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Shrink Your Joy Gap
You may have heard that love is a choice. Strictly speaking, this is not true. Love is attachment. It is a bond you share through good times and bad. You can choose to do loving things. You can choose to do kind things. You cannot choose to feel love. However, the more joy you build into your marriage, the more that feeling of being “in love” will stay strong and grow.
A joy gap is the length of time between moments of shared joy.
Warner’s goal in writing this was to introduce four habits that shrink the joy gap and make joy your default setting, using the acronym PLAN:
- Play together
- Listen for emotion
- Appreciate daily
- Nurture rhythm
To a large extent, this is what romance is all about. It is taking the time to prepare to be together. Preparation means you have been thinking about the other person. Your heart and your mind have been dwelling on how to make your special person happy, how to bring him or her joy.
It is essentially impossible to have sustained joy in your marriage without a rhythm that includes rest. Couples who nurture rhythm by incorporating times of resting together, as well as playing together, create a foundation for joy that is sustainable for years to come.
The Brain Science Behind Joy
BREAKTHROUGH 1: THE BRAIN MAGNET
The brain magnet is a term to describe your drive to bond with other people. You come out of the womb craving attachment. A joy bond is characterized by several key traits:
- Lots of smiles
- Positive feelings from being together (or even thinking about being together)
- The security to act like yourself around the other person
- An ability to connect safely at an emotional level
- The sense that you are with “your people”
A fear bond looks quite different:
- Smiling is rare
- Hiding emotions is common
- Wearing masks for fear that people will not be happy to see you if you act like yourself
- Isolation becomes normal
- Shutting down when problems arise and losing the desire to be relational
- Treating someone who should be a friend more like an enemy
BREAKTHROUGH 2: THE JOY BUCKET
You always have the ability to grow more joy no matter how little joy you have lived with until now. By filling your joy bucket to capacity again and again, you grow that part of your brain. The more regularly you experience joy with other people, the larger your joy bucket gets.
BREAKTHROUGH 3: THE ON/OFF SWITCH
You can tell when your switch goes off and your relational circuits shut down with four simple tests, exemplified by the acronym CAKE, which can also help flip the switch and turn your relational circuits back on.
- CURIOSITY. When your switch is off, you lose all curiosity about your spouse.
- APPRECIATION. With your switch in the off position, you can’t remember what you appreciate about the person you love. Instead, you find it very easy to remember all the reasons you feel resentment. Appreciation produces attraction, so without appreciation, it is easy to feel resentment, find blame, and see the other person as an enemy.
- KINDNESS. With your circuits off, you don’t feel like being kind. Instead, you feel like winning. If curiosity and appreciation have shut down, kindness won’t be far behind.
- EYE CONTACT. One sure sign your switch is off is that you stop making eye contact. Remembering to warmly look your wife or husband in the eyes will often remind you of the need for kindness, appreciation, and curiosity.
BREAKTHROUGH 4: THE NARRATIVE ENGINE
Narratives are powerful. What you believe about your wife or husband will have a profound effect on how you treat and feel about him or her.
The relational circuits in your brain are primarily composed of mirror neurons. As you can probably tell by the word “mirror,” these neurons learn by watching other people in action and imitating those actions.
Why Joy Can Be So Hard to Find
If you have grown up without a lot of relational joy, it is going to take some focused work before joy will become a habit. The problem that works against sharing joy is fear mapping. This term refers to the habit we develop of scanning our environment for problems to fix instead of looking for blessings to appreciate.
In his bestselling book on marriage, John Gottman described the habits that distinguished “master marriages” from “disaster marriages.” He defines a master marriage as one in which the relationship is still healthy after six years. A disaster marriage is one that either ended or was in serious trouble within six years.
Couples in “master marriages” were joy bonded. They had developed the habit of appreciation and entering into each other’s joys.
The longer the gap between moments of shared joy in your marriage, the more fertile the soil for resentment.
If you think of the wrong done to you like a weight that is placed on a scale, forgiveness can feel very unjust. Forgiveness, from a Christian perspective, is taking the weight of what has been done to you and giving it to God. At the heart of the process is a choice. It is choosing to allow God to be the judge rather than you, and letting God carry the weight rather than you. This can be explained as turning the debt you are owed over to God’s collection agency.
From a brain science perspective, a habit forms through repetition.
Habit #1: Play Together
As life goes on, it is important not only to keep on playing together, but to expand the ways you play together by building new hobbies.
The point is not what you do, but that you grow the list of ways that you can have fun sharing life together. It is okay for couples to have different hobbies, but you need some that you can do together as well.
Brady’s Note: Jennifer and I are finding new hobbies together. In the last year, we have taken on tennis and Disc (Frisbee) Golf. Both activities get us out of the house and help us play together in the midst of the pandemic’s stay-at-home order.
Some practical ways to increase joy in your marriage through play include special events and social routines.
SPECIAL EVENTS
Shared hobbies, weekly dates, anniversary celebrations, and vacations give you something to anticipate together with joy, and they make memories you can share again and again. Making sure you have special events on the calendar is important for keeping joy in your marriage.
Brady’s Note: We have also enjoyed getaways together when I had opportunities to speak, starting with Denver in 2016. Then, following my first international speaking engagement in Dubai (2016), Jennifer wisely asked, “Why can’t you speak in Europe?” Fortunately enough, I secured speaking engagements in Amsterdam (2017) and Barcelona (2018), which served as great getaways together!
SOCIAL ROUTINES
Ending the day happy to be together is a huge part of building a social routine of playing together. This starts by establishing two rules for the end of the day.
- Rule #1: We will stop talking about problems and tasks thirty minutes before we go to bed.
- Rule #2: We will play together and share appreciation before we turn off the lights.
