Watching the film

In football, teams will watch films of their previous games to see what they did and did not do well. They take that information to make adjustments to hopefully play better the next week. What do you think would happen though, if they never watched film and lost game after game, year after year? They would have a lot of bad habits to break that they had created over the years.

In marriage, we tend to never look at film and then we act surprised when our marriages fail or hit a major season slump.

What if we looked at our "films" on a regular basis? It could be a weekly thing if you are in a slump or a monthly thing if you think things are going great. Or it could be whatever works best for your marriage. I can see times in my own marriage where if we had only been watching film on a regular basis we never would have gone through a slump because we would have caught our mistakes before they became a habit. Around the time the girls came along I (Bethany) made the mistake of putting the girls before Ace. I thought Ace was a grown man who could take care of himself, but the girls being just babies and toddlers needed me to take care of them all the time. We got away from dates, we never talked and he was working WAY too much. If we had been watching out for those mistakes they might not have become bad habits that were hard to break and unlearn.

So what does looking at film in your marriage look like. My suggestion is a date where you just honestly take the time to talk and listen to each other. Knowing what your film session is, you can come prepared to bring things up that you would like to work on or reinforce something you think you did well on. Let me caution you not to make this a gripe session, but to come with only one or two things that you really would like to work on and two or three things that are good habits that you would like to continue. Even the Detroit Lions do something good once in awhile and need to be encouraged to keep that up.

When you first start watching your films there may be a lot of bad habits you need to break and it can be tempting to try to correct all of them at once. That's really not a good idea though. It can be overwhelming and you will be trying so hard to fix everything that you won't work hard on any one of them. Pick the most important ones first or pick the ones you know you can fix quickly so you can move onto the next one. Before you know it your team will be winning and it will get easier to find those good habits to reinforce and harder to find the bad habits to fix. Now that does not mean you can stop watching film, it just means it will be a little more fun when you do.

Now go watch those films!