Friendship, communication and vision are keystones to developing a long and healthy relationship with one’s spouse, according to relationship experts Megan and Nahum Kozak.
The couple were the main speakers at a Zoom talk sponsored by the Catholic Network of Marriage Educators on World Marriage Day, February 13. The talk was entitled “Building a Love that Lasts”, which was styled as a date night for couples.
Amazingly, some of the couples who tuned in to the talk had been married for more than 50 years. One shared that they will soon be celebrating their seventieth anniversary.
“It’s like talking about light to a roomful of Edisons,” Mr Kozak said jokingly, adding that they have the utmost respect for couples who have stayed together that long.
Mr and Mrs Kozak run Lighthouse Relationships, which provides individual as well as couples therapy in Brisbane. Mr Kozak is a psychologist, while Mrs Kozak is an accredited relationship counsellor.
Mrs Kozak said the knowledge they impart to couples is based on scientific research by Dr Michael Gurian, an American author and social philosopher, who is also a marriage and family counsellor, and on the results of a 40-year longitudinal study conducted by Drs John and Julie Gottman, renowned researchers and psychologists.
“A strong friendship is the basis of a strong relationship,” said Mr Kozak, who described this as the first part of the Lighthouse Relationship model.
He said there are three parts to a friendship: knowing your partner, showing appreciation and being responsive to your partner.
“We develop a map about our partner in our brain. We know their likes, dislikes, pet peeves . . . we do this really well in [the] early stages of a relationship. But it can be a challenge later on when we feel like we already know everything about our partner,” he said.
When one stops trying to know a partner, there is a risk of growing apart, he added.
“We want to have an ongoing expression of warmth and appreciation that goes into building a good friendship,” Mr Kozak said.
Apart from that, there is a need to be responsive. “We need to pick up on what our partner puts out there,” he said.
They talked about something that happened to them early on in their marriage when Mr Kozak would make tea every morning for Mrs Kozak.
Mrs Kozak said this action was sweet in the beginning, but then it became a “guilt tea”, something she would take a couple of sips of and then throw down the drain.
It took a month for her to work up the nerve to tell Mr Kozak that him making her tea did not make her feel loved. He asked her, “what does?”
“I kind of had to stop and think it through. And I went, well, something that makes me feel really loved is when you whisper in my ear. I don’t even know why. It’s delightful. It’s intimate. It’s something that only you and I can hear,” she said.
So, for the past 12 years, he finds something to whisper in her ear. Even if it’s just, “Hey, honey, I’m putting out the garbage.”
Communication
The second part of the relationship model is communication.
Mrs Kozak said the Song of Solomon 2:15, which speaks of “catch all the foxes, those little foxes before they ruin the vineyard of love”, is a really good guide for communicating.
Conflict shouldn’t be something from which couples shy away, but it needs to be handled “without criticism, without defensiveness, without being contemptuous, and without putting up a big stone wall”.
“When we talk about that challenging thing, we catch the fox. We catch that little thing that gets in the way, the thing that might get buried in the carpet, so that it doesn’t spoil this beautiful vineyard of love,” she said.
Mr Kozak added, “far from something that has to be avoided, conflict is something that is really useful and helpful to give us ballast, to give us direction, to give us truthfulness and honesty in our dealings with one another”.
The third part is vision. They explained that couples come to the marriage as whole individuals who choose “to create this beautiful space together”.
The couple will have dreams as individuals and dreams for the two of them.
“We each need to be filled up with our own dreams, so we can create a vision for what we want,” Mrs Kozak said.
She said that, at the start of every year, they go out as a couple with their journals and write their dreams for themselves individually and as a couple.
“We just want to let each other know . . . the dream for us . . . for our girls, our date nights, our business . . . all the things that we dream for our team. Of course, we are listening to the prompting of the Holy Spirit,” she said.
Towards the end of the talk, Mr Kozak reminded participants to let communication bring out the vision.
“The only reason we have conflict is to give us something we can put together into a vision about you, about me and about us, how we can be together and basically, what God’s plan is for us, what is the thing that can make us the best us we can be,” he said.
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