Making marriage beautiful : lifelong love, joy, and intimacy start with you

Through grounded faith, humor, and disarming candor, Dorothy Greco equips readers to build flourishing, Christ-centered marriages that last a lifetime.;Foreword; Introduction; 1 Marriage Will Change You: What Do You Want That Change to Look Like?; 2 Not Your Mother's Lasagna: Legacies, Wounds, and Unrealistic Expectations; 3 Beyond Pink and Blue: Creating Christ-Centered Gender Expectations; 4 An Unlikely Blessing: Mining Disappointment and Anger; 5 Tuning In: Why Good Listeners Make Better Spouses; 6 Unmasking Counterfeits: How Disordered Attachments and Addictions Thwart True Desire; 7 Nonnegotiables: Confession and Forgiveness; 8 A Paradox: How Suffering Leads to Love; 9 Choosing Joy: God's Secret Weapon. What makes a marriage beautiful? Honesty? Compatibility? Physical and emotional intimacy? All of these are important, but there's one component that determines the quality and longevity of a marriage more than anything else: a willingness to grow. Because a wedding joins together two imperfect people, all couples experience disappointment, conflict, and pain. How husbands and wives respond to these challenges determines the kind of people they will become and the kind of marriage they will have. Making Marriage Beautiful reveals how the pursuit of Christ results in profound transformation for both the individual and the marriage. Rather than offering clichés and formulas, Greco relies on candor, humor, and real life stories to bring encouragement and wisdom to all couples, regardless of whether they have been married four weeks or forty years. Foreword Introduction 1 Marriage Will Change You: What Do You Want That Change to Look Like? 2 Not Your Mother's Lasagna: Legacies, Wounds, and Unrealistic Expectations 3 Beyond Pink and Blue: Creating Christ-Centered Gender Expectations 4 An Unlikely Blessing: Mining Disappointment and Anger 5 Tuning In: Why Good Listeners Make Better Spouses 6 Unmasking Counterfeits: How Disordered Attachments and Addictions Thwart True Desire 7 Nonnegotiables: Confession and Forgiveness 8 A Paradox: How Suffering Leads to Love 9 Choosing Joy: God's Secret Weapon. 10 It's Not Good to Be Alone: The Complex Gift of Community11 Made Beautiful: The Redemptive Power of Sacrificial Love Notes About the Author. "Through grounded faith, disarming candor, and the real-life stories of eight diverse couples, Dorothy Greco equips you to: create an honest and intimate marriage, acknowledge and resolve your hurts and disappointments, discover how family and cultural expectations affect you marriage, exchange unproductive relational patterns for healthy alternatives, become an agent of healing for your spouse, learn how to love sacrificially and faithfully ..."--Back cover Through grounded faith, humor, and disarming candor, Dorothy Greco equips readers to build flourishing, Christ-centered marriages that last a lifetime. how to fix a marriage;how to fix a broken relationship;Christian marriage counseling;Christian marriage books;Christian marriage help;biblical marriage advice;Christian marriage intimacy;godly marriage