Days, Communicating Your Needs, and Knowing the Difference Between a Bad Habit and a Bad Heart/ Lessons 11-15

• Nikki Smith • Season 1

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How do you keep the spark alive in a marriage that's spanned over two decades? Join Nikki Smith as she shares her 25 Lessons for Marriage Success, drawing from 25 years of marriage and 32 years of partnership. In this episode, we unpack the critical lesson of not letting bad days accumulate and how to prevent minor frustrations from snowballing into bigger issues. Through personal stories, Nikki illustrates the concept of the "slow fade" and emphasizes the importance of starting each day with a fresh perspective. 

Discover why the notion that your spouse should inherently know your needs is a myth that could be harming your relationship. Nikki dives deep into the necessity of clear, ongoing communication, explaining how changing life circumstances require constant dialogue. You'll also hear about the minor yet common annoyances, like half-finished projects and scattered contact lenses, and how understanding and managing these habits can lead to a more harmonious home life. Tune in for practical advice and heartfelt anecdotes aimed at helping you embrace both the joy and chaos of marital life, strengthening your relationship one lesson at a time.

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Speaker 1:

Hey friends, I'm Nikki Smith, your host here at A Heart that Beats for Home, the podcast where we're ditching filters and diving headfirst into the raw beauty of all things home. Now, I am no expert when it comes to this whole parenting and marriage dance. I'm simply a gal who's been riding the mom roller coaster for 22 years and a wife still untangling the mystery of it all 25 years after saying I do. My goal is to bring you unapologetically messy and boldly genuine conversations about cultivating strong families. We're gonna laugh, possibly cry, and straight talk about the joy and chaos that comes within the four walls that we call home. No judgment and certainly no perfection, just real talk from my heart, a heart that beats for home. Let's dive in.

Speaker 2:

Hello friends, welcome back to another episode. Thanks for being here. Always love having you all tune in week after week and it means the world that you continue to show up here. So thanks for being here, excited to be jumping into week three of our series here on 25 lessons over 25 years tackling the topic of marriage, and this is something that has been really fun for me, kind of just to reflect on as I'm coming up with these 25 lessons, to think back about how much we have learned, how much we've grown, how much we have failed forward over the last 25 years of marriage, but more like 32 years of being together in a relationship and just excited to share some of these things. It's been a fun reflection and I'm loving working through these. We've already tackled one through 10. Today we're going to tackle 11 through 15. And again, over and over, I will tell you guys this is not me coming to you with a guidebook of we've done it all right and we're excited to tell you how to do it.

Speaker 2:

My real goal in this is that number one that you would be able to relate to a lot of this. I think so much of this is relatable and when you talk to others who are in marriages and relationships. I think we all get caught up on a lot of the same things the humanness of our own hearts and our relationships that get in the way, and how navigating through these things in a way that's moving us towards deeper, more intimate relationship, and how that can strengthen our marriage, is just a fun camaraderie that we can have when we go through these, and so I know I've heard from some of you that a lot of these are really relatable. You know, ultimately, my goal isn't that you would take these 25 and say these are my 25 things that we're going to implement into our marriage, but that you would listen and when something strikes a chord, when something resonates with you of, oh man, that might be part of why we're having that rub or that might be something we should implement to see if we can communicate a little bit better. My hope is that you can, throughout this series, take maybe even one thing a week that you think I'm going to give that a shot. I'm going to work on that in my own life. I'm going to work on that in how I communicate with my spouse or how I interact with my spouse and hopefully, at the end of this, everybody can walk away and say I did take something that's helping me in my relationship.

