Published March 2021 by Nelson, Thomas Inc.
Publisher's Summary:
Learn how to fight better and end your arguments with your partner feeling closer, more loved, and better understood.We take our cars in for oil changes. We mow our lawns and pull weeds. Why don’t we do maintenance on our marriages? This relationship is the most important one we will ever have, so why not get better at it?
For the last several years, Penn and Kim Holderness of The Holderness Family have done the hard maintenance and the research to learn how to fight better. With the help of their marriage coach Dr. Christopher Edmonston, they break down their biggest (and in some cases, funniest) fights. How did a question about chicken wings turn into a bra fight (no, not a-bar-fight; a-bra-fight)? How did a roll of toilet paper lead to tears, resentment, and a stint in the guest bedroom?
With their trademark sense of humor and complete vulnerability, Penn and Kim share their 10 most common Fight Fails and how to combat them. Throughout the book, they offer scripts for how to start, continue, and successfully close hard conversations. Couples will emerge equipped to engage and understand, not do battle—and maybe laugh a little more along the way.
In Everybody Fights, couples will learn how to:
Use “magic words” for healthy conflict resolution
Address unspoken and unrealistic expectations
Banish the three Ds of unhealthy communication—distraction, denial, and delay
Carry individual baggage while helping your partner deal with theirs
Penn and Kim want you to know you’re not alone. Everybody fights. Marriage is messy. Marriage is work. But marriage is worth it. Fight for it!
My Thoughts:
I discovered Kim and Penn Holderness on Facebook and, honestly, their videos helped me survive 2020. They are funny, creative, and I may have a little more in common with Kim than I'd like to admit (let's just say that neither of us was particularly eager to have the lockdown end since it meant we'd have to return to social responsibilities). And, of course, they appear to have so much fun together and understand each others peculiarities and get along so well.
Not so fast. They want us to know that, like all of us who are married, life's not always so rosy. In fact, they readily admit that they fight a lot. To be fair, they are together almost 24 hours a day, every day, CoVid or not. Who wouldn't fight? Plus, they are two very different people. Most couples I know are - that's what draws us to one another, the balance the other brings to our lives. It can also lead to disagreements...oh, let's call them what they so often are - fights.
Being church-going people, they turned to their minister (pastor? heck, I don't remember which he is), who is also educated in marriage counseling, for therapy. And he's had some great ideas for them, which they are happy to share with us, along with a lot of things they have learned from researching the topic.
Every chapter starts with a fight that Kim and Penn have had. Each gets their turn to tell their side of the story (because we all know that there are always two sides to every story) and then they let us in on what they've learned about what caused that particular kind of fight and how to learn from it, make future fights like it not as harmful, and how to get past it.
The Holderness' have been married something like 15 years. I'm not sure that what works for couple who have been married that long would work for couples like my husband and I, who have been married almost 39 years.
One of the chapters suggests that married couples need to do a better job of thanking each other for the things that each of them do. I'm agree; that's probably one of the things that people who have been married longer need to be conscious of even more than those who are newly wed. But whilst they suggest that something like "Thanks for driving" is good, "magic words" to use might be "You drove for so long! All I did was sit here and scroll through my phone, which I desperately needed, while you stared at the boring road for three hours. I feel so much more relaxed now." First, I'm pretty sure my husband is happy just to have his work acknowledged. Second, I don't know that emphasizing how relaxed I feel is the best way to thank him. And last, I'm pretty sure we'd both start laughing if we talked like that to each other.
Another chapter, though, is about secret contracts. "Secret contracts are the silent deals you makes with your partner by default and through routine. They are tasks we take on and identities we assume with an invisible handshake at the start of a relationship that we continue till death do us part - or until something happens that reveals the contract needs to be redlined." Now here is something I think every married couple can relate to, maybe more so then longer you've been married. Those are the things that can result in fights about who does more and that pigeon hole us into roles that we don't always want to be in. Recognizing that these things exist is the first step in understanding how to revise them and the book helps readers go on from there.
Will all of the solutions to helping readers resolve marital conflicts be easy or comfortable? No. If you don't already sit down periodically to have discussions about your relationship, it's going to feel very strange. In fact, one of the chapters discusses the idea that we need to just sit down and look each other eye to eye, which is bound to make most couple uncomfortable. The Holdernesses want readers to understand that the discomfort of those conversations is much easier than the pain of the fights and the damage it can do to the individuals in the marriage and the marriage itself. Look at that second paragraph of the publisher's summary - why don't we make the time to maintain our marriages?
Like everything they do, Penn and Kim fill the book with humor. But they tackle the big issues head on - money, marital roles, and sex. It's worth a read for any couple but I think it's one that might be particularly useful for young couples to set them off on the right foot. Now I'm off to put together a plan about how we're going to work these things into our lives - starting with those secret contracts!
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