So your kids are teens, but surprise! You’re having another baby. What do you do now? A surprise pregnancy can be a bit of a shock, particularly if you and your spouse expected to be empty nesters soon. It’s also a big adjustment for your kids, who are focused on their friends, extracurricular activities, dating, and planning for college. This change is likely creating some chaos inside you, your spouse, your marriage, and your family. We can imagine that this news has created a seismic s...| SYMBIS Assessment
What do you do when you disagree with your spouse’s approach to parenting? Most of us enter marriage with the awareness that we’ll have disagreements with each other from time to time. But we might not anticipate conflict over parenting styles. If you’re feeling conflicted about how your spouse parents your children, what can you do? Different Parenting Styles Can Be Beneficial It’s tempting to harbor hard feelings or information we don’t want our spouse to hear. We don’t want to ...| SYMBIS Assessment
Does your spouse act like one of the kids? Parenting kids is a full-time job, both for you and your spouse. But if your spouse acts more like one of the kids than your parenting partner, that makes your job more challenging. Rather than presenting a united front and guiding your children together, you find yourself parenting your spouse, too. The problem is, teaching appropriate behavior to your kids means they need to see it modeled. If one of their parents doesn’t always follow basic etiq...| SYMBIS Assessment
When you’re busy with kids, it’s often tough to find time to focus on your marriage. The couples we’ve worked with over the years have told us that making time together is one of their biggest struggles. If you’re wondering how to reclaim some precious time with your spouse, read on. Carving out time together can be challenging when you have children, no matter their ages. Babies and small children require so much of your time. But when they’re older—say, in their pre-teen and tee...| SYMBIS Assessment
Is it wrong to want to spend all your time with your spouse? Maybe your spouse has lots of friends and enjoys spending time at social gatherings. In contrast, you’d rather stay home, just the two of you, and spend time together. Is that too much to ask? You’re content without a large social circle, and you wish your spouse felt the same way. How can you navigate this major personality difference? What Recharges Your Inner Battery? When it comes to our social needs, a lot of people are har...| SYMBIS Assessment
So you want to enjoy some vacation time together, but your spouse has a habit of using all their off days with his or her family. You love your in-laws, but you don’t want to spend all your days off with them. More than that, you want a little downtime with your spouse as a couple. Is it possible to create a better balance? Strong Family Relationships Are Great, But Balance is Essential It’s great that your spouse has a close relationship with their family. The fact that they can spend qu...| SYMBIS Assessment
Does having sex less often mean your marriage is in trouble? A married couple’s sex life is often a pretty good barometer for how things are going in their relationship as a whole. Intimacy, passion, and commitment are all important and crucial ingredients for a fulfilling married life and lifelong love. Still, there are times throughout your life when sex will happen less often than you’d like for it to, and that doesn’t necessarily mean your relationship is any less healthy. There are...| SYMBIS Assessment
Summer is in full swing, and this time of year is perfect for nurturing your relationship with your spouse. Whether you’re going on a bucket list vacation or spending time closer to home, you can absolutely boost your enjoyment of one another. This summer could pay dividends in the months and years ahead. Ready to enjoy one another more through the summer months and beyond? This post is for you. Let’s get right into it. Make a List of Things You Like About Your Partner One of the most pra...| SYMBIS Assessment
Are you ready to build a happier, healthier marriage? Honesty is an important foundational ingredient in the healthiest marriages. It allows us to communicate in an open, vulnerable, and authentic way. Sometimes, it’s also tricky to navigate. Today on the blog, we’ve gathered some of our top posts about truth and lies in marriage. If you’re looking to build a more honest relationship with your spouse, this is a great place to start. What to Do When A Spouse Lies Catching your spouse in ...| SYMBIS Assessment
Do communication techniques feel awkward to you? You genuinely want more meaningful communication with your spouse. The problem is, whenever you try to apply a method you’ve learned, it feels awkward and unnatural. If you can’t use those techniques, what else are you supposed to do? Using communication tactics such as reflecting your spouse’s feelings might feel robotic and unnatural. You might feel like you’re going through the motions of an exercise. But getting agitated by a techni...| SYMBIS Assessment
Is revenge justified when your spouse betrays you? Whatever happened, this betrayal was devastating to your emotional wellbeing. It affected important aspects of your life and made moving forward incredibly difficult. If your spouse hurt you that deeply, is it fair to make them pay for what they did? Shouldn’t they have to suffer, too? Betrayal is one of life’s most painful experiences. That’s especially true when it happens within a marriage. Some betrayals are easier to overcome than ...| SYMBIS Assessment
Daily devotionals are a beautiful way to connect with your spouse on a spiritual level. But in our experience working with couples, they’re surprisingly hard to do as a married couple. For some couples, praying and studying together feel easy during the dating years. Once you cross the proverbial threshold of marriage, everyday obligations take over. Suddenly, daily devotionals don’t feel quite as endearing as they used to. They have a different energy. With so many daily demands, it can ...| SYMBIS Assessment
