If there's a challenge in your marriage, one of the worst things you can do is to just

put it under the rug and pretend like everything is just fine.

We want to encourage you today to get into some difficult stuff and get it out into the open

so your marriage can heal.

I'm John Fuller, along with Dr. Greg Smalley and his wife Aaron. They head up the focus on the

family marriage department and Greg it's pretty dangerous isn't it to pretend like oh I've got

my act altogether here in the marriage. Yeah, absolutely because I think it creates a lack of authenticity.

So when we're pretending that everything is perfect, it kind of creates this facade of intimacy within our relationship because we're human.

Trying to learn to live with someone completely different than me,

that's gonna create challenges.

And so if we're pretending that nothing's there

or that, oh, we're totally fine and perfect,

it feels very inauthentic.

I think it also, though, creates just, we miss opportunities to grow together.

Because if we're pretending everything is perfect, then we're not facing the challenges or

noticing areas that we need to deal with so we're not growing.

And that's such an important part of a marriage is we just keep growing learning

dealing with issues repairing conflict all that is required in so for

pretending hey we're good we're going to miss that kind of stuff.

Well, and then ultimately what happens when it's compiling, it will explode.

And so then it may end up coming out in ways that you really don't want it to ultimately causing more damage and more things

to talk about. That's not true. Oh wait that's... We're going to push pause we'll be

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