Bickering, Kindness, and the Deep Roots of Love

Marriage isn’t only shaped by the big events and ruptures—it’s also shaped by the little things. The small arguments that seem to surface again and again, the shifts in family roles as children grow up and move out, and even the physical changes that come with aging can quietly wear away at a relationship if left unspoken.

In this episode of the Allender Center Podcast, Dr. Dan and Becky Allender are joined by Dr. Steve and Lisa Call to revisit the topic of marriage following the release earlier this year of their book, The Deep-Rooted Marriage. 

Together, they name the everyday tensions—like bickering over household tasks or navigating the emotional weight of an empty nest—that can strain a relationship.

More importantly, they share how couples can stay “buoyed together” through kindness, curiosity, and honest conversation. From asking simple questions like “What’s going on for you?” to practicing story work that helps us understand the deeper histories beneath our conflicts, this conversation offers hope and guidance for cultivating resilience and intimacy in marriage.

Whether you’re facing small resentments, major life transitions, or simply longing for more connection, this episode invites you to consider how kindness, curiosity, and story work can deepen your relationship. 

Please Note: This episode contains some mature language; listener discretion is advised.

Related Resources

• Marriage Online Course. With 8 sessions, 25 teaching videos, and a downloadable journal, this self-paced course helps couples explore how personal stories shape their marriage story and discover hopeful pathways forward. Enroll today!
• Marriage Story Intensive: Go deeper with Dr. Dan and Becky Allender and Dr. Steve and Lisa Call through an immersive experience at The Reconnect Institute. Learn more here.
• The Deep-Rooted Marriage: Dive into Dr. Dan Allender and Dr. Steve Call’s latest work, exploring how story, kindness, and curiosity can transform your marriage. Order your copy here.

About Our Guests:

Dr. Steve Call is a clinical psychologist specializing in marriage counseling. He co-authored The Deep-Rooted Marriage with Dr. Dan Allender, and is also the author of Reconnect: tools and insights for cultivating meaningful connection in your marriage. Over his twenty years of working with couples, he has gained significant insight into what contributes to a married couple’s distress. His writing and his professional therapeutic work offer expert guidance to couples seeking reconnection and meaningful connection. His work with couples provides insight, awareness, and understanding so that hopeful change can occur. Steve also teaches masters-level counseling students at the Seattle School of Theology and Psychology in Seattle, Washington. 

Lisa and Steve have been married for nearly forty years and have three children and three grandchildren. Lisa is the founder and director of Farmhouse Montessori and has achieved Level I and Level II training in Narrative Focused Trauma Care through the Allender Center. She is currently enrolled in Level III and actively leading Story Groups. Together, Lisa and Steve enjoy hosting Marriage Story Intensives, spending time with their family, and exploring the beaches of the Oregon Coast.

Episode Transcript

Dan: Well, it is a joy. Always fun to join my dear friends, Steve and Lisa Call with my beloved wife, Becky. We are going to talk about bickering, well, complaining negativity, or so often what seems to happen when couples have certain energy differences that come in the context of how we handle routine activities in the house. So yeah, this is a reflection on Deep Rooted Marriage, but Steven and Lisa, welcome.

Lisa: Thank you.

Steve: Thank you, thank you.

Lisa: I don’t know if it’s a compliment that the topic is bickering and you invited us, but we won’t take it too personal.

Dan: Well, just a quick question. I mean, do you guys bicker?

Lisa: Never.

Steve: You asked me that the other day. I think, you asked, do we bicker? My first response was, no, I don’t think so. But then the more we…

Lisa: All day long we’ve been bickering. So we were like ohh… I guess we do!

Steve: We bickered this morning. We bickered last night like, oh, I guess it’s way more familiar than we thought it was.

Dan: That’s hilarious. And you did critique me using a word that you said came up in the forties and fifties.

Steve: I did. I don’t think I’ve heard the word in a while, so I don’t know. Maybe it’s just like a… I’ll have to look at the origin or where it came from, but it’s, I guess how we would describe what was occurring for us. Last night we had an incident where we got this pizza oven and we decided to make some pizzas outside… an outdoor pizza oven. And…

Lisa: This is no easy task.