Far too many couples go to bed talking about problems and planning for tasks, then wonder why they sleep so poorly and live with so much stress in their marriage.
Friendship is the foundation of a great marriage. One of the keys to a great friendship is playing together and having fun.
Habit #2: Listen for Emotion
Warner has led dozens of marriage retreats and always asks the couples, “What are the top three problems in marriage?” The number one answer at almost every retreat is “communication.”
PRINCIPLE 1: COMMUNICATION IS USELESS (AND SOMETIMES DANGEROUS) IF YOUR RELATIONAL CIRCUITS AREN’T ON.
Before you try to talk to someone who is shut down, you need to help them open up.
PRINCIPLE #2: LISTEN FOR EMOTIONS BEFORE TRYING TO SOLVE PROBLEMS
Communication needs to start on the right side of your brain by listening for emotions before sending the information to the left side and trying to solve the problems you hear. This process is called validation. It is the most important tool for keeping relationships bigger than problems.
Validating doesn’t mean agreeing with what someone is feeling. You don’t have to agree that they should be feeling a certain way. You simply need to acknowledge that they are, in fact, feeling that way.
Negative emotions the “SAD-SAD” emotions because SAD-SAD helps you remember what they are.
SADNESS.
“I have lost something that brought me joy.”
Sadness is a low-energy emotion.
ANXIETY.
“I fear not being able to find joy as I look at the future.”
Whereas sadness is a low-energy emotion, anxiety is high energy. It triggers our fight, flight, or freeze response, which shoots adrenaline all through our body.
DESPAIR.
“I feel like joy is impossible.”
Despair is another low-energy emotion. It can suck the life out of your body so that you have no energy and don’t feel like doing anything. Despair is hopelessness and is found at the root of most depression. It is the feeling that there is no solution for your problems.
SHAME.
“I feel like hiding because I can tell I don’t bring you joy.”
Shame is also a low-energy emotion.
ANGER.
“I want something to stop right now because it is robbing me of joy and causing me pain.”
Anger is a high-energy emotion.
DISGUST.
“I feel like recoiling from a person or situation.”
Disgust is a low-energy emotion often connected with the desire to vomit. Disgust makes you want to get as far away from something (or someone) as you can.
Becoming an expert at listening for emotions is the first step toward becoming an expert at keeping relationships bigger than problems.
The problem with winning these conversations is that winning rarely strengthens the relationship. To put this in perspective, in extreme cases we call people who have lost their conscience and only care about winning sociopaths. They don’t care who they hurt as long as they win.
Validation (a right-brain activity) must come before comforting (the left-brain action of making a problem smaller and thus more manageable).
In Rare Leadership, Jim Wilder and Warner present a simple acronym for remembering the order this process needs to take: VCR. Validate, Comfort, Repattern.
VALIDATION.
The right brain validates by accurately naming the emotion the other person is feeling and accurately identifying how big it is for them.
COMFORT.
After your right brain validates, your left brain comforts by problem-solving with the person.
REPATTERNING.
As we experience the process of validating and comforting again and again, our brain learns to make that pattern its new normal.
People who skip validation and go straight to left-brain comforting generally make the situation worse. We call these people “fixers.” They are more interested in fixing you than listening to your emotions.
Habit #3: Appreciate Daily
In some ways, marriage isn’t that complicated. When appreciation levels are high, your marriage is joy-filled. When resentment replaces appreciation, marriage feels like a burden.
Appreciation attracts. Resentment repels.
GRATITUDE VS. APPRECIATION
Taking time to dwell on what you appreciate about your spouse is a much different experience than simply saying “thank you” for something they do.
Appreciation is often the hidden ingredient that determines if a marriage is strong or weak, admirable or anemic. (Check out some of my previous posts about Jennifer from 2017 and 2014)
Habit #4: Nurture a Rhythm
The first and simplest reason the joy gap starts to expand is tiredness. It is hard to build joy when you feel worn out and lack margin. Perhaps the core reason we lack margin (check out this post on Dr. Richard Swenson’s book Margin) in our lives is that we lack rhythm. Without a relational rhythm, our souls begin to wilt.
“You develop an affection for what you appreciate.” Appreciation leads to affection, and affection leads to more appreciation. It becomes a cycle. It is this cycle of relational appreciation and affection that leads to a rhythm that creates margin in our lives, allowing us to be happy together in times of rest as well as times of activity.
We have created a very isolated culture. Families no longer eat meals together. They don’t tell each other stories of the day or take time to sit outside as the sun sets. Kids go to school, play sports, do homework, listen to their music, watch TV, and go to bed texting with friends. Even husbands and wives often don’t connect until they are in bed, and even then, it happens as they are watching TV.
Having a routine to start and end your day nurtures a rhythm that naturally gives you margin.
Brady’s Note: Each day (on most days), Jennifer & I start the day with our run to Sonic for our diet drinks—they’re 99 cents before 10 a.m. It provides us with an opportunity to take a look at the day ahead and talk one-on-one before the busy-ness of the day hits. Sometimes in the early evening, we also walk our dog (see more about Minnie, the Positive Dog, here). These rhythms are important to our relationship, and when we don’t start or end our days this way, we notice the difference!
Learning to build routines that allow for rest as well as play creates a great environment for building joy. Joy grows best when there is a rhythm of high activity (whether work or play) as well as low, restful activity.
When the day comes and you are at the end of your life, what things would you like said about how you valued your marriage? What would you like to be able to say about how you cultivated and tended your marriage? In other words, what kind of marriage legacy do you want to have?
Wrap Up
No marriage is perfect, but if you build enough joy in your relationship, you will recover from conflict more quickly, feel greater security in your relationship, and find yourself looking forward to time together more often.