EP 54: How to Cultivate a Thriving Marriage

With the record rains we’ve been getting in East Texas this summer, our garden is thriving far better than we dreamed. Usually by August, many of our veggies and annuals have given up the ghost. If you think about it, marriage is a lot like gardening — both need a lot of tending if we want them to do well. So on this week’s podcast, we’re discussing how to cultivate a thriving marriage.

The material for this episode was taken from a blog post I wrote over eight years ago (an updated version of which you can read below today’s show notes), but the principles remain the same. So listen in. These six essentials can take your marriage from good to great, or from barely surviving to thriving better than you ever dreamed possible.

I just love this time of year. I love the bright blossoms and the emerging bulbs and the grass that grows greener every day. I love looking through flower catalogues and landscaping magazines and pinning ideas to my “Outdoor Living” Pinterest board. I love spring!

I well remember my first foray into home gardening. I poured over a Breck’s wholesale catalogue for days. Inspired by all those beautiful photos of lush gardens, I ordered over two hundred tulip bulbs, then struggled to bury them at the requisite seven-inch depth in the patch of hard, black clay that constituted our “flower bed.”

Once they were in the ground, I put my gloves and spade back on the shelf and waited expectantly, envisioning the riot of blooms that would surround my house the following spring. I gave no thought to watering or weeding or fertilizing or nurturing those little bulbs in any way, yet I was totally discouraged and dismayed when only six of the two hundred ever even sprouted.

I think lots of couples face similar disappointments when it comes to cultivating a beautiful marriage relationship. They’ve seen the movies and read the books and heard all the “happily ever after” stories, so they buy the rings and go through the ceremony and exchange the vows, fully expecting the same blissful results.

But a beautiful marriage, like a beautiful garden, doesn’t happen on its own. It takes a lot of tender, loving care. It takes work. For a marriage to thrive, you must.

6 Essentials for a Thriving Marriage

1. Cultivate the soil

Thorns and thistles may grow in hard, sun-baked clay, but cultivated plants need a little more soil preparation than that. If you want a beautiful flower garden, you must first break up the fallow ground.

Likewise, love will never thrive in hearts that are cold, hard, proud, and impenetrable. For a marriage to flourish, hearts must first be laid bare – open, honest, and vulnerable.The best place to start? With your OWN heart. Don’t go digging around in your husband’s heart trying to break up any clods you find there. Pray for him and leave that cultivation to God. Your own heart may be in need of more work than you realize.

Pray with the Psalmist, “Search me, O God, and know my heart; Try me, and know my anxious thoughts and see if there be any hurtful way in me, and lead me in the everylasting way.” (Psalm 139:23-24)

Hosea 10:12 tells us, “Sow righteousness for yourselves, reap the fruit of unfailing love, and break up your unplowed ground; for it is time to seek the LORD, until he comes and showers his righteousness on you.”

And the last part of Jeremiah 4:3 reads, “Plow up the hard ground of your hearts! Do not waste your good seed among thorns.”

2. Plant Good Seed

But having good soil isn’t enough. We also must plant good seed. If I want to harvest tomatoes, tomatoes are what I’ve got to plant. Same goes for peaches or peppers or periwinkles. We reap what we sow.

Galatians 6:7 spells this out: “Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.”

Jesus put it this way in the Sermon on the Mount: “By their fruit you will recognize them. Are grapes gathered from thorn bushes, or figs from thistles?  Likewise, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit.  A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit.” (Matthew 7:16-18)

This is true in gardening, but it is also true in life, love, and marriage. You are going to reap what you sow in those areas, as well.

If you sow anger and screaming and chaos in the way you relate to your others – including your husband– then anger and screaming and chaos will likely come back to you.  If you’d rather have peace and patience and love, then you’ll need to sow peace and patience and love in all your interactions with those around you, starting at home with your spouse.

3. Water deeply

For flowers to do well, their roots must be healthy and intact. If the roots are shallow or diseased or deprived too long of the water and nutrients essential to survival, the plant will wither and die. The same is true for marriage. A love that is firmly rooted in the Word of God, that drinks deeply and often from the well of Living Water, will be better able to withstand both droughts and storms that come its way.

That’s why Jesus bids us to come to Him and drink: “but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall become in him a well of water springing up to eternal life.” (John 4:14)

And again, “On the last and greatest day of the feast, Jesus stood up and called out in a loud voice, ‘If anyone is thirsty, let him come to Me and drink. Whoever believes in Me, as the Scripture has said: Streams of living water will flow from within him.’ ” (John 7:37-38)

4. Pull the weeds

You can prepare the soil and water well, but unless you stay vigilant, weeds will grow up and choke out more desirable plants in your garden. You must learn how to recognize such threats, watch for them constantly, and deal with them swiftly, before they have a chance to take root and establish themselves. So it is in a marriage. The love, joy, peace, and other good fruits that characterize a happy marriage cannot coexist with bitterness, resentment, arrogance, contempt, or selfishness, so don’t give those weeds a chance to rear their ugly heads. Stomp them out the minute they try to take root in your heart.

Hebrews 12:15 warns us, “See to it that no one falls short of the grace of God and that no bitter root grows up to cause trouble and defile many.”

But don’t just stop at pulling weeds. Plant something good in its place, or the foul thing will come right back, even bigger and deeper. That’s why James 1:21 admonishes us to “put aside all filthiness and all that remains of wickedness, in humility receive the word implanted, which is able to save your souls.”

5. Fertilize as needed

The longer a garden grows, the more depleted the ground becomes of the nutrients the bedding plants need. To keep plants healthy, fertilizer must be used to replace vital nutrients in the soil.

