Our lives didn’t begin when we got married. When we joined together, our picture was already quite well settled. We need to understand who we were and what we brought into the relationship. We’ve developed patterns of living, patterns of being, patterns of survival. How do you get what you want? How do you react when you don’t get your way? These patterns have been with you all of your life. We often become aware of our unknown patterns in marriage. We begin to see things within ourselves that were not apparent. We also see things in the other that we didn’t know were there. When we have awareness, then we have choice.

It’s too easy to become a victim of circumstance. But we need to realize that everything about our lives is a choice. We’re choosing our emotions and behaviors, our strengths and weaknesses. Sometimes our unconscious choices allow us to let things get out of shape.

We service our cars. We fill them up and clean them. We don’t do the same to our lives. We don’t tend to check our relationships; we just run them and run them until we reach a crisis. We often think that relationships are self sustaining, but it’s the other way around. Relationships are what we are here for. Relationships are the work of our lives. When Jesus left us with one commandment, ‘Love one another’, he was really saying, ‘Relate well.’