Steve: It’s no easy task. And it was just taking forever and making the crust and putting the sauce on.

Lisa: And Steve’s like, I just want it to be fun. How come this is, how come this isn’t…

Steve: How come this isn’t fun? I was hoping this would be fun. I

Lisa: I can’t control if this is fun. This is hard work.

Steve: Why is this taking so long? And how come the crust isn’t ready? And just all kinds of accusation, which I think is maybe the source of what bickering is. It has this sort of accusatory tone to it.

Dan: Absolutely. Oh, it’s so accusatory. And yet what I would say in most occasion, it’s sort of light, fair contempt. We’re not at the point of just an outright brawl, but it’s just sort of that light sniping at one another and it’s a deal. But it all came up because of this article you brought,

Becky: Well, I love sociological numbers and percentages, and this was from the Journal of Marriage and Family in 1924… 2024, they took 3000 couples and they found that moms handle 71% of the household tasks including cleaning, scheduling, childcare, and other daily labor that requires a lot of mental effort. And then another 2020 study was University of Southern California, and they surveyed not as many women, but 322 and found that moms reported being responsible for 73% of all cognitive household labor and at 64% of all physical household labor. But taking out the garbage was the only one of 30 tasks in which fathers did more planning and execution.

Dan: That was painful when you brought that up. I’m like, yeah, I’m the garbage man here.

Becky: So the study also found cognitive labor was associated with women’s depression, stress, burnout, overall mental health and relationship functioning.

Dan: Well. How did you feel when you read that to me.

Becky: It’s no surprise. I mean it’s not, but I think what I went to is, oh my gosh, our country basically has both parents working now, unlike when we entered the workforce. And that is really, really hard. And the other thing I went to was, man, if the man is not on the top of his game, I’m getting ahead of myself at menopause and perimenopause. It’s a big trouble because what you’re going to talk about now is gray divorce.

Dan: We’ll move in that. But again, how are the two of you responding to this? Does it fit? The first thing I did was, and that’s just not true for us. You, you’re not doing 73%, 71%. And we started going through, this is where bickering came up, bickering as to whether it has applicability to our relationship. And I would say you’re not at 73, you’re probably at 67. So just that few percentage left.

Becky: We are now that the kids are out of the house. That’s umm… excuse me?

Dan: I know. So again, how are the two of you responding to that?

Steve: What would you say?

Lisa: I mean, I think we can resonate with that. I think we both came from families that were pretty traditional and so in the roles. And so I think we

Steve: In gender roles?

Lisa: In gender roles. So I think we didn’t push back as much. I think it was fine, but I mean that’s not to say there weren’t many things to bicker about. So I don’t know. What would you say?

Steve: I think there’s a little bit of resistance to being like what you just said, Dan, around percentages like, wait, I don’t think it’s that high. Is it really like that? Is that true for us? And if it is, what does that imply about our relational dynamic? And I think that’s the hope of something like that is what does that speak or what does that say to you about your relationship, potentially? And maybe that’s the invitation for listeners is the invitation to reflect on what might that say, if that’s actually true for you in your marriage, what might that say about your relationship? Is that where some of the tension lies? Is that where some of the bickering comes from? But I think for us, I wouldn’t say so much traditional. I would say that at times there’s one of us that bears a majority of the duties, if you will, the word that even the research used duties and responsibilities. But I think that has ebbed and flowed over time, maybe more so since children have left the home. I think that’s definitely true. More so. It was primarily Lisa that 70% I’d say would really fit when our children were young and the logistics and the planning, I think you bore a tremendous amount of responsibility around that for sure.