Speaker 2:

That's the ultimate goal is that, as we share what we have learned over the last 25 years of navigating marriage, the highs and the lows, the struggles and the successes, that something that we have struggled through. I love the quote that says a struggle kept silent is a struggle wasted, and a lot of these lessons came through our hardest struggles, and so, in being able to share them, I really do hope that it's not a wasted struggle. It's definitely not a wasted struggle in our personal relationship, because every time that we've struggled and we've fought through it and we have sought counsel and have really dug in to committing to come out stronger, obviously our relationship has benefited, and it would be even that much more worthwhile if others' relationships could benefit as well. So let's jump into number 11, and that is don't let bad days accumulate. What do I mean by that? I think it's known fact that some days we just have not so great days, right, they're not all horrible, rotten, no good days, but there are days that we just are off. Maybe it's just you're exhausted or you're emotional, or there's been some kind of trauma or just things aren't going your way, and a lot of times when we have a little bit of a bad day or we're having a hard time finding joy in the everyday things, we can get crabby and then that can interfere in our relationship, and me waking up on the wrong side of the bed usually results in conflict with children or conflict with my spouse. That, ultimately, is my responsibility because I'm not controlling my joy and I'm being crabby.

Speaker 2:

But whenever we have a bad day in relationship or maybe there's just a lot of tension or a lot of sandpaper type interactions between the two of us, the important thing for us is that we don't let those bad days stack up together, and I'll tell you why that is. It's just life. There are going to be times where there's just there's just a bad day and it just happens and we have to give grace to each other to recognize they're struggling with something. They have some physical things going on, they have a ton of extra stress in their job or with kid situations, and we just have to give grace for that. But when we have bad days where we're maybe not talking kindly to each other or we went to bed a little irritated with each other. When we have days like that, it is so crucial for me and my husband that it's an isolated thing, it's a one day, it's a commitment to even if I wake up tomorrow on the wrong side of the bed again, it is my responsibility and my duty to figure it out and fix it.

Speaker 2:

Because what happens is when we string together bad day after bad day after bad day, it's something that I like to call the slow fade. It's something that we don't recognize in the moment, but by day two or day three, the distance that starts to grow in relationship, the lack of communication, the cold shoulder, the not wanting to have interaction or to go on the walk or to hold their hand that is a dangerous slow fade towards bigger problems that are coming down the pipeline fade towards bigger problems that are coming down the pipeline. And when we continue on that path, when we continue to do that and string these things together, we can find ourselves a couple weeks, a couple months in some extreme cases a couple years down the road going. How did we get to this point? How did we get here?

Speaker 2:

And a lot of times it's something happened where we put up a wall, we held a grudge, we made inaccurate conclusions about who our spouse is or what their intentions were, and it becomes something that grew out of proportion for what actually happened. And so just a commitment that we have made is that we will not let bad days accumulate. It's okay, right, they occasionally happen, and we got to give grace and by the end of the day, after 25 years, we're at the point where pretty much either one of us will look at the other if it's been the responsibility of our own actions that has made it a bad day and say, hey, I'm sorry that I was really on edge today, I'm sorry that I was really short, I'm sorry that I gave you that tone, I'm sorry that I was really short, I'm sorry that I gave you that tone, I'm sorry, whatever it might be, I own that. I'm really feeling stressed out. I'm carrying weight that's not mine from all these different situations, and instead of keeping that on my back, I need to figure out how to release that so that I can show up in our family and in our marriage not cranky and not irritable and not taking things out on you that aren't your fault, and so that has really just been key for us.

Speaker 2:

The other thing is, anytime that we let these things accumulate, the temperature in your home will change. When you've had a bad day, and it's just that most of the time the kids are like, ah, mom's a little grumpy today or dad's a little grumpy today. But when these are things that start to become a habit and they start to be day after day after day, 100% it affects the atmosphere of your home. Your children, a hundred percent, sense the cold shoulder, they sense the snippy tone, they sense the distance and the lack of connection through, you know, touching his back when you walk by or grabbing his hand in the car, and our kids pick up on that stuff and it changes the temperature of the home and it creates a doubt and it creates anxiety in our children. And so there are so many reasons why it's so important to keep this in check so that we don't look back in a week or a month or a year and say how did so many days go by, how did so many things build up on top of each other that were unresolved that we really let it get to this point? So lesson number 11 for us is don't let bad days accumulate.

Speaker 2:

Number 12 is seek to understand, and this is the whole mindset of, instead of saying obviously I'm right, switching that mindset to one of conversation and one that asks good questions, not passive, aggressive questions not, you know, I'm gonna make you feel stupid questions but ask questions that more align with. I need to seek to understand why we're seeing this differently. This could be in how we want to handle finances. This could be in routines around the house, responsibilities around the house, how we're going to deal with kids, how we're going to spend our free time. There are so many different things where we will have differences of opinions, and some of those things are small enough that we just keep rolling and it doesn't really matter.

