Catholic Husband

It’s quite easy to see that we’ve really got a complete misunderstanding of the meaning of sex. On one side of the spectrum, there’s the pervasive hedonistic view that galavants around with the classic “anything goes” mentality. On the other side is the rigid, closed view that sees sex as an inconvenient necessity. The Catholic Church’s teaching is clear, but what both of these views ignore is the fact that sex isn’t just for the bedroom.

If a couple views sex as a singular act, they’re missing out on perhaps the most fundamental aspect of a healthy marital sexual relationship. Sex itself is a physical act, but only as its outward mechanism. Sex is so much more than a merely physical act. Through its experience, sex is able to dial into biological responses that trigger deep emotional connections. Beyond just the physical and psychological, sex is a deeply spiritual experience.

For an act that’s such a transformative and transcendent experience, sex is not and cannot be contained in the bedroom. Sex is all about continuity. If spouses are harsh and bitter to one another throughout the day and then suddenly go into the bedroom and enter into the marital embrace, the lack of continuity is going to severely diminish the sexual act. A person simply can’t flip a switch and expect a rich experience.

Your daily married life is an extension of the sexual act. It should be foreplay. Not running around the house pushing each other up against a wall foreplay. Rather, living in harmony, peace, love, and service will give your relationship the kind of continuity and foreplay that’s required for deeply moving sexual encounters. These sexual encounters are so much more than the act itself as you both feel united in every way and closer than you could possibly be in any other setting.

Sex incorporates all aspects of a married couple’s life. The bond of trust that you share, your communication skills, your ability to love, your ability to respond to one another’s needs, and more, all meld together into your sexual relationship. The only way to have a truly satisfying sex life with your wife is to pour your whole self into your relationship. Your whole life must be fully integrated… you can’t be a jerk in the daily routine and expect a healthy sexual relationship.

We need to live more integrated lives and relationships. Always be loving, always be kind, and stop trying to put your sexual relationship into a box. Sex isn’t just for the bedroom, it’s for daily life.

The life of a young single person is filled with friendships of all degrees. Think back to your college days and the boundless number of friends that you had. Each relationship achieved a particular purpose. They weren’t formed out of some utilitarian purpose, rather, as each friendship was cultivated, it ended up meeting some need that you each had.

After graduation, when your friends dispersed across the country and around the globe, some of those friendships faded and were replaced with others. Perhaps you found friends at work, in your apartment complex, or in your parish. Again, you had needs that needed to be met, like the need for a confidant, the need for a sounding board, or the need for a social wingman.

The single most radical relational change that we experience as adults comes on our wedding day. Your wife, your marital relationship, is designed to meet all of your essential relational needs and most of your peripheral needs.

Your wife is your best friend, your sounding board, your emotional support, your confidant, your career coach, and so much more. While your marital relationship meets all of your essential needs, there’s still room for other relationships. These relationships are certainly important, but they’re no longer urgently needed.

This is the single biggest struggle for any newly married couple: maintaining old friendships while investing the majority of work, time, and effort into the newly formed marital relationship.

While it can be sad to admit, the relationships that one has during their single life are instantly diminished on one’s wedding day. This doesn’t negate their importance, but it does mean that those old relationships must take a back-seat to the relationship with one’s new spouse.

Balancing out those relationships in a new paradigm is important work. Although the friendships are no longer in first place, that doesn’t negate their overall importance. Married couples need to still rely on these non-marital relationships because they do have value and they are still a part of one’s social life.

The married life brings with it the difficult task of navigating this new reality. I’ve found that it requires intentionality to foster and continuously cultivate these friendships. I would argue that your marital relationship is enhanced by these friendships.

All of this brings out the great marital trap: couple friends. In movies and media we are often confronted with images of perfectly aligned couple friends who share their lives together. It’s presented as something that’s effortless and crazy fun. In reality, finding couple friends is incredibly elusive. If we believe that there’s a couple exactly like us out there and spend all of our time trying to find them, we’re setting ourselves up for failure.

More likely than not, you’ll have couple friends that share some commonalities with you, but are not necessarily going to be the “share this life together” variety. In those instances, I’d encourage you to embrace the commonalities that you share, enjoy your time with them, but don’t force the friendship to be something that it’s not.