Dan: Well, one of the elements when I went to read the article that Becky brought, one of the things that they’re capturing is this notion of the mental load. It isn’t just who carries out the trash generally or who does dishes. There are usually some kind of ritual that we almost all fall into. And yet the notion of mental load for many families, the idea that a woman’s bearing more of the task of the interior of the home, the life of the children, and also working outside the home. You can see where it’s just so obvious the level of resentment would have to be something that has to be engaged and tended to. So I don’t know if any couple’s going to get to a pure clear equity 50/50. I’m not even sure that’s a good goal. But where there is that disparity at that level, that is an issue. But even more so as you put it, I think you’re putting it in this way. Do you have the capacity to address where does the life of the family come? How does the family go from going to bed at night to then getting up in the morning to getting food ready, to getting kids out the door to going shopping? I mean, all the details that are required to make a family work. When the disparity is that high and you’re not engaging it and not engaging it without resentment or quibbling, again, bickering, then that’s going to linger over time. And that’s part of the residue of what I think comes to this category of gray divorce. We know in this country, couples who are 50 years of age and above used to be one out of 10 divorce. Now it’s one out of four. And you have to step back and say, even if you’re not in that age frame, you’re in your thirties, your forties, you’re not married, you need to begin to ask questions with that kind of sociological data, what in the world is going on to make a shift from one out of 10 to one out of four? We want to get your response as to what you’re seeing in the couples you work with, what you’re seeing in terms of the larger realm of this level of what’s going on and is this part of the factor.

Steve: I think that’s so fascinating because part of what maybe isn’t as addressed as directly as it could be is that part of what happens in that age group is that there are less needs potentially because children are maybe a bit older, maybe they’re empty nesting, they’re getting to the stage I think where, wait, who are you again? Whereas the function of being so busy early on in life actually plays a part in not addressing what needed to be addressed relationally. And so I think there’s a link, a correlation for older couples where, oh wait, we didn’t address 20 years ago what we needed to. We were busy, we were distracted. The mental load that we’re talking about, particularly for her, it’s not that it’s a distraction, it’s that there isn’t capacity. And I think that’s part of what’s happening for older couples is that very notion of we didn’t address what we could have or needed to, and here we are in this stage of life, like wait a minute, we’re waking up to the reality of, oh, there is some residue, if you will, of what has not been addressed.

Becky: I love that because we don’t even know what needs to be addressed until it’s needing to be. And I think as a woman, I didn’t know much about menopause, and now there’s so much more information that’s available. I mean, my doctor said, you’re thin, you exercise all the time, you’ve got lots of muscle, it won’t be a problem. But we went away on a sabbatical and I had no estrogen, and it became a big problem.

Dan: Oh, it was a big problem.

Becky: And then came back to the United States after being on a motorcycle and afraid I would fall off the face of the earth. By the way, menopause one symptom can be loss of balance. No one told me that. So I went to two doctors, got on estrogen, and then was overblown with estrogen and got my shopping done at Nordstrom’s. But my daughter, who’s a nurse practitioner said, we’re going to the ER.

Dan: Oh, you didn’t explain

Becky: I had too much estrogen from the two different doctors. Well, I had these streaks going up, and once it got towards my heart, she said, we’re going. I’m like, oh, I didn’t get the swimming suit. She’s like, we’re going but all to say, and then they just cut. I had no estrogen after having too much estrogen. And now the rules have changed again medically. And so I really think it’s a problem. A lot of the situation of the gray divorce is neither male nor female has a full understanding of the woman’s body because of our healthcare. Women have never been given enough study, and that continues to be. So, I mean, if it’s pretty easy, if you know what’s happening to your body and if your spouse understands it, and there’s information out there now, but even not as much. I mean there’s more and more, but why not more now? So I really think for us, that coincided with when I was working on the streets with prostituted teens. And so of course it showed up in our bedroom all sorts of ways without even understanding fully what was happening to my body.

Dan: Bickering, bickering. I mean, we were not cognizant literally of how through the loss of estrogen, there’s also a profound decrease of oxytocin.

Becky: Everything in your body changes.

Dan: So the idea of oxytocin being that biochemical that allows attachment, connection, intimacy as it decreases your patience, sheer, capacity to bear something of my own radical, erratic activity became less and less. So you can see as you put it in such an important category, if you don’t have knowledge and you don’t have conversation, so much of our tensions get dissipated by just this sniping energy of anger. Anger becomes a way of diffusing what your body doesn’t know your bearing. So as you two hear that and engage it, because you are a number of years younger, does it connect to your own experience of making that transition into the gray years?