Speaker 2:

But when there are situations where we are not seeing eye to eye on something, instead of making it my whole goal to prove that I'm right and to come up with the case to show you why I'm right and you're wrong, taking on behavior of, I really want to listen more than I speak and I really want to seek to understand. I want to know what got you to that point of view. I want to know what things you read or you researched, or your past that led you there. I want to know if it's because of something that I'm feeling makes you feel unsafe or insecure and really being able to just ask questions, to really dig in and hear. Why are we seeing this differently? And when I seek to understand and I hear and I ask those good questions, is my opinion going to change. Am I going to be more sympathetic to your opposition to maybe the way I wanted to do it or the way it's always been done? And so just always taking on that attitude of having a heart that's willing to seek to understand, not to just prove that my way is the right way and this works so well with children as well, when there's conflict and you're like, nope, that's not how we're doing it, I'm the mom, I'm the dad, this is just how it's going to be done. The older our kids get, the more I want to try to seek to understand why they're asking what they're asking, why they're pushing back on. The things that they're pushing back on Never is an excuse for disrespect, but it's an attitude of I can learn and I can gain understanding when I ask good questions and when I stop to really lean in instead of just pushing my objective all the way through. So that's number 12, seek to understand Number 13,.

Speaker 2:

Never assume that your spouse can read your mind right. We all think there's got to be a time. We've been married enough years now that he should just know what I want. He should see the things that I need. He should know when I'm overwhelmed, why I'm overwhelmed and what would help me not be overwhelmed. He should know my likes and my dislikes. And the reality is is that good communication is probably one of the very most important things in marriage, and I know we did a whole podcast episode on the power of communication. That's a great one to go back and re-listen to and some practical tips and some strategies on how to improve communication in your marriage.

Speaker 2:

But the reality is, as we change, every time that life changes or we get older, or our household situation changes, parenting stages change the things that we need aren't always the same, and so if my husband understood what I needed when we got married at 21, and that's how he was still trying to meet my needs at 46, when so much life has changed, so much of how I even operate and the things that make me crazy or the things that bring me joy have really changed a ton over the last 25 years and when we assume that someone knows what we need. When we are in the kitchen and we're frustrated and there's a bunch of stuff in our brain that we're running through a list of things that we need to get done and instead of just communicating in a healthy way what those things are, in a way that's not again passive, aggressive, the difference that that makes, opposed to taking this kind of stance and stubbornness towards but he should just know what I need, or the kids should just know what I need. One thing that we have talked about a lot on the past episodes is that whole question of what can I do to help, and to some people that feels very much like I shouldn't even have to have that asked me. They should just be able to see what I need. They should just jump in and do it. And that's true in some circumstances, right, obviously, if I'm in a kitchen and it's absolutely looks like a bomb has gone off on there and there's dishes and there's school stuff and there's just all kinds of stuff that needs to get done, and somebody walks in and says, what can I do to help, the initial reaction might be well, look around and pick some stuff up, and so there are those situations where it's obvious that there's stuff that can be done to help.

Speaker 2:

But a lot of times myself I won't speak for all women, but I think a lot of us women we have a running list in our head of all the things that get that needs to get done. Right, we need to go grocery shopping, and Johnny needs this for school, and we got to do that project, and we've got to get ready for this birthday party and we've got to wrap that gift and I need to go outside and water the plants. And it's all these things that are this running list in our head that has us so overwhelmed. But we're not good at saying to people in our family hey, while I do these dishes, would you mind running outside and taking care of that thing for the dog and watering my plants? It would mean so much to me if you would do that for me while I'm taking care of the kitchen, so that we could just sit down together when we're done and both be able to relax, right? I don't know why that is so hard for us to do and we usually don't say it until we're at the point of complete frustration that we are doing all of the things in our mental checklist and other people are sitting around or they're not being attentive to what we need instead of just asking.