The world's most practical pre-marriage assessment. Perfect for pre-engaged, engaged and newly married couples. The future of premarital assessments.| SYMBIS Assessment
So you want to get married, but your significant other is reluctant. Engagement seems a long way off, if it happens at all. What do you do? If you’ve been in a relationship for a long time—maybe even years—you’re likely thinking of the future. But how can you get to the future if the person you’re dating is ambivalent about engagement? You’re ready to take that step toward making the ultimate commitment. How do you get them on board? How Much Longer Should You Wait? Is it worth wa...| SYMBIS Assessment
Does your spouse withdraw when you’re going through a tough time? Seasons of grief, loss, and waiting are difficult for everyone. But we each survive those seasons in different ways. Maybe your spouse self-isolates during times like this, but you crave deep connection. How can you persuade them to open up to you? You want to join with your spouse’s spirit and get through this together. You’re eager to walk alongside them and share their grief, but they’re so private about their feelin...| SYMBIS Assessment
Does your spouse spill your secrets? It’s upsetting when someone tells your secrets to friends and family. And when your spouse does the telling, that hurts even more. We want to be able to trust the person we marry with our vulnerabilities, fears, and deepest secrets. So what can you do when your spouse breaks confidence? Is there any way to rebuild trust in your marriage? Let’s talk about it. Spilled Secrets Feel Like Betrayal Let’s say you opened up to your spouse about a sensitive s...| SYMBIS Assessment
Do you hide hard feelings from your spouse? Many of us prefer to ignore conflict, or have none at all. It’s understandable that you want to keep the peace. Staying silent feels like the safer option when you don’t want to fight with your spouse. The thing is, conflict has its place. When you and your spouse don’t see eye to eye on an issue, it’s going to lead to friction. Avoiding friction completely won’t make it go away. Instead, hiding your hard feelings can create an undercurren...| SYMBIS Assessment
Does your spouse guilt you in front of friends and family? It’s great to have a shared friend group, or to be close with family. There’s comfort and intimacy in close relationships. But sometimes, spouses bring up grievances against each other in these settings. Your spouse might do this in a way that seems lighthearted or well-intentioned to others. To you, though, it feels like an embarrassing guilt trip. Guilt trips can be masked as concern, jokes, or prayer requests. Sometimes they’...| SYMBIS Assessment
How much alone time is healthy in a marriage? Is it possible to spend too much time alone? If so, what does that mean for your relationship? Being alone, as well as together, can be healthy for your individual wellbeing. When we’re healthy individuals, we bring that wellness into our marriage. Yet there’s often a misconception that spending time alone is unhealthy. That’s not always true. Every marriage experiences different seasons, ebbs, and flows. Spending time alone doesn’t necess...| SYMBIS Assessment
Has your spouse asked you to lose weight? Maybe they haven’t asked, but have hinted and left clues along the way. You might be feeling self-conscious. If your spouse wants you to lose weight, should you do it for them? Most likely, if your spouse has brought up concerns about your weight, they are interested in your overall health. Ultimately, any actions you take for your wellbeing should be for yourself. When we’re healthy, our relationships benefit—including our marriages. Weight is ...| SYMBIS Assessment
How and when should you pause a difficult conversation with your spouse? At one time or another, every married couple will experience a prolonged conflict. At the very least, you’ll face difficult discussions you can’t wrap up in one afternoon. These conflicts and disagreements can come at inconvenient times in your life, when you can’t give your full attention to discussing and resolving them right away. Trying to force conflict resolution can complicate problems, rather than solving t...| SYMBIS Assessment
You want your spouse to earn more money. Is that unreasonable? Financial conflict is one of the most common sources of marital tension. Money can be a volatile topic. This is especially true for spouses who come from different economic backgrounds or have differing values around spending, saving, and earning. There are many reasons why you might want or need your spouse to earn more money. These can include: Building an emergency fund Cost-of-living expenses Desire to buy a house Having child...| SYMBIS Assessment
If you’re a married couple still in college, is it okay to live with your parents or in-laws? In our experience working on a college campus, we spent time around students daily. We witnessed this scenario hundreds of times. It’s challenging to go through college together as a married couple. Finances tend to be tight when you’re both in college, so the idea of saving money by living with parents can seem appealing. When you marry before college graduation, you experience the excitement ...| SYMBIS Assessment
Dealing with snooping in-laws is challenging. During holidays, it’s common to host gatherings full of curious family. How do you stop it?| SYMBIS Assessment
Is your spouse a different person when you visit their family? If this sounds familiar, then this article is for you. Let’s get into it.| SYMBIS Assessment
If your spouse has know-it-all tendencies, you can’t change their behavior. But there are some things you can do to encourage improvement.| SYMBIS Assessment
So your spouse started a business. You’re missing the sense of stability and security you enjoyed before and feeling afraid. What now?| SYMBIS Assessment
Do you ever dwell on what might have been? While it’s human nature to think about different possibilities, it could hurt your relationship.| SYMBIS Assessment