Lisa: Well, I mean, I resonate with what Steve talked about, the functionality of when you’re coping with building a family and you’re busy and you’re both doing your jobs and you don’t have time or you don’t have understanding to be able to even address what I might be feeling, what you might be feeling, how this might be interacting. And then as we move into this empty nest stage, I think for us, and I think for a lot of women, all of a sudden, wait, the function’s gone. I don’t really need you. I can actually live a really happy life. I have options. Now, on the other hand, I have options. Now I can.

Steve: You’re saying that for you

Lisa: As a woman,

Steve: As a woman, yeah,

Lisa: I think we have more options to have a really fulfilling life. And so if we don’t have the capacity to engage the conversations and how there’s been impact over the years. So I don’t know. That’s kind of the flip side too. I think of maybe another reason why there’s gray divorce. The function was to have this family, and now we’ve got this family, so now what we’re disconnected, we haven’t really, there hasn’t been care, there hasn’t been kindness. We’ve siloed, and so now I’m going to go do my own thing.

Steve: Yeah. I also think of it as when we say the one out of four statistic, it’s meant to maybe put up a yellow light and say, Hey, caution, let’s pay attention. What’s happening relationally between us. So what’s happening relationally around us? We were talking earlier around sometimes even last night, I think this ongoing low grade contempt, the way you described it, I thought was helpful, Dan, around bickering. It seems like that’s connected really to this undercurrent of hurt, frustration, disappointment that hasn’t really maybe been fully acknowledged or expressed. And I thought last night, Lisa, she did a wonderful job actually being curious about, Hey, what’s going on for you? You seem a little agitated, you seem a little frustrated. And I didn’t know. I didn’t know what I was connected to. But I think therein lies the hope of, if we can pay attention to some of this current dynamic around bickering, the frustration, maybe resentment, what is that about? What is it connected to? And maybe that’s the hope of this conversation as well, is can we invite one another to be curious around what is the undercurrent? What is that connected to? Is it something yesterday? Is it something maybe connected to a decade ago? We often don’t know.

Dan: Well, what did you discover with regard to the pizza oven?

Steve: Well,

Lisa: A couple of things, really.

Steve: A couple of things, but I want to highlight two things in that. One is we don’t often know in the moment. It took me the next day this morning to actually put words to what was I bothered by? What was I agitated about? Well, we were planning to have this…

Lisa: Well, and also lemme just say this isn’t a natural thing that I would do, but over the years of practicing noticing and being aware that there are other things playing out, that there’s wounding, that there’s hurt, that our stories are playing out, all of that was at play and it kept me buoyed to staying in curiosity, because…

Steve: That’s a good word.

Lisa: …Normally I think I would call bickering more like defensiveness. How it felt for many years for us is just defensiveness like, well, you did this. Well, you did that.

Steve: You slept in an hour, you did this.

Lisa: He did that one on me on vacation. I’m like, well,

Steve: Why’d you have to bring that up.

Lisa: I’m like… I’m not taking it. But anyway, I could feel that It kept me buoyed into curiosity and I kept going, no, there’s something, you’re frustrated. This is frustrating that it’s not fun. And I just stayed with that because we’re both sort of in this stage of we’re not going to work as hard anymore. We’re tired of working so hard and we’re just not committed to that. But we were practicing for a family get together coming up in a couple of days, so we’re like, we’re going to make these pizzas for all these people, and we’re both going, I don’t think so. This isn’t going to work.

Steve: This isn’t going to work.

Lisa: And so there was some resentment there that Steve started to realize like, wait, why are we always doing all the work? Why are we hosting? Why are we doing this big production? And it’s not even fun. So we did find that out. Also, your back was hurting and you realize, oh my gosh, when you have physical pain sometimes, or the broad spectrum of menopause, like you said, Becky, things are happening in our bodies that are irritating us or bothering us or making us feel off balanced, or all of those things are playing into why we’re responding in a way that is less generous or whatever. We’re just, it’s happening. And so being connected to like, wow, let’s be aware of what’s happening in our bodies.