As spouses, we need to be okay with the fact that our wife will be friends with people that we’re not necessarily friends with, and vice versa. It’s important for us to support her in that relationship and to expect the exact same with the reverse. Your wife should support relationships that you have with people she might not consider to be friends. Again, it’s all about finding common ground. It’s important to choose your friends wisely, to maintain friendships you had prior to your wedding day, and to cultivate relationships with new people.

Your relationship with your wife is the most important one that you have in your life, but remember to surround yourselves with high quality friends.

A lifetime together is a journey of 1,000 miles. Each day, you take small steps forward and, some days, you simply make no progress. We all want to be better people, to live up to the idea of a person we have in our heads, but breaking free from our self-limitations can be extremely challenging, if not almost impossible to do.

We structure our time in minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and years. In the minutes, hours, and days, it can be easy for us to lose perspective and let opportunities to improve our marriage pass us by. It’s incredibly easy to begin to take our spouse for granted and slowly stop recognizing the true gift that she is. In these times, we need to be most aware that, as we close our eyes at night, the day that is ending can never be regained.

I’ve written many times about the importance of time and how it’s the singularly most important resource that we have. Although minutes and hours are small units of time, they are the building blocks of our lives. They’re where life happens. We need to take better advantage of them.

As 2014 draws rapidly to a close, you no doubt are pondering what you’d like to do differently next year. For some reason, we’ve collectively decided that it’s only at the beginning of a New Year that we should amend our lives and course correct to a direction that we really want to go in. While I don’t believe the New Year is the only time to do this, it’s true that this major time trailhead does provide ample opportunity for a do-over.

While others spend their time planning out impossible fitness goals, career goals, or intellectual goals, I want to challenge you to do something incredibly radical. The relationship with your wife is the single most important relationship in your entire life. There should be no one on Earth that you’re closer to. You and your wife share everything. There are no secrets, there’s no shame, there’s only security. I want you to decide to invest very heavily in your marriage in 2015 and plan to have the best year yet!

So many times we can fall into victim thinking. When your wife isn’t considerate of your feelings or does something that bothers you, it’s so easy to slip into the blame game that’s typical of our other relationships. The fact is, your marital relationship isn’t like your other relationships. It’s wholly different.

Instead of trying to make everything equatable, what if in 2015 you laid your life completely down for her, as you promised you would on your Wedding day? What if you yielded to her needs and made her feel honored the way that she should? What if you did everything you could to decrease yourself and your needs and increased hers? What if all of your actions pointed towards loving and serving her more deeply?

On December 10, 2015, if you did all of those things, how much stronger would your marriage be?

The married life is permanent and yours will likely endure until the day you die, which could be decades away. It’s a daunting task to those who don’t understand the beauty and richness that constancy and stability bring. The fact remains, the stronger your marriage bond is, the happier you and your wife will be. The more in sync you are with your wife, the more prosperous you both shall be.

Think about the areas in your marriage where you aren’t living up to this standard. Think about the times and situations where you habitually fail to be the husband that you can be. Choose your 2 biggest areas of failure and, starting today, find ways to overcome those shortcomings. Set reminders for yourself to review your progress and as you overcome an area, add a new one.

We all have visions of perfection in our minds, visions of the husband we want to be. You can be that man, you can be that husband, if you’re willing to do the work to overcome what years of relational hurts and failures has created.

You’re a smarter man than you were on January 1st of this year. You have the potential to be the awesome husband that your wife deserves. Make it your goal to unlock that potential in 2015 and honor her the way that she deserves to be honored.

Alison and I have been married for 26 months. That means that our Budget Committee has assembled 26 times to write 26 different budgets. There have been some fun meetings when we were flush with cash and there have been meetings where things were really tight. We’ve had Budget Committee meetings that planned for the arrival of Benedict, and planned for gift giving to those we love most. Our Budget Committee has planned for everything from trips to toothbrushes. Over time, we’ve refined how we operate our Budget Committee and I’d like to share our process with you.

All couples who have a Budget Committee should enter into the process with two general assumptions: 1) the process will change and evolve over time and 2) the use of veto power should be done with intentionality.

