Let's Chat with Will & Tony
Let's Chat with Will & Tony
SEG 3 of 4 - Values & Traditions - The Marriage Maze: Navigating Emotional Commitments, Marital Challenges, and Parental Responsibilities
Marriage isn't just a journey; it's a labyrinth of emotions, commitments, and pivotal decisions that mold not just two lives, but the family they nurture. Through honest conversations, we share critical insights into preserving the sanctity of marriage vows and facing marital adversities with unwavering integrity. We tackle the tough truths, from confronting infidelity to considering divorce when it's the honorable exit. Our dialogue serves as a heartfelt reminder of the enduring power of cherishing your partner and the profound impact a thriving marriage has on children, setting a stable and instructive example for them to follow.
In the intimate spaces of our episode, we reveal the hurdles of balancing parenting—a test that intensifies when a child faces a serious medical condition—and nurturing a marriage. You'll hear our personal narrative of mustering the courage for a long-overdue couple's getaway, trusting technology and community support to empower our son's independence with his Type 1 diabetes. It's a testament to the resilience and growth within our family, and the reinforcement it gives to the marital bond. Listeners are encouraged to find their own paths to prioritize their relationships, because the steadfast commitment to one's marriage reverberates through the entire family, strengthening each member and the collective whole.
Common Sense Advice for Life. Let's chat Now. Here's Will Kesley and Tony Pack. Welcome back. Let's chat with Will and Tony and we're talking about things in life that will make sense it's been. It's kind of an interesting show today because we're asking people to kind of just think of their life for a minute and decide what pieces of it are working and which pieces aren't.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and hold on tightly to those things of work and just get rid of the things that aren't. I will tell you, life's too short to hold on to these things and just baggage, right.
Speaker 1:Everything that is a virtue, hang on to until you understand it enough that you want to adapt it. Like, for example don't steal, I don't care who you are. You may think well, I think I'm allowed to steal because, after all, they. I've never seen people that steal that are happy. Keep fidelity in your marriage. If you're not happy in your marriage, then get divorced.
Speaker 2:Yeah, don't go off on the, you know, break your covenant with your wife.
Speaker 1:I don't advocate that one. Well, I don't like how it's going, so it's not convenient anymore. I mean, that's not what I'm advocating. What I'm advocating is do things based on a virtue. Yes, right, don't go diswail. I'm just going to cheat on my spouse because that's the way I'm going to. You'll never feel good about yourself, You'll never feel virtue in yourself and, in fact, it'll water down who you are at night when you look at yourself in the mirror. It'll water down the self-esteem and you'll look at yourself and you'll become a worse person for it.
Speaker 1:You're not going to gain anything from it. It's just the rules.
Speaker 2:So I think that's a interesting thing to talk about, about that idea of hey, if you're in an unhappy marriage, do something about it, own it. Even if you pursue the divorce, you at least keep your personal virtue that I'm not going to break my promise to this person until I've formally severed that promise with the person through a formal divorce. Have a standard and stay by it. I stuck to my standard.
Speaker 1:I promise this person you know love and fidelity and you stick with that until that's not there anymore, you don't just like try and keep it in place and while you go get all your other things you're missing in your life on the backside right, because the key is, there's honorability in the way we do everything, including separating in a marriage, and I would rather you work through hard things and get to the other end of hard things while you find those are the relationships that really thrive. When two people commit to the commitment they made to be married notwithstanding, there are reasons that some people should be divorced for a different show.
Speaker 1:But the idea is don't be an idiot in the middle of it and think you're going to find happiness by going and getting a different relationship on the side and being dishonorable.
Speaker 2:I love that word honor, yeah, because you think of that word and it inspires a lot of stuff in your mind about you know upholding your commitments virtue, honesty, you know it kind of.
Speaker 1:So if you're at a place right now you're thinking, maybe I want to go, just I would caution you heavily. I'd never met anyone who comes in and says, yeah, I went and cheated on my spouse and I feel really good about that. They usually are sick because they realize, more importantly, all the things they've broken. But they've also broken a commitment to their own heart. They made it one point that now they've decided to break.
Speaker 2:It's like you said earlier, they eroded their own self-confidence and self-worth and self-worthiness.
Speaker 1:Let's talk about going to Mexico yeah, Mexico. So I have this rule in marriage. One of the cautions we give in marriage is that people get married because they love each other, they wanna be together, they wanna spend time together, they can't wait to just do fun things together. And then they get married and stop doing them.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's one of the common causes that things fall apart One of the top five reasons people fall apart in marriage. And then kids come in and they become important, and I get it. Jobs become important. However, I'm a super fan of saying if you stop dating after you're married, you're gonna fail at marriage. Correct, keep doing what you did when you fell in love, absolutely. And that means you gotta go be silly. I mean, you go park your car somewhere. Just go be silly, it's okay. That's why we got married. Go make out on the hill again. It's a part of the fun of being married.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think you mentioned this probably a year ago when we started this. We had a show where you talked about the ratio between positives and negatives when your first dating.
