Hey friends, welcome to the Rhythms for Life podcast where each week we talk about resilient rhythms

that help you take charge of your mental, spiritual, physical, and relational health.

This season's conversations come from our best-selling book, The Fight for Us,

overcome what divides to build a marriage that thrives.

So grab your copy, invite your friends, and let's build healthy relationships together.

Welcome back. I'm Rebecca.

And I'm Gabe. And we're continuing the Fight for Us series on marriage and relationships.

And we're so grateful that you're part of this conversation with us.

If you didn't listen to the first two episodes, go back and start at the beginning because this

is going to be a journey that we get to go on together as we keep learning about marriage and how

to fight for our marriage versus be divided in our marriage. Yeah. So this week we're talking about

why marriages should fight, right?

Like we're like, wait, why should they fight? No. I know. That sounds oxymoronic.

Well, because the whole title is the fight for us, right? We should be fighting for each other,

not against each other. Right. But typically we get into a cycle where we fight with each other.

And I don't know if you could see a chart where it just maps the percentages of time.

Couples are feeling distant from one another, feeling disconnected, feeling like they're in a fight. But I would guess for a lot of couples, it's like half their marriage. Right? They go to work, upset about something the other person said, or they lose an entire weekend

because they haven't been able to resolve something or they just don't know how to connect.

And how much of our marriage life, you know, goes on without that sense of connection, unity,

and that feeling that we're all longing for in the committed marriage we have.

Right. And so this idea is that we fight because often we say harmful things, then we feel hurt, then we retreat, then we kind of want to self-protect.

So we don't even want to tell the other person that we're hurt. It's almost like we need to go self-sude or something. And then we're

...