Hello and Merry Christmas. Welcome to the Naked Marriage podcast. We are Dave and Ashley Willis and on this podcast we address the truth about sex intimacy and lifelong love. We've got a really important topic today.

It's on the heavier side not to be a downer at Christmas, but this is such an important and very real issue that needs to be addressed specifically this time of year.

But even if you're listening to this and it's not Christmas time, this is also a topic that's very relevant year round. So don't tune out. You might be listening to this in the middle of the summer, but it has relevance for you. So stick around at first.

The love of my life is here and she's going to share a recent review.

That's right. And thank you guys so much for leaving your reviews. When you leave a five star review, it lets people know about our podcast and plus it just keeps us going. We love hearing from you all. So today, this is from LifeSourceLady and she entitled it Divorce for Preparing for Marriage.

She said, I've been divorced for 13 years because he found someone else, but God has laid it on my heart to pray for my future husband. So I believe that he is going to bless me with a godly man. I cannot say enough of how much I love your podcast so inspiring and informational.

I hope and pray that whoever God has for me has him listening to. Thank you, Sheila. Thank you Sheila so much for sharing that. And I just think there's so much wisdom in preparing for marriage.

That's just so awesome. And you know, Sheila is actually one of several messages we've received from people who are single or divorced and they're wanting to be married someday.

And I think that's just such an awesome thing. So please tell your single friends who want to be married someday about this podcast as well.

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Hey guys, we are so happy to be coming to you today because it is Christmas. Merry Christmas.

We love the Christmas season so much. It's such an awesome time to get together with family, but we also want to own the fact that for a lot of us, we are dealing with the reality that maybe someone that we love so much isn't here with us anymore.

Like maybe someone has passed on or maybe things just aren't the same and we're grieving the loss of how Christmas used to be when we were kids or when maybe kids were little and now they're grown and they're gone and they can't come home this Christmas.

Or maybe maybe you're listening to this and you're divorced right now and it's the first Christmas without your spouse and and things are just going to be different because you're sharing custody of the children and you don't know how it's going to look.

We want to own the fact that that it's not always the happiest time of year for people. And so how do we deal with that and how do we we make Christmas better through the grieving process.

And so many people are hurting at the holidays because really Christmas it can be the most joyous time of the year, but what it really is is it an it's an amplifier.

It amplifies everything that you're feeling. So the good things in your life can feel even better at Christmas. But what we don't talk about enough is that the difficult things in your life can seem even harder.

Yes. The losses in your life, the people that you've lost you feel that more acutely around Christmas time and we've had several requests leading up to Christmas for people asking specifically can you address this issue of how to deal with with grieving or with loss or with pain.

With with our spouse together because what grief can do oftentimes is be a wedge to drive a couple apart because we each grieve in such unique and individual ways grief is kind of like a fingerprint.

It looks different on everybody. And so when we're dealing with with the loss of a loved one or any kind of loss.

Our spouse is most likely dealing with that same loss in a different way. And so we have to find a way to support each other and to give each other time and space to work through it in a healthy way.

And this isn't just a Christmas issue at that point like you know working through grief and loss is something that all year round I think couples have to find a way to do.

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