• "You’ve Got A Friend In Me"

    This article was published on October 15, 2011

    Everyone needs friends. Women need friends. Men need friends. Married couples need friends. We all need someone who will say "I'll stick it out with you; I'll help you get through this." Randy Newman wrote a great song about friends that is featured in one of the Toy Story movies called "You've Got A Friend In Me". It says:

    You've got a friend in me
    You've got a friend in me
    When the road looks rough ahead
    And you're miles and miles
    From your nice warm bed
    Boy, you've got a friend in me
    Yeah you've got a friend in me.
    You got troubles
    I got 'em too
    There isn't anything
    I wouldn't do for you
    We stick together,
    We can see it through
    Cause you've got a friend in me
    You've got a friend in me.

    In marriage, there is great value in mutual couple friends. A healthy married couple can be a wonderful support and encouragement when we're going through some of the rough patches in life. It can be easier to talk to mutual friends than to family about some of the struggles that occur in marriage.
    One of the benefits of mutual couple friends is their ability to remind you of what's normal in a relationship. Sometimes we feel we're the only ones going through a situation, that no one else would understand, but when we have healthy married couple friends, conversation with them can reassure us that every marriage goes through difficulties and there is hope and help. They can provide a safe place to vent and work through marital frustrations. When you have another couple in your corner, urging you on and encouraging you to keep going,  they can help you develop healthy habits, attitudes and activities that will enrich your marriage.

    Friends bring new ideas for strengthening, improving, and revitalizing your marriage as well. They can offer opportunities for fun social interaction. This can be especially important for husbands. In order to understand why this is so, we need to grasp one significant difference between men and women. When women are stressed they want to talk…and talk…and talk. Talking provides a shower of oxytocin in a woman's brain helping her to feel better. Husbands can easily feel overwhelmed by all that talk, and if there is nothing he can do to solve the problem for her, he can end up feeling like a failure. Men are wired to be problem solvers and being unable to protect his wife and solve all her problems can be stressful for a husband. Men handle stress differently than women. When a man is stressed, often he doesn't want to talk about it.  Talking only serves to shine a spotlight on the problem he can't solve, or the situation he can't fix.  Instead, he needs to do something physical to relieve his stress. Going for a walk, taking a drive, watching a ball game are all ways men deal with stress. Physical activity produces testosterone in men and testosterone is what will make a man feel better when he's stressed.
    So what does all this have to do with friends? Having mutual couple friends can give a wife an outlet for talking through her stress, and a husband a physical outlet for working out his stress. Getting together with friends for a fun activity can help everyone.

    That's why marriage mentors can be an invaluable resource for married couples. Being mentored means you have another couple to walk along beside you on your marriage journey, someone to talk to, to ask advice of, and a couple to build a friendship with that can have lasting benefits. Are there trained marriage mentors in your church or community? If not, call us at Heart  to Heart Marriage & Family Institute (905) 693 1129 or log onto our website at www.h2hinstitute.com to enquire about starting a mentorship programme where you live. You'll be glad you did.