Maddie's Moments

Real talk here. I honestly don't think we talk enough about just how good marriage is. In the world we live in, we hear far more negative things about marriage than positives. There are SOOO many good things about marriage! Did you know that married people are happier, healthier, and earn more than those who are not married? Cool, right? AND when you are married, you are able to learn and grow in ways that you wouldn't be able to experience any other way.  This week in my Family Relations class we learned about marital intimacy and just how important it is in our marriages. I'm a firm believer that married or not, it's important to learn about sexual intimacy and about how our bodies work. Talking about sex used to be such a taboo and awkward thing for me. I didn't even let my mom have the "sex talk" with me because I said "no no no" and avoided it like the plague. Now that I'm married, I wish I would have learned about it before.  S

The way you start your marriage is important. It's like a cannon. How you start will propel you and continue into your marriage years later. Although you can change the course of your marriage later, it will be really difficult. For women, when marriage problems happen, and they will, women tend to look back to how the marriage started. As my teacher put it, "If the wife can look back and have a lovely story to tell herself, then she can make it."  The way your relationship develops really does matter. Your relationship should be like a staircase, meaning that you take the proper steps to build a healthy relationship. These steps are dating, courtship, engagement, and then marriage.  Nowadays, couple go on one date and then it's like they skip right to courtship after that. They begin steady dating and are committed without even really knowing each other. It's important to go on plenty of dates with each other and get to know as much as you ca

Fifty years ago, dating was a completely different game. People would go on dates, ACTUAL DATES, rather than just hangout like we do today. It used to be that two people would spend time getting to know each other. They would go on dates and talk over the phone. Today, we hangout, text, and try to spend all of our waking time together. Nowadays when people date, they skip over the actual "dating" part of dating and move right on to courtship. People today are far more likely to make out on their first date. That's right, I said their FIRST date together. Here these people hardly know each other and they are jumping right to being physical with each other. That was  unheard of  fifty years ago. As a college student, dating is a big deal, especially at a campus like BYU-Idaho's. Dating is hard as a young adult with the way dating norms have changed. You go on a date with someone and it's almost expected that you two are going to keep dating. Dates rarely happen a

The world "would have us believe men and women are so alike that our unique gifts are not necessary, or so different we can never hope to understand each other. Neither is true. Our Father knew exactly what He was doing when He created us. He made us enough alike to love each other, but enough different that we would need to unite our strengths and stewardships to create a whole. Neither man nor woman is perfect or complete without the other. Thus, no marriage or family... is likely to reach its full potential until husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, men and women work together in unity of purpose, respecting and relying upon each other's strengths." Sheri L. Dew I love this quote. It teaches me that when God created us to be different as men and women, HE KNEW WHAT HE WAS DOING. We live in a world where there are many different messages about gender. A few that I've seen and heard are the different stereotypes for men and women, feminists marching for &q

You know those things your family does without ever really being spoken? Yeah? Well those would be family traditions. Every family has different traditions that make up their family culture. These traditions can be a certain way a family does something or a certain belief that is passed down from parents to children and onto the next generations. Not only do these traditions vary from family to family, but also from culture to culture. In China, although it is a law, there is the tradition that each family only has two children at the most. The children are to respect and obey their elders. In Mexico, there is the tradition where families celebrate the lives of their ancestors who have passed on. Family is a focal point to their culture. In India, their is a tradition where in most families, the parents arrange the marriages of their children. In my family, we have the tradition where every time our family is all together, we take a picture. We all complain and grumble every time m