As the end of the month draws near, I clean up our monthly budget in YNAB (You Need A Budget), our budgeting software. I also prepare next month’s budget in broad strokes for categories that we already know what the expense will be, i.e. Rent. With the budget cleaned up, I print off 2 copies of the current month and 2 copies of the upcoming month.

Alison and I put Benedict to bed, though we plan on inviting him to some meetings when he’s old enough, and sit down at our breakfast nook.

We first do a post-mortem of the current month’s budget. Line by line we look at what we spent our money on. This is incredibly helpful in two respects. First, it highlights areas where we either over budgeted or under budgeted. Second, it gives us accountability. We’re not perfect people, so we do overspend in some categories each month. Although we may overspend a category, we never overspend the budget, meaning the money just comes from another line item.

The post-mortem is almost like a report card. We have the goal (Get out of debt) and we can compare how we spent with that goal. Sometimes we do really well and other times we don’t. After doing the post-mortem, we decide which categories to empty to $0 into a line we call “Gazelle Debt Reduction.” This line is for any “found” money that comes in during the month. So any income that’s above and beyond our paychecks goes into this line and at the end of the month, we decide how to spend it. Spoiler: it almost exclusively goes to debt. So, for example, if we don’t drive as much as we expected, we typically take the Gas budget down to $0 and move the leftover money to the Gazelle Debt Reduction. We don’t do this for all categories. Car Repairs, for example, we always leave funded because we want to keep building up that budget line in anticipation of future repairs.

After the post-mortem, we look at the upcoming month’s budget. We plan for birthdays and anniversaries, we look ahead to upcoming expenses (Christmas, travel, etc.), and we always budget incrementally for big annual bills (taxes, antivirus software subscription, membership dues, etc.). Once we’ve decided on an amount for all of the categories, we look at what’s left to budget.

We do a 0-based budget, the format that Dave Ramsey teaches in Financial Peace University, so that means that all money is allocated somewhere. For us, we “sweep” any remaining money into a line called “Salary Debt Reduction.” That’s simply money that we have from our paychecks that we’ve assigned to debt.

Once we’ve finished the first draft of the upcoming month’s budget, we discuss things that we’d like to buy in the upcoming month. I keep a running list on my phone in the Clear app so I have a pretty good idea of what we need to discuss. For example, in a recent Budget Committee meeting, I asked for money to buy antivirus software for our computers. We also budgeted for Benedict’s birthday party and discussed our Christmas budget.

After all budgets have been finalized and approved, we pull out the checkbook. We get a number of charitable solicitations during the month in the mail. I hold on to all of them and then Alison and I review them in the Budget Committee meeting. Alison and I each have lines in the budget called “Ministry Support” from which we can contribute to causes. As we review each solicitation, we consider if either wants to make a donation. If we do, we fill out the form and write the check. It really is the most fun part of the whole meeting. Finally, we write checks for any paper bills that we’ve received, usually just our utility bill that charges a fee for paying with a debit card.

Alison and I both have veto power in the Budget Committee. We don’t use it as a weapon or a negotiation tactic, just as a check and balance. There have been things that I’ve asked for that she’s said no to and there are things that she’s asked for that I’ve said no to. The veto is more of a tool than a weapon. It keeps us both in check and allows us to feel comfortable saying no to things that we feel are out of bounds. Even better a “no” often leads to a discussion that might help to clarify the initial request.

We’ve been on the whole spectrum when it comes to how we operate our Budget Committee meetings. We’ve been incredibly lax and hasty and we’ve been really intense. We’ve discussed our formulas for certain things, such as how to deal with our tithe, and it usually takes a few months for us to figure those questions out.

The best part of the whole Budget Committee is the clarity and communication that it brings. We both know exactly where we stand, what we have to spend, and where out of bounds is. We’ve found a system and a process that works for us and, as a result, we’re able to allocate more money to debt reduction than we ever have before.

This is the process we use for our monthly Budget Committee meetings. It’s really actually quite a pleasant experience and we seldom fight over it. It’s just two people discussing and agreeing how to spend our money. In the end, we’re stronger as a couple and as a family because we do the Budget Committee.