15 Tips for a Stronger Marriage

Book excerpt: 15 inspirational tips to help your marriage be the best that it can be. Also includes 12 tips on parenting! From the introduction by Eric Elder: I was sitting with a couple recently to help them plan their wedding when the bride-to-be asked me to do something impossible: she wanted me to talk at her wedding about marriage and what made my marriage to my wife, Lana, so successful. She said she admired our relationship and wanted to learn whatever she could to make her marriage the best that it could be. Here’s why her request seemed so impossible: how could I possibly summarize 23 years worth of thoughts on marriage in such a short message on her wedding day? Yet her question also inspired me because I loved the idea of being able to pass along to them anything that might be helpful. So I began to think of all the tips I had heard before we got married, after we got married and throughout our 23 years of marriage. I quickly came up with 4 or 5 sermons to share at her wedding! In the end, I only shared 1 simple message with them, based on 3 words, which I felt would help them get through anything they might face in the future. I’ll share those 3 words with you in chapter 6, as they serve as the glue that holds all the other tips together. But I still wanted to share with this couple all the other great tips that God had brought to my mind. The result is this little book that I’m now sharing with you. I wish I could say that if you’ll just put these 15 tips into practice you’ll be guaranteed success in your own marriage, but relationships just don’t work like that. Each one of us is unique and each one of our relationships is unique. Yet I still believe each of these tips can be helpful to you in one way or another, even if it’s just to talk through them with your spouse, or spouse to be, and then adapt and apply them to your own relationship. To make this book easier to read, I’ve divided it into 7 chapters, 6 of which are about marriage, with a bonus chapter at the end called “12 Tips On Parenting.” I wrote this chapter in response to another question by some other friends who asked for my thoughts on that topic. Since this book has 7 chapters, you might want to read a chapter a day for 7 days or a chapter a week for 7 weeks. You might also want to go through this book with a few other couples who are newly married, nearly married or just want to strengthen their marriage, no matter how long they’ve been married. Who knows? This book may be just what they need to make their marriage not just good, but great!Any way you do it, I pray God will bless you through it, both now and for many years to come. In Christ’s love, Eric Elder