This is the Ramsey Call of the Day part of the Ramsey Network. Let's go to Denver. We've got Amber in Denver, Colorado. Hey, Amber, how are you?
Hi, John and Kristi. I am calling because I am struggling with my marriage. I've been married for two and a half years, and it's actually my second marriage. And when I married my husband, I had a long list of things that he needed to check off before I decided to get married, and he took out a lot of those boxes.
And I'll just hold on, hold on, hold on, before you go through. Just humor me. Just some of the things on your magical, mythical fantasy list. Kind.
Let's see, reliable. Keep going. Those are the easy ones. Give us the ones that are going to be rolling my eyes.
Sturdy, fable. Sturdy, sturdy, sturdy, like, I'm looking at a guy on the lobby that's got about 150 pounds of raw beef on him. He's ripped. I just think he's going to...
That kind of sturdy. That kind of sturdy. And easy going. That's the right way to put it.
Passionate and easy going. Okay, continue. No, not passionate, not passionate. Easy going.
Yeah. Cool. And he, I think for him, his checklist was more like, you know, fabled with money, comes from a good family, and we're kind of coming to this pivotal moment in a relationship where we are realizing that we don't have, that we never had the love spark. And I'm really struggling trying to figure out if that's actually a necessary thing to have.
So, hey, yes, you should, you should... Man, you're saying all the things. This feels like a... I'm not even going to go there.
You're saying all the things. So yes, you have to love the person that you're married to. That's a... One of the cornerstones of marriage is I love the person.
I often win when somebody says we're coming to this apex moment, especially when it's two and a half years in. That feels like you have set yourself up for a determined outcome that you want, and you want to blame it on a moment. Right. So, why'd you marry this guy?
If he's sturdy and compassionate and kind and lovely. And I promise that he wanted you for more than you were good with money. Yeah. Right, right.
And so, I think that's a very important thing to me to be tumultuous. There was a lot of passion and love. And it's badly. Yep.
There was infidelity and addiction. And so, I knew that I guess I feel like I didn't trust that anymore. And I wanted something a little bit more stable and reliable. Okay.
And I'm just like, I guess I'm struggling because I always believed I could just cultivate something that was worth it. But it feels a little bit more like an arranged marriage type situation. And it's been a few years since I looked at the data. It's been a few years since I looked at the data.
But arranged marriages over time. When they decided to put the work in, they love each other. The data on that suggests that they last a long, long time. Yeah.
And so, I want to tell you, is you've got a lot more choice in this than you're allowing yourself. Of course, you're like, I feel you're just moving like almost. I can feel it from you. Well, when you were saying the checklist, Amber, when you were saying the checklist of what you wanted in this house, I already knew what your previous relationship was because your checklist was pretty consistent.
And typically when someone is passionate, I'm looking for these things kind and compassionate stable. I'm like, well, she's been somewhere where she didn't get that because otherwise she wouldn't be so definitive. I need these things. Like you've been hurt.
You've been wounded. I think there's an element of this and John, I actually want to throw back to you on this aspect of, I think people view marriage differently. As a believer, as a child of divorced parents, I'm like, no, I'm in it. I'm in it and less I'm in it.
But that's how you marriage. Everyone doesn't view marriage like that. Everyone doesn't view marriage depending on your faith. And so I think how you view marriage greatly, I would imagine affects how you make decisions.
Because I hear this as hard, make the choice to love each other, work at it, stick with it and turn it into what you want it to be. But everyone doesn't see it like that. You just said something that is counter-cultural yet scientifically accurate, which is make the choice to love. Esther Perel is the one who first put me onto this, which is, it used to be historically that we put our security and our stability from our institutions, right, from our small villages, from our churches, from our local schools.
And as those institutions have shifted and changed over time, we've looked at a marriage partner and said, you are everything. Your stability, you're my love, you're my romantic, you're my passion. So here's the thing. You've got stability, you've got kindness, you've got a person of character.
Desire is something that you practice. It is something you say, I'm going to be about. And he's going to be about it too. And y'all are going to have the adventure of a lifetime practicing desire.
You've got the stability and the safety. Now you decide, we're not, this marriage is not going to end, we're going to practice desire and we're going to be all in. You're going to look up in six months and you're going to be so in love with this dude that your house is on fire. That's good.
That's good. Do you think Disney movies have ruined us? I think they have destroyed everything. This is the Ramsey Show.
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