Speaker 2:

And we all look at lists differently. All of us handle stress differently, right? Some of us, when we get stressed out and there's a ton to do, we get snappy and short. Others of us become very quiet and just go into work mode, and there's also a huge difference between men and women and just how we process things. And so for me to assume that my husband always knows what's happening in my head and what it is that I need is setting us up for complete failure in our marriage and in our communication. And so lesson number 13 is never assume that my spouse can read my mind and get good at communicating what it is that I really need. Lesson number 14 is recognize the difference of a bad skill or habit versus a bad heart, and I think often again, this kind of goes up to the last one that we just talked about.

Speaker 2:

It's easy to get hyper offended and assume that somebody is a bad person when things don't go the way we saw them going, and the more I look at my own life, the more I look at my husband's life. There are a lot of things where maybe we just do things different and I don't even wanna call it a bad skill maybe some bad habits or habits that aren't the same. We do things a little bit differently. This is a silly example but it's so practical. So I wear daily disposable contacts and I have a really, really bad habit. At the end of the night, if I get into bed and I have forgotten to take my contacts out and throw them away when I'm doing my nighttime routine, I will pop my contacts out and I will put them on my bedside table. Right, they're disposable. Tomorrow morning I can take them off my nightstand, I can go throw them in the garbage no harm, no foul. Well, occasionally there's a couple of days worth of contacts on my my end table and occasionally they get knocked onto the floor or they stick to my book and then I'm carrying my book and a contact drops on the floor somewhere.

Speaker 2:

And there have been a handful of times where my husband has either had a contact step to the bottom of his foot or has seen it laying on the floor and I'm sure everything in him as an engineer, orderly, systematic person thinks this is stupid, like all you had to do was walk to the garbage can and throw your contact away at the end of the night. Right, I'm an artsy person, I'm kind of a loosey, goosey, go with the flow, and to me, contacts on the nightstand is so not an issue. And if this was something that my husband decided made me a bad person, or created a story in his head that I'm lazy or I don't care about him stepping on a contact, all of these different things, instead of just recognizing, no, that's just a bad habit that she has. That's a bad habit and annoys the heck out of me. But she doesn't have a bad heart. She's not doing it to be vindictive. She's not doing it to cause me anxiety and fury and he very seldom has fury.

Speaker 2:

But the difference in that, in the same way that I can look at things, I can't stand the TV being on at night in our bedroom. I can't stand it. I don't know. I like to come into my room and have it be totally quiet and not a bunch of different distractions. I like to come into my room and have it be totally quiet and not a bunch of different distractions, and so I could say my husband has a bad heart or he's a bad person because he's not recognizing that I just want it to be quiet in our room at night, and when he comes in and he turns on the TV to watch the news or to watch that quick fishing video or hunting video, while I'm trying to calm down for the end of the night, I can create all these things that are making him a bad person in my heart and in my mind. When the reality is it could be a difference in opinion or it could just be a bad habit. That could very easily be a conversation that we could have, and I think so often when there's things that rub us wrong, then we start to fester on them and we start to create all of these stories in our head. We start to take this little tiny seed of frustration of something that happened, whether it be the socks on the floor or how you only half finish a project.

Speaker 2:

For me, I am famous for half finishing a project. I will start a project upstairs. I'll start cleaning out a closet, I'll pull out a vacuum and then I'll have to go pick up a kid from school. Right, and so I'll go pick up a kid from school and then that leads into we have to go get snacks for the party tomorrow and I come home at nine o'clock and I go oh shoot, I totally forgot that. Our entire closets, on our bed, the vacuums plugged in, with the cord running all the way through the upstairs and that makes my husband crazy. It makes my husband crazy to have half finished projects and again he could decide that I'm a bad person for doing that, or he could just recognize that it's just a bad habit that I have. It's a bad habit that I can very easily start one, two, three projects and get them half done and things look way worse than they did when I started.