Becky: And this is really wonderful for us, you and Lisa. And because we have husbands who are therapists, we have husbands who are in the trenches with marriages, and we’ve had the opportunity to do story work through the Allender Center, through years of training. And so to know that even still we have trouble. But again, it’s that conversation and it’s that curiosity for the other with their story. And so I just am aware of how fortunate we are because of the work that we have had the privilege to do. But yeah, one out of four. That’s crazy.

Dan: Well, and it opens, lemme just go back to that question of, so in finding that it’s not going to work for this family gathering, what got triggered for you, Steve?

Steve: I think I was disappointed. I was frustrated this sense of like, oh, I have to produce again in order for relationship to occur, particularly in my family. That’s been true. And so I think there was the fighting, the reality of that I didn’t want it to be true. I didn’t want that to be true, that here I am again in this potential role. So I was frustrated, but I don’t even know a stronger word than that.

Lisa: I mean, the feeling of being consumed,

Steve: Maybe consumed, taken from, something like that. And I think what bothered me about it was that it was bothering me. I think that’s also what happens.

Lisa: He kept saying, but I want it to be fun because if it’s fun, then it doesn’t count for being consumed because you’re having fun. Sure. I was like, I’m sorry, but I can’t produce fun right now.

Steve: But also what we’re talking about with our bodies, I just don’t want it to be true that I have limitations or that something’s happening physiologically or my back hurts or whatever that might be according to what we’re experiencing. So I think that’s also there. I just don’t want it to be true. I want to be okay with this. And I wasn’t, and I’m not. And I think sometimes that’s part of the agitation, maybe another descriptor of what bickering is. We just feel agitated and what is it?

Lisa: Or even that our bodies are aging. You’re talking about all the different impact of how our bodies are aging. And so we don’t even know how that’s playing out. I’m so frustrated that we can’t have this intimacy that we want, or I so frustrated that we can’t keep up or whatever it is you need to sleep in for an hour, whatever our limitations are or frustrating for us. And so you’re holding that tension.

Dan: I want to go back to the pizza oven in a moment, but let me just add to, I think one of the things we’ve discovered this summer, we’ve had a great summer, and yet what we’ve noticed is we’ll go off for a couple days with one of our kids’ families, and when we get back, it takes us so much longer to recover from having fun. So it isn’t just hard times, but that, I mean, perhaps that’s been true before, but we’re much clearer about what our bodies can bear and what they can’t. And in that, I’ve noticed that in that period of recuperation happens to be one of the things where we’ve been bickering more with just a little tension between one another. But you’re opening the door to, in one sense, a bigger reality with a pizza oven. And I think that’s where we go back to what we attempted to address in the Deep Rooted Marriage. If you don’t engage your story so often, these difficulties seem contactless. They seem in many ways, like just petty interactions that have no real meaning. But when you begin to go, no, there’s something going on with the pizza oven. Now here’s my data. I was with you when we were doing a marriage intensive at your glorious barn. And do you remember I do. I was watching you.

Steve: Yes.

Dan: You were focused, consumed, excited, watching the pizza crust, taking it out…

Lisa: He had a mentor, he had a… partner, right?

Steve: I had a partner.

Lisa: He had a very good mentor named Ben doing the pizzas,

Steve: The caterer next to me.

Dan: Yes. And do you remember I mocked you,

Steve: Right? Yes.

Lisa: And he was having the time of his life. So that’s his memory. Absolutely. Right. That’s his memory. This is going to be great. I’m like, I am not Ben.

Steve: This is going to be fun.

Dan: What I not only underscore the issue of being used in consume, but historically you’re not really fond of failure.

Steve: That’s true. I’m not fond of something not going the way I hoped it would go, whether that’s not catching…

Dan: Pickleball.

Steve: Pickleball… a particular fish and a particular river with a particular fly. But I think what you named and highlighted on our behalf for all of us, for the four of us, but also I think for all of those listening is what you said is if we don’t engage our story, the contempt grows. It takes root. I think what is so important though, to keep highlighting is more often than not, we just don’t want it to be true. I just don’t want my story to be playing out in this particular moment. That’s what I was, I think more agitated about was… Here it is again. And I don’t want that to be true. And I think that’s the tension that our body holds sometimes, that the then is projected onto the other, which is what I was doing was I was displacing it, giving it away, trying not to feel what I was feeling.

