The Love Dare: Intro/Day One

A few weeks ago, Josh bought "The Love Dare" and decided he wanted to start doing it...not because we have a shaky marriage or anything, but simply because we are human, and like everyone else, the stress of the real world eventually over takes all of the sweetness and romance that comes with being newlyweds. Not that Josh and I had much of a newlywed period since we got married in April, and then found out in May that we were having a baby. But anyways, that's beside the point. Josh has been doing it for about 2 weeks now, and yesterday I picked it up and decided that I was going to do it too. No harm in taking the extra initiative right? So, for the next few weeks, I'll be blogging about what I read in the book, what the actual dare is, and after each dare there are questions about what you did and what you learned. There are a few dares that I think are a little too personal to blog about for everyone to read, so if you see the blog go from day 10 to day 13 or something, just know that there was something in between that I felt the whole world didn't need to read about.

Day One: Love is Patient January 27, 2009

This first day talks mostly about how love is built on 2 main pillars: Patience and Kindness. Without both of them, marriage is destined for hardship and struggle. Patience brings an internal calm to an external storm. When things get frustrating, rather than jumping up and getting angry, patience teaches to be calm and refrain from throwing more on the fire by being negative. Patience is where love meets wisdom. Wisdom to know when to keep your mouth shut and not to increase an argument through fighting and being unnecessarily rude. Patience helps you to give your spouse permission to be a human. No one is perfect. Everybody makes mistakes...both big and small. And no matter what we try to do to prevent that in our spouse, it's bound to happen at some point or another. Josh can vouch for me, but one of the biggest patience issues I have is with Sports...lol. Josh is one of those people that is truly passionate about sports...football , baseball, basketball during the playoffs. Sports interviews, anything. So that's something that I am having to work on myself. Letting him enjoy his sports without nagging him to do something else. It's funny, one of the examples in today's message was how a patient wife lets her husband watch sports without contrantly nagging him to spend his time doing something else.

Today's Dare: Resolve to demonstrate patience and say nothing negative at all to your spouse. If the temptation to say something negative arises, choose to say nothing at all. I did pretty good with this dare. I try to stay positive about everything anyways. Since Josh and I rarely argue as it is, it was pretty simple to not be negative and show patience.