Gospel Perspective on Marriage

• According to, It is OK to break-up with good, nice decent people, or even if you love someone forever, it doesn't mean you'll like them every day
• Importance of a gospel framework:
  • Knowledge of our destination: Consider what type of marriage you want
  • Criteria to judge our circumstance: Ensure you're moving toward the right goal
  • Perspective through the process: Understand what you are doing
• Marriage is a central component of the gospel and is the glue that ties families together
• Marriage between a man and a woman is ordained by God, central to the Creator’s plan for the eternal destiny of His children
• Covenant: two-way agreement where parties exchange commitments
• Covenants made at marriage are between each individual and God, and between each individual and their partner
• In a contractual marriage, parties seek happiness by walking away during troubles, but in a covenant marriage, couples work through issues together
• From a gospel standpoint marriage allows them to be drawn to the Lord, serve and cherish one another, share life experiences, grow together, and become one to realize the fulfillment that the Heavenly Father desires for His children.
• Ultimately, happiness results from making and honoring eternal marriage covenants
• In other words, marriage makes life organized and helps distribute resources
• Marriage has an "institutional" position in society helping structure societal order and timing
• Today marriage norms are changing, and many scholars suggest it is undergoing "deinstitutionalization," weakening social norms and leaving individuals to define and act independently
• Two possible outcomes of deinstitutionalization including establishing new norms (redefinition) or loss of norms (individualization)

Doctrinal Overviews for Marital Virtue

• Why marriage?
• What kind of marriage?
• Modern context of marriage
• How does the Latter-Day Saint culture fit within the modern context?

Marital Virtue and Self-Regulatory Processes

• Self-regulatory processes: couple satisfaction and function aren't directly linked to couple process
• Friendship involves developing a partnership with a shared vision, knowing likes/dislikes, and playing to strengths/weaknesses
• Loyalty is more than commitment but remembering the relationship's history and focusing on your partner
• Generosity is putting your partner’s needs first and being generous with forgiveness
• Fairness involves seeking self-improvement rather than trying to improve partners, developing flexible fairness
• Christlike attributes involve relying on Jesus Christ and His Atonement, trusting in His power and love to develop traits that provide strength and hope

Commitment in Context

• Commitment defined as rejecting potential alternatives

Interdependence Theory

• Foundational to long-term relationships
• As relationships progress, individuals depend more on each other due to spent resources, emotional investment, and projected loss
• This leads to commitment

Types of Commitment

• Constraint Commitment (Have to): Due to barriers such as kids, money, family, or friends
• Personal Dedication (Want to): For the sake of the relationship and the joint benefit of the couple

Exploring Constraint Commitment

• Perceived Constraint: Social pressure to stay together
• Material Constraint: Resources put into the relationship
• Felt Constraint: Feeling trapped, impacting self-worth

Sliding vs Deciding

• Relationships have innate pressure to become more committed over time
• Influenced by cultural, peer, and family pressures
• Sliding: Moving into commitment due to relationship inertia

Building Commitment

• Based on commitment through healthy dedication
• Requires sense of purpose and clear goals
• Requires moving beyond formal evaluations
• Focus on getting past disclosures
• Requires a constant state of vigilance vs sliding
• Requires a commitment to a covenant mentality:
  • Focusing on partner vs others
  • Focusing on strengths vs weaknesses

Gender and Partnership

• Martial equality increases intimacy, satisfaction, and mental health where inequalities lead to lower self-esteem and intimacy
• Sex is biological, while gender is a social concept
• Belief in irrelevant gender suggests the world would be better without gender or with gender-neutral housing but belief in eternal gender suggests an eternal aspect to gender
• Independence suggests men and women should be treated equally without depending on each other while separateness suggests that they are very different like from different planets
• Those who have courage and faith will plan for the ideal situation that God holds before them
• Gender neutrality: There is no need to be like men, we need women to rejoice in their womanhood and have spiritual confirmation of their identity, their value, and their eternal destiny
• Divine gender: the difference between women and men does not override the eternal promises that God has for His sons and daughters

True Partnership

• The lack of President and Vice President means neither spouse being superior or inferior, they walk side by side
• Priesthood holders should accept their wives as full partners and have a shared responsibility when presiding in righteousness
• True partnership, should lead to:
  • Discipleship: to learn from each other
  • Divine institution: understanding stewardships and family roles
  • Covenant: committing to learn and grow together with home repairs
  • Cleaving: stick together with tolerable separateness and independency vs cleaving

Avoiding False Partnerships

• Marital hierarchy: avoids the traditional myth and marital equality sameness: avoids the liberal myth

Purpose of Sealing

• According to Ulisses Soares, The temple sealing, a woman and a man enter the holy order of matrimony and are sealed and given eternal blessings/divine power.
• They should live according to the covenants they have made moving forward interdependently and in full partnership with the Lord.
• Nurturing/presiding means that both parents are obligated to help one another as equal partners
• The link between family of origin to marital outcomes is often connected back to the transmission of beliefs and attitudes

Family of Origin Factors

• Families provide our first experiences with relationships, emotions, communication, conflict, marriage
• Indirect effects: the observations we make that are internalized
• Direct effects: direct conversations about marriage and relationships with our families, communicating expectations
• Learning relationships skills (indirect effects) with families being primary method of learning about how to interact with other people then internalize/generalize
• Attachment would be the earliest example (ignoring conflict for example)
• We learn male and female roles in Se role theory and learn cognitive roles from our family that gives bases for our relational behavior

Family and Divorce

• Transmission is stronger with married parents and where children see marriage as strong
• Family of origin is a demographic risk factor for divorce though, and has risk factors that all have that can be thought of as traffic signs

Attachment

• Attachment is the ability to approach others with anxiety surrounding others that starts at birth
• Anxious attachments - a strong desire for closeness and dependence that creates worries about a partner's ability and availability
• Avoidant - Discomfort with closeness and dependence on others
• Secure attachment: low anxious and low avoidant
• Those high in anxious and avoidant attachment are more likely to be catfished online and more likely to engage in cyber date abuse where high avoidant/ anxious attachment is linked to increased likelihood of remaining single or divorce
• Secure attachment is linked to having higher marital satisfaction, increased stability and Better communication and marital process
• If attachments tend to be resistant to change we can Lie with parameters vs jump the fence and have drastic attachment changes and scars, with couple dynamics resulting due to the combination of attachment issues

Self Worth

• Self worth: your self perception about your value to yourself, others, and your community based on self esteem, body image, life satisfaction , perceived competence, identity
• There can be Negative self talk that puts you below others creating comparison stress
• Perfectionism can lead to rigid and unrealistic expectations for yourself AND in relationships

Core Identities

• Identifying that you are a child of God first and foremost, you are a member of the Church (a child of the covenant), and a disciple of Jesus Christ leads to spiritual strength.