The Power of a Pro-Marriage Collective
Three benefits of a supportive community for your marriage.
You may have heard the statement, “You’re the average of your five closest friends.” Well, we believe your marriage is the average of your five closest couple friends. Our pastors often say, “Show me your friends, and I’ll show you your future.” For your marriage to be secure and strong, you need to build what we call a “pro-marriage collective”—a community of like-minded and growth-minded couples.
An artist’s collective is a group of artists, curators, and supporters who work together to support and promote the work of every member of the collective. Just like artists need support and encouragement to continue pressing forward, you and your spouse need a marriage collective that will strengthen and push you forward in your marriage.
The quality of our married life is enhanced by the quality of our relationships—both as individuals with our friendships with our couple friends. We teach and coach a lot about discovering your purpose and your vision for marriage, as well as setting boundaries and priorities for marriage. But for our first several years, we didn’t have a purpose. We didn’t know what our purpose was. And we really didn’t have a vision for the future. Truthfully, our vision was that we wouldn’t get divorced. We did have some boundaries we set early on, but no growth-oriented priorities. However, one thing we did that made all the difference in our marriage was getting around the right people who not only had strong marriages, but also encouraged and championed our marriage. In that season, we learned that having a marriage collective is so important.
There are huge benefits to having a marriage collection, here are a few:
- Accountability
The gift of other people in our lives is that they know us and pay attention to us. They love our marriage and family enough to even confront us and grace and truth sometimes. And they’re willing to have hard conversations, ask tough questions, and hold us accountable to make sure the things that are going to strengthen marriage are present in our marriage. There’s power in having people in your life who can ask, “How are you guys doing?” And it’s even more powerful when you know they have your best interest in mind.
- Encouragement
Life is hard, which sometimes makes marriage hard. But we’ve heard it said, “A joy shared is doubled and a sorrow shared is half of that.” When we have people in our life who help us shoulder our burdens, it cuts the sorrow in half.
A couple of friends have shouldered significant pain points with us in our marriage journey—whether it’s ministry challenges or parenting disappointments, it’s encouraging to know these couples have been in our corner praying for us. It’s lightened the load in our married life through hard times. Getting a simple text from a friend that says “I’m praying for you,” has lightened the load in our marriage and lifted our spirits many times.
- Wise Counsel
We need wise, godly counsel, especially when we’re in the thick of our own lives. When you’re in the middle of your own mess, you can’t see above the weeds.
Proverbs 11:14 (Amplified Version) says, “Where there is no wise intelligent guidance, the people fall and go off course, like a ship without a helm. But in the abundance of wise and godly counselors, there is victory.”
We share that passage with couples when they’re preparing to get married. But it’s such a great reminder that no matter how long we’ve been married, we need people that can give wise and godly counsel in our life. Whether it’s financial matters or parenting issues, we need to lean in to those further down the road.
Ultimately, the best counsel we can get is from God. Proverbs 3:5-6 says, “Trust in the Lord, lean not to your understanding, in all your ways acknowledge Him…” But God uses people in our lives and couples in our lives to strengthen our marriage and help us move forward.
Proverbs 13:20 says, “Walk with the wise and become wise, associate with fools and get in trouble.” It’s so important that we’re building this collective of people that are going to give accountability, encouragement, and wise counsel. One of the things we often see in marriages when couples are struggling, is that they tend to isolate themselves from others, hiding the struggle from friends and family. And isolation only enhances the pain. So having a strong marriage collective is going to provide support, encouragement, counsel, and comfort. Ben Casnocha wrote, “The people you spend the most time with will change you in ways you cannot anticipate or ever fully understand. The most important choice of all is who you choose to surround yourself with.”
When we first got started, we didn’t have a lot of vision. We didn’t have a lot of forward momentum. But we did have a lot of great people around us to witness and observe how they honored one another and modeled marriage. Spending time