Speaker 2:

It usually comes back around, sometimes it takes a couple of days, but these are just little things that start to wear at us over time. If we believe the narrative of that's a bad person, or they're doing it intentionally to make me mad because they have a bad heart, or they're trying to prove a point and just really taking ownership of the ability to look at our spouse and say okay, they are not a bad person, that's just a bad or annoying habit, and I need to figure out a way that we can go back to lesson 13 and assume that they cannot read my mind and know why this makes me so crazy, but that we can have a good, healthy communication around it to hopefully get to a better place, instead of me creating this entire narrative of them being a bad person. And then lesson 15 is take interest in what interests your spouse. Now, this does not mean that you have to pick up every single hobby that they have and you know. Now it's like one Saturday we're doing my hobby, one Saturday we're doing your hobby. But this is just, I think, something that I have realized is really important.

Speaker 2:

Anything that is important to my spouse, I want to be important to me. That is important to my spouse I want to be important to me. Now, important doesn't mean 100% participation, but important can mean asking questions about, seeking to understand what it is and why they like it, being able to have conversation around it. I know that there are so many couples that have the husband has one interest or the wife has another and never talk about them. We just go our separate ways. But I want to invest in the things that are important to my spouse. I want to learn about them, I want to be able to sit at dinner and talk about the golf game and actually understand what is being said when they talk about scores and handicaps and birdies and eagles and all of these different things. I wanna be able to understand and participate in that conversation. In the same way that if I'm learning pottery, I want my husband to be super excited to come look at what I'm creating, or to be excited with me when we go to buy some glaze for the stuff that I'm making or whatever it might be, instead of it just being well, that's your thing, and I don't really have an interest in that, and I think it isn't only just about hobbies For me. I have really tried to make it a priority that I am able to talk to my husband about work on a personal level. I'm able to name some of his employees or coworkers by name and ask how are they doing? How are their kids, how did it go when you traveled with them? Today? All these different things where I'm able to have conversation about the things that are a big part of his life and a big part of his day, so that they know that I care and they know that I'm listening and they know that I'm taking interest in what they're saying and trying to be involved.

Speaker 2:

I remember way back in our earlier days of marriage and young kids, I used to go away, maybe once a quarter for a weekend to do good old fashioned scrapbooking right, and I would go away for two days and I would just work my butt off putting these scrapbooks together of our kids. I'd be so proud of them. It was such a fun and rewarding thing for me to do as a mom and I would. When I first came home, I would sit down next to my husband and I'd show him the pages that I did. There are life, there are kids, there are stories and, honestly, he probably likes looking at them, but it has a totally different value to him than it does to me. I know that he appreciates that I do them, that I'm creating these for our children and as these keepsakes and these memories for our kids to know kind of their stories. But I know it doesn't do the same thing for him that it does to me.

Speaker 2:

But when I was doing this several times a year and coming home, when it got to the point that when I got home he would say hey, come over, show me the book show me what you did. I want to see him what that did for me to know that he was taking interest in a how I was spending my time and something that I was working really hard on. B that he knew that it was important to me. So it became important to him. And that could be something as simple as the way that we control our emotions when our spouse wants to show us a project they've been working on at the house. Or when our spouse is doing yard work outside and they've worked really hard and they make a comment about something about the yard being able to go like yes, you killed it. Oh, my gosh, I want to go out there, show me what you did, or show me how you did that. Or in the garage if they're working on a project, like take interest in what interests them, so that we don't get in this rut of living two parallel lives in our own lanes doing our own things and only having these common denominators of, yes, we have children together, yes, we manage and run a home together, but all of the other stuff in between we're kind of on our own, and I just think it's so important for a healthy relationship to take interest in what interests your spouse. And so that is number 11 through 15.

Speaker 2:

I'm going to recap them real quick. Lesson 11, don't let bad days accumulate. Lesson 12, seek to understand. Number 13, never assume they can read your mind. Number 14, recognize the difference between a bad skill or habit and a bad person with a bad heart. And number 15, take interest in what interests your spouse. So there you have it, guys. We will jump into 16 to 20 next week. We are getting there. By the time this airs, we are back from our big, awesome 25th anniversary trip Next week. I'll take a little bit of time to share with you guys all the amazing things about that trip and just the special time that it was for us, and just kind of let you in on that a little bit. So come back next week when we jump into the next five lessons as we are coming to an end in this fun series on marriage. So until next week, friends, take care.