Speaker 1:Top positive, it's like all positives.
Speaker 2:It's like 20 to one positive comments to negative and then by the time you're five years in it's flopped where it's you know, 20 negative comments to each other. Negative comments to anyone positive and I'm like a huge proponent of that it's stay positive, stay in your marriage and your relationship and focus on that, because you might have this thought where oh hey, you know, well, I got kids, I gotta focus on the kids.
Speaker 2:I gotta spend all the time with the kids Kid and I would say one of the secrets to healthy kids is by maintaining a healthy relationship with your spouse.
Speaker 1:And when the kids see mom and dad are doing things they did to stay in love.
Speaker 2:Yeah, because what is it gonna teach the kid? Oh, I need to do that, I need to focus on that for the kids.
Speaker 1:I see how this works right.
Speaker 2:This relationship between mom and dad is healthy. They're in love and it gives that stability to him.
Speaker 1:This is why you need to keep dating. My wife and I we have a standing date every week. We try to make that every week and we try to be flexible because sometimes things happen, but if we don't, we make it a bit other times, and sometimes that maybe we got in the car and we went down the street and we came back, we just took time away. Now, when we were newly married, we had kids, we still went on trips together without the kids, like I did, like you just did. That's what I wanna talk about. How hard was that for you? It was tough. It was tough.
Speaker 2:So yeah, just to get a little personal here, I have one of my sons has and he's still fairly young has type one diabetes. So anybody who's had a family member or something with type one, you're connected to him a lot. Especially if they're a young kid because it can go bad real quick. It can go back quick right and you need to count their carbs and be with them and help them with the way they dose themselves and stuff to keep them alive right If it goes in.
Speaker 1:Dosing goes in.
Speaker 2:So my son was diagnosed something like seven years ago my wife would know the exact day, I'm less good at that, but anyway approximately seven years ago. So for the last seven years we haven't really had the chance to get away, and because with them.
Speaker 1:It's scary. Who do you trust him with? Yeah. Who do you trust he's too young to do it on his own? Yeah.
Speaker 2:So it came into this year and we were coming up on our 25th year anniversary and my son's older and he's pretty capable and we have a lot of the great, wonderful technology out there that's for type one diabetics. And so we made the decisions like, hey, we're gonna go invest in us this trip to Mexico. But it was tough, it was tough on me, it's tough on my wife to say, hey, we're gonna, we're gonna set it up and we're gonna pull away and go to Mexico and let my son you know, my teenage son do it himself.
Speaker 2:Now he's proven he can do it himself.
Speaker 1:We just are you know you're worried about it, right, your parents, it's okay, and so we set up all the schedules.
Speaker 2:We had backup plans and people in the community that are also diabetic that we know could help him and all the stuff. We set it up because of how important we felt it was that we got away and had some one-on-one time and did some fun thing, as Camille and I.
Speaker 1:So heavily calculated, so we just calculated. Very difficult to do, emotionally difficult, but worth it. But you did it yes.
Speaker 2:And let me tell you this interesting. So in the middle of the week my son had a. They call it a sight. It's a sight that they put on their arm, that they're using the monitor Insulin pump that pumps the insulin in their body.
Speaker 2:Well, that one went bad. It wasn't working and my son had never, you know, actually done that operation, that process by himself. And so we got on FaceTime, FaceTimed him and my wife was able to step him through doing that sight change all by himself. Now we had other neighbors we could have called upon if we would have to.
Speaker 1:You had a whole system in play.
Speaker 2:It wasn't like you were just abandoning a child, but we have the system, but we allowed him to go and do. His whole sight changed and it worked out great. He did it perfect and got him back. You know, getting insulin and stuff.
Speaker 1:I'm gonna hold you back. You just said something. We allowed him the opportunity to grow to a new level of independence. He didn't you Correct, and that's what. That's the exact point I was gonna make is he did it by himself.
Speaker 2:We didn't call the, you know the Calvary in Let him do it by himself. He did it. It worked great. And you know I haven't had a I only got back a couple of days ago so I haven't had a chance to really talk to him about it. But I could tell that emotionally it was like a step in his progression, like oh wait a second, how hard was this for your wife I am independent. It was extremely hard for my wife.
Speaker 1:Yep, the reason I'm gonna be that thank you for being candid and open about it, because this is how it really is. It's not that. Oh, we're just gonna get up and it is.
Speaker 2:No, it was tough. It was like weeks and weeks of prep To get ourselves mentally to a state to go, but you took the prep.