On the same principle, you should feed your marriage by reading books, attending retreats, and/or getting counseling as needed. It is important to maintain a teachable spirit and to never stop growing as a couple. 

Don’t assume because your marriage has been healthy and happy in the past, it will always be so. Keep a close eye on things: watch for signs of stress and address any deficiencies as soon as you are made aware of them.

For Christians, our fertilizer – our nourishment – comes mainly through the Word of God. In John 15:4ff, Jesus explains it like this: “Remain in Me, and I will remain in you. Just as no branch can bear fruit by itself unless it remains in the vine, neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in Me. I am the vine and you are the branches. The one who remains in Me, and I in him, will bear much fruit. For apart from Me you can do nothing….”

Loving one another – including your spouse and children – is God’s command to you. And it’s a command you will only be able to fulfill to the degree than you remain and abide in Christ Jesus and His holy Word.

6. Ensure lots of sunshine

Even with adequate water, good soil, and proper fertilizer, a garden won’t flourish without lots of light. Likewise, a marriage fares better when dispositions are sunny and bright. 

“A merry heart does good like a medicine, but a broken spirit dries up the bones.” (Proverbs 17:22) 

A cheerful outlook and a positive attitude goes a long way in nurturing a happy, healthy home, so keep on the sunny side as much as possible!

We get A LOT of sunshine here in Texas where I live, although our part of the state has also gotten an unusual amount of rain this summer! In fact, it’s been raining all day again today. I had to delay taping this episode because it was coming down so hard there for a while, I was afraid it would be picked up by my recording.

The good news is, as a result of all that rain, our vegetables and flowers have been doing AMAZING this year. We’ve harvested more tomatoes and cucumbers than I can count, and all our flowers look vibrant and verdant and full of bright, vivid blooms. I don’t have any of those beautiful impatiens in this house, but we have lots of lilies and cannas and periwinkles and – thanks to some culls I brought home from my mother’s house a couple of weeks ago – some perky Mexican petunias.

Normally everything starts looking brown and crispy by August, after weeks of hot days with little to no precipitation. This is especially the case since the house we’re currently in doesn’t have an automatic sprinkler system. That means, anytime we leave town for an extended road trip in the hottest part of summer, everything usually dies while we are gone.

Fortunately, this year I invested in some ollas (that’s O-L-L-A-S—I’ll link the ones I’m using in today’s show notes) . These are small terra cotta cisterns you bury beside your plants, and the water slowly seeps through the olla’s porous sides. Those smart little devices have kept all my potted plants well-watered, even while we’re traveling.

But the Texas heat and my lack of a sprinkler system motivated me to paint a huge mural on the concrete wall that runs the length of our backyard. (I’ll try to link a few photos in today’s show notes, as well.)  I’ve painted irises, and tulips and hostas and zinias, plus fruit trees and flowerpots and bird houses. That way, I can always have gorgeous blooms, no matter how hot and dry the weather gets.

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The mural looks pretty good at a glance – in fact, just a few weeks ago, we saw a mama and papa cardinal out in our backyard trying to teach their baby bird how to fly, but the poor little thing kept trying to flit up to one of the trees I’d painted and land on a branch, but of course it couldn’t. And the baby bird just kept falling back to the ground.

As I watched that little fledging bird struggle, it made me momentarily regret ever painting that mural to begin with. But he eventually flew high enough to land in one of the real trees hanging over the mural wall, and all was good.

The problem is, there’s no life in the landscape I painted on my mural. It’s just two dimensional. The cute, colorful birdhouses are completely uninhabitable. In the same way, the ornate bird bath and terra cotta pots aren’t useful for anything but just looking pretty.

Unfortunately, some marriages are a little like my garden mural. They look pretty good on the surface, but if you scratch too deep, you’ll quickly realize there’s no substance behind them. 

So when I talk about cultivating a love that will last, I’m not talking about some two-dimensional facsimile of a happy, thriving marriage – I mean the real thing. Not a bunch of pretty pictures posted to your Instagram account.  Not a series of snapshots and status updates you post to Facebook that have no substance to back them up.

I don’t have anything against pretty pictures or status updates, but if that’s all there is, you are really missing out. Growing the real happily-ever-after marriage takes a lot more time and effort than a curating a social media feed.

It takes years of discipline and commitment and sticking together (even through the not-so-happily-ever-after parts). Years of love and patience and forgiveness and working as a team. Years of blood, sweat, and tears, and getting your hands dirty, sometimes up to the elbows.

Once I finally accepted the fact that great landscaping takes a lot of hard work, I was not only able keep the little patch of flowers outside the front door of our first house alive, but eventually planted and (with much help from husband and children) maintained nearly two acres of beautiful woodland gardens that are absolutely breathtaking when they’re in full bloom. If I’d thrown in the towel when my first attempts failed, I would have missed out on all the pleasure and satisfaction that gardening success brings.

Likewise, if I’d bailed on my marriage during initial hardships, when tempers flared or days were long or the way grew weary, I would have missed out on all the wonderfully happy years that have followed.

So try it yourself. Prepare the soil. Plant good seed. Water abundantly. Pull the weeds. Fertilize properly and get plenty of sunshine.

Put these 6 Essentials for a Thriving Marriage to work today, and see what kind of results await you. I know from experience that a marriage will produce strikingly beautiful and fragrant blooms when properly nurtured with lots of tender, patient, and loving care.

More Biblically Sound Marriage Tips

If you enjoyed these 5 Essentials to a Thriving Marriage, you’re going to love my book Love Your Husband, Love Yourself. It takes a fascinating look at how science has confirmed the superiority of God’s design. The Word of God is full of wisdom for every facet of life, but we’ve found it especially helpful in building a happy, healthy marriage!