4 Reasons To Share Your Marriage Conflict With Your Friends
When was the last time you shared the honest-to-God truth about your marriage issues with a friend?
Too often we are too stingy with the truth of our conflict and our marriages, friendships, and friends' marriages are missing out because of it.
Here are 4 reasons I think we should share our marriage conflict with our friends:
Real community requires transparency.
We were made to live in community, and you can’t do that without transparency. Keeping your issues a secret is not living in community. If you only show the shiny parts of your lives to your friends, you're hiding and you're missing out on the way God calls us to live.
When the Bible talks about members of the church it does not mean “members” in the way we now use the word when we think of country clubs and executive perks. It’s not a key card to get into a bougie airport lounge. “Member” in this context is more like if your arm gets cut off from your body you’ve been “dismembered.” Christian community is supposed to work like a body, all together and united. Not separated by secret lives and holding out of big parts of our lives.
Bring your marriage conflict to the table with your friends so that you can live transparently in the community God has given you.
To open the door for your friends to be honest about their own issues.
It is really easy to believe that everyone else has their life together even though they don’t. But the reality is, someone has to go first. Someone has to be brave enough to share the hard and ugly parts of our lives.
When you are honest with your friends about your struggles it helps your friends feel not alone and opens the door from them to tell you their issues as well.
When I feel like my life is out of control I don’t run to the shiny seemingly perfect person to confess my mess to. I open up to the people who have been real with me about their own mess.
To be relatable.
It’s hard to have a real relationship with someone who isn’t relatable. How can you be friends with someone who is always a bit out of reach?
I’ll never forget the time I told a good friend of mine about the time I was so angry I threw a cooking sheet at Dylan. She was shocked. She knew I was a believer and she just assumed because Dylan and I were both Christians, we must not fight and if we did it was polite and cordial. She was shocked to hear that we fought intensely and made a ton of mistakes along the way and she was so relieved to hear it. Our coffee dates were much different after that conversation. She started opening up to me about her own problems and we were able to be real with each other.
I want to be relatable so I want to share my weaknesses and sins with my friends. The beautiful thing is, because we are all sinners living in this broken, fallen world - the thing that is MOST relatable is indeed our weakness. It is our conflict. It is our struggle. That’s relatable to everyone because all have fallen short of the glory of God.
To learn from each other.
This is probably the most obvious but sometimes our pride gets in the way of believing it. You can learn from your friends. Sharing about your marriage conflict allows your friends to speak into your marriage issues. If you haven’t solved the problem on your own and you have smart friends, it’s wise to seek them for counsel and allow them to speak into the situation. They have an outside view that can be very helpful.
Also not every couple has to make ALL the mistakes. But too often, we don’t share the bad parts of our relationship which means no one gets to learn from our mistakes. Do your friends a favor and be real with them so they can learn from you.
I hope these reasons help you find the beauty in sharing truth and hard stuff with your friends. Find some safe friends you trust and start sharing your marriage conflict with them in an effort to better live in community.