Speaker 1:How often do I hear, though, one spouse or the other will not leave Because I can't leave my kids. I can't this, I can't that, I can't this, I can't that. And when I want you to take a minute back, I step back and say maybe you can, maybe you can put some prep in place, maybe you can get some other people around to help you, maybe we just need to add a little more. This isn't about being Rambo. This isn't about being irresponsible children.
Speaker 2:Yeah, not just walking away from a. I would never do that, which we didn't right.
Speaker 1:This is about commitment to the marriage and understanding that mom and dad need mom and dad time too, and when you don't give mom and dad time, you forget that each other's number one. It starts to erode your marriage, which doesn't help your family. So we think we're helping family by not by staying in there, by being there for them by staying in there, yeah.
Speaker 1:And what you're not doing is showing them that the two of you, the stronger the two of you are, the better. So if you're contemplating this, I want you to seriously contemplate when was the last time you went and spent some time together? When was the last time you went on a date?
Speaker 2:When was the last time you just Went silly, went silly, had a conversation that's not about the business of life, right? Right, just go have a conversation about some random topic and spend the night together just enjoying each other.
Speaker 1:You got married because you enjoyed being with each other. Now we stop. It would be great to add that back in. Absolutely, it could be stressful.
Speaker 2:It can be stressful, but the better you do it, the easier it gets and the stronger your children will get as well, yeah, and that's what I was going to highlight is it actually improves your children when they see that healthy relationship between mom and dad and they see the commitment that we put through. And I loved what you said earlier about it wasn't like we were just going, hey-.
Speaker 1:I'm abandoning you. It's all about mom and I.
Speaker 2:There's no preps. We had layers of contingency plans there so that was safe. But it was a safe environment to let them experience independence.
Speaker 1:And to have the chance.
Speaker 2:And to have the chance to prove the trust. And my older son, who's a junior in high school. It was his chance to kind of be there and do the home chores and take care of his younger brother and it was great for him too. So it was actually really good to all around with the right preparation.
Speaker 1:I love it. Many times we see this with kids that are younger. It's hard, you know.
Speaker 1:You gotta get somebody that can babysit you gotta be able to trust the babysitter and or the neighbor, cause there's some things that happen. But there comes a place when you have to get from the fear to a calculated decision to make some commitments. And I can tell you kids sometimes get really nervous when kids leave and so we don't ever like sneak out on them, let their mommy and daddy are going out on a date. We're back in a couple hours. We love you, great to see you, and it may be hard the first few times you do this, but after a while they're gonna learn to trust Mom and dad can go and they still come home and that's a confidence that your children will gain. That you cannot teach except by that experience.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that's a great point. Now, the prep started years ago. By the way, you know, for the last number of years we haven't gone out of the country. I mean, this was a big trip down to Mexico. We were out of the country. But what we'd been doing for the last five or six years is we started with, hey, we're gonna be gone tonight on a date. Then it turned into hey, you know, we're gonna be gone over at the hotel across the, you know, across town. If you really need us, call us, we'll be there in like 10 minutes. Right, and it slowly we built up this confidence in the situation that we had to deal with as a couple. We built this confidence, kent, so that we could, at one point, do what we did last week and go to Mexico. So it was awesome and it was good for the kids, good for us, it was great.
Speaker 1:Proud of you, tony. Well, there you go. It was great for your wife, because it's really hard sometimes on wives. It was harder for her.
Speaker 2:You know I'm a yellow and we talk about people code all the time. I'm a yellow, I'm fun. It's like I'm the semi irresponsible one. Oh, that'll be fine, right. But my wife she's blue, so she really wants to make sure the kids are taken care of, which is admirable, right, I love it. That's what I love about her.
Speaker 1:But what I'm hearing is she took it on like a champ. She did.
Speaker 2:And she's the one I'm proud of Because she allowed the kids to have that growth experience and showed me, her love and devotion to me, and it was great.
Speaker 1:Now that it's over, was it worth it?
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, cheets and Eats is a great place, not to mention all the fun, great conversations we had during the week, of spending an entire week together without the kids.
Speaker 1:That's just you. It was awesome and, by the way, it can be stressful, because if your marriage is based around the children and all you do is talk about the children, you'll get away and you have, like what we even talk about. Yeah, you have to relearn each other, right? Ok, that's the idea.
Speaker 2:That's the point. That's the point we want to encourage you OK.
Speaker 1:When we come back, I want to give you some ideas on how to get past the stressors of life, the headaches of life. It's just as we close the show. I got a couple ideas I want you to kind of play with. I always like to leave the show with a couple of things. There's four or five things we can do to find a new value in life. If life's holding you back, if you feel like you're overburdened, you got stressors, you got headaches look at the future and go gee this is my life.
Speaker 1:Let's give you some ideas, All right cool, let's do it. Let's do it All right, I'll take a quick break. We'll be back. Let's chat with Will and Tony on News Talk 107.9. Back in a couple.