Nurture the Garden

"If you want something to last forever, you treat it differently. you shield it and protect it. You never abuse it. You don't expose it to the elements. You don't make it common or ordinary. If it ever becomes tarnished, you lovingly polish it until it gleams like new. It becomes special because you have made it so, and it grows more beautiful and precious as time goes by." - Elder F. Burton Howard of the Seventy

Growing things require nourishment and care - a successful gardener carefully plans out the garden, plants seeds, and then continually works to nourish and maintain the garden. That gardener plucks out weeds that would choke and overtake the beautiful plants we want to see blossom and bear fruit. An unsuccessful gardener forgets to nourish the garden, leaves the weeds to run amok and is left with dead flowers and chaos. Just like a garden, relationships require nourishment and pruning. 

Feelings and thoughts are powerful, those positive and loving feelings that occur in a marriage relationship are like the flowers in the garden, they need to be carefully cultivated and nourished. The weeds that would choke them are negative thoughts, feelings, and actions. 

This week I was introduced to the idea of love maps. This idea comes from Dr. Gottman, author of "The Seven Principles of Making Marriage Work." In the book, Dr. Gottman defines a love map as having a knowledge of your partner's world. This includes little things like favorite color and deeper things like life goals, aspirations, and fears. These love maps are supposed to help nourish and build a relationship. As an experiment, my husband and I went through some of the love map question games in the book. We found out that we do know quite a bit about each other - but there were questions we didn't know the answers too and it was really fun to get to know new things about each other. As we went through the questions, I could really see how having such a knowledge about your spouse can bring you closer together and keep love burning bright in the relationship. 

Here is a link to the Gottman Institute website and one of the love map exercises:

https://www.gottman.com/blog/the-sound-relationship-house-build-love-maps/

(Photo above was taken myself in the Botanical Gardens in Boise, Idaho)