Dan: Yeah, just this intersection between resentment and discouragement, if you think of discouragement, is a loss of courage, a loss of capacity to engage what’s true with honor and goodness. And so often when I feel resentful toward Becky underneath it, as you put 10 minutes ago, I want to come back to it’s hurt, just plain simple hurt. And that feels too vulnerable to own to myself, let alone to her if she’s already hurt me, bringing hurt is not going to feel like it’s going to be handled well. And historically I think you’ve been way better than most people in engaging my hurt. But because there’ve been enough failures, maybe two out of 10, three out of 10, that’s enough to be able to go, I don’t want to do it again. So that harboring, harboring a sense of like, well, you don’t get it. You don’t see. You don’t know what I’m going through. And then when Becky brings this article and I’m like, oh my gosh, it may not be as true today as it was 10, 15 years ago, but that package of disappointment, hurt on your part. Being played out even a decade or later is just important that we come back to that category of how do we address where there is disappointment, hurt, discouragement in a way that honors the reality of what we’ve experienced and yet looks at it in the larger story? How does the two of you do it with regard to the pizza oven?

Steve: How about your pizza oven? What’s your pizza oven story?

Dan: Well, we could make that shift. Are you sure you want to defer? So…

Steve: Well, I think as you were saying that I was aware of what helps us to actually pay attention to the others’ emotional energy that’s rather than interpreting it as like bickering or defensive posture. Lisa has more, I dunno, can I just say I think more character, she has more kindness than I tend to hold around being curious around what’s happening for me than I have for myself. And I think that’s the key is do we have a spouse and can I imagine myself being the one that says, what’s going on for you? We can’t always make sense of what’s happening in our own body and what we’re experiencing. I think that’s the beauty of marriage, is I need help. I need help discerning what is happening for me. We need help from the other. So maybe that’s part of this dialogue is what helped was Lisa was curious, honestly, you said that earlier, Lisa was what’s going on? She didn’t take it as, why are you being so rude? What’s wrong with you?

Lisa: Which is how I took it for about 25 to 30 years. So I mean, we can’t stress enough. He had so much interaction with each other’s stories that literally, I just remember when I realized that we had made each other’s stories so vulnerable, and we’d talked about him so many times that literally the defensiveness began to fall away. I mean, I remember feeling like, oh my gosh, this is so different. And because I don’t know, the young parts that were wounded, the parts that hadn’t been seen for so many years were finally being seen and tended to that. I don’t know. I think it’s just that hurt that’s always underlined, but if you begin to tend to it, it’s not screaming as loud and there’s noticing. And so that’s when I feel like that the defensiveness in general begin to fall away when we begin to understand the truer story, the deeper story. And so now, yeah, the bickering will come up because we’re trying to do this thing and we get frustrated, but then it’s just more natural to go back to, okay, something else is happening. Something else is playing out this, I know you’re not frustrated at me about this. It doesn’t make sense. But before I think it just so easy to go there. And so…

Steve: In the past, there would’ve been a lot of judgment. What’s wrong with you? Why Are you talking like that to me.

Lisa: Or storming out of the room or forget it, I’m not doing this. There’s so many other options. But as we’ve gotten more familiar with the pattern, like, oh, I see what’s happening. It’s just that aha.

Becky: It’s that being on the same team I think is so important. And that’s what knowing the story of the other is, and to help when the other is really in a bad place to come alongside. Again, our phrase, I’m not your enemy or what’s going on, it’s huge. We probably didn’t see that modeled from our own families. And so this is not a small thing to start saying that and start stepping back.

Lisa: And when you see that picture, when you get that picture that this is related to his story, it’s not about me now. So I’m not defensive now because I can see this isn’t about me. But if we don’t see that, we just keep making it about each other.

Becky: And it’s so great. I know that your dad and your brother will you go talk to them. Is it worth it? I’m just aware of because our parents aren’t on the earth. But I see how this is hard for you, and I guess I have hope that you might, because you’re a very gifted man with words and know how to do what you do, and you do it so well. Just do you ever think of that? I’m just curious.

Steve: I do. I do think of it. I think that’s the risk is is it worth the risk in any particular relational dynamic for my family? I am so ambivalent around that. I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s worth the risk. I don’t know if it’s worth it. There’s a history around risk and there’s also a history around preservation, not giving any more access. You don’t get any more access.

Lisa: Well, and often family doesn’t respond well anyway. So it’s not always the answer to go back and make things better. I think having the understanding of your spouse or having someone else that can understand what your story is can bring a lot of healing.

Becky: So you can just say, damnit, then you’re like, damnit to hell. What I do, I get angry at the other person and let him know.

Lisa: Yeah, well, because he wasn’t connected to what he was like, I don’t know. I don’t know. I kept saying that, but then I don’t know, when you became connected to it,

Steve: It’s just time I needed sometimes.

Lisa: Was that helpful?

Steve: Yeah, it was.

Lisa: So it’s not like he’s going make resolve with those people or anything like that, but just to have the…

Steve: It’s not a therapy session, by the way.

Lisa: I know. But to have the understanding is sometimes an…

Becky: Come on. Isn’t everything with you two?

Steve: It is. It’s always therapeutic. I also want to highlight though, what you guys have modeled also really want to put words to, I mean, you have modeled the notion of kindness. What kindness looks like, sounds like, feels like between each other. I think for some couples that’s part of what is underdeveloped. They don’t necessarily have someone else or another couple maybe to, not just the word model is overrated, but the idea of what are the relationships around you that model something of this idea of less defensiveness, this posture of kindness, this posture of curiosity, I think that goes without saying, but it needs to be said again, as we’ve learned that from you as well. You guys have modeled that for us.

Dan: The antithesis of bickering is where you have the presence of kindness, and you can tell the difference is just hot versus cold. It’s that clear. And we were on a walk this morning and Becky brought up something about my relationship with my biological father, and in that interaction, she could tell I didn’t want to be in it. And it was so kind that you brought more data and you said, is this not true? And is it something that you want to think through a little bit more? And I’m like, no. I’m like, no, no. Let’s just have a nice walk.

Becky: Yeah, yeah. And he’s like, afterwards, after the uncomfortability of it all, he said, that’s what you need to do in a group that’s very good. But he always blesses his mom on his birthday and never did his dad. I’m like, well,

Dan: Which given the complexity of my relationship with my mother, I think it was actually an amazing work of grace. But the reality of, well, what about blessing your dad? He was a part of the process of you coming to this earth. And I’m like immediately like I’m glazed over. The tension has increased. We’re still walking, but I can feel like I wanted to double my pace to make sure that I outrun her and all that happening in a matter of one second, 30, 30 feet from the beginning of the continent to where we were. And this is again, where none of us are making any kind of proclamation, how mature we are, but the imperative of do you have a container, do you have an ability not just to kind of contain the problem so it doesn’t get worse, but a larger container that’s able to hold the tension of that particular moment to then be able for kindness, for curiosity, to be able to engage what’s there. And I’m grateful that, yeah, you did. I thought you did a brilliant job of dealing with a difficult human being at that point.

Becky: We took 48 years on your birthday to get to that 50/50 of your parents.

Lisa: Hey, that’s progress.

Steve: That’s a beautiful imagery though. The imagery that you could receive, the pursuit, you could receive Becky’s pursuit with a sense of that she’s for you. The very thing that we’re just talking about, Becky is for you and you are for her, like the reception, the receptivity to, oh, I might feel agitated and bothered, but I know at a core that Becky is for me.

Dan: Well, and that shall we say, container of truth, that even in the interplay between one parentheses and the other, there may be a lot of jagged dots and slashes and so and so, but something’s holding us together. And I fear, that’s what many couples, even in their early first 10, 15 years of marriage, are not looking to the reality that as complex as their lives are with young children, with two incomes, with paying for the extraordinary amounts of money that are spent for childcare, et cetera. The idea of no, you don’t want plaque to build up in your body, in your heart. And I always come back to this category of flossing. It’s so small, it doesn’t take that much time, but for decades, I just thought, no big deal. I go, well floss tomorrow. But with greater and greater clarity what happens not just to your teeth, but to your heart as a result of not flossing. Yeah, I’m a deep, committed, passionate flosser. Well, I feel like that’s something that even in our near 50 years of being married, we’re doing better. We’re actually engaging the plaque that could, again, I don’t think at our point that I’m fearing a gray divorce, but the reality is no one has a right to think their marriage is so good that there cannot be division. So honoring what’s going on and how do we begin the conversation, even if it’s difficult and painful, at least we can begin to do so with the container of we are committed to one another and we want to grow. And I think that’s one of the things that I feel such heartache for when there’s somebody listening now whose heart resonates with this, but has that sense, their spouse does not. And then you are, at least, it’s not quite what the scripture is speaking about, but where you have that sense, you are unequally yoked. What do you say to that couple? What do you say to that person?

Lisa: Well, what I want to say to ask you first is if someone said, yeah, I want to floss, what does that mean? I mean, what does that even mean? How would you even start flossing?

Dan: Well, to know that plaque is going to kill you. I mean, literally in every marriage there’s danger. No matter how well you love or how distant you feel, there is a reality that there are forces internal, external, seen in the unseen world that want your marriage to be empty.

Becky: And I just, well, for me, being married to Dan Allender, really, I mean, you’re a good man and we have great love and great fun together. But I had to do my own work. I had to do my own work. And that’s where the Allender Center, after being an intercessor for so many years, I started going through the different trainings and that worked for me. Therapy might work for some people. I needed a witness. I needed a group that changed my life, that changed who we are as a couple because I finally needed to find me. So much had been about Dan’s career and the children. And so it was as our friend who was an intercessor with me said, isn’t it unusual what helped you has your last name? Which isn’t really our last name, but that’s another story. But it’s just, I can’t say enough that, and it’s not like I did it and I don’t have to keep working at it. There’s another story. There’s another group that needs to hear at times. So it’s been such a rescue that you had a vision that you had long ago where people could not have to get a degree and come get help, not even knowing they needed help.

Lisa: Yeah. So even if just one that’s listening in the marriage. It’s like, yes, I want to do this work. You can do the work. You can do your own work. It’s what you’re saying. You can do your own story work. You can begin to see what are the things that are playing out in me, because they’re probably bringing out the things in the other. And so that is a place to really start and to begin your own flossing, so to speak.

Dan: I just think about the reality that how many couples have we had when we’ve done this marriage intensive together? You’re in your groups. Our group, often we had one person very committed to being there, and another person, I got drug to another conference or another, whatever. And it’s been intriguing that oftentimes the one who’s most reluctant, at least in our experience, has been willing to get in ways that the person who’s most aware and desirous, when they begin to get clarity about their own story and impact, have more probability of kind of going, oh, I didn’t know this was going to cost me.

Lisa: I thought it was all your fault. What’s happening.

Steve: That is such a helpful reminder is that given the situation we were just talking about, because I think for many couples, the one that is more adamant around the work or the desire for work, it’s usually connected to because they see the other as the problem. They see the other as, there’s something wrong with you, therefore we need help. And rather than, Hey, I might be playing a part in the dynamic that is occurring between the two of us. I love that you brought up our…

Lisa: Drag your spouse to the intensive.

Steve: We do have one spot. We have one spot in September remaining, so we’d love to have one of those couples listening join us for sure.

Dan: Oh, what fun that would be for somebody to listen and be able to go, oh, I might be the reluctant, or I might actually be the excited, but not sure what it’s going to be.

Becky: Hey, I know it’s him or I know it’s her. Yeah, either way. Wow.

Dan: But again, as much as we believe in what we do, I’d go back to this fundamental stance of without knowing your story and the story of your spouse and how that interacts, and the context of the small pizza ovens or walks, where a comment comes up its without context, and therefore it’s often either dismissed or creates even greater division versus being the doorway to actually a deeper and richer exploration of what your heart was meant to know where there was harm, but also where there is the way of redemption. So again, thank you guys. Thank you.

Steve: It’s so fun to be with you guys. Thank you for the invitation conversation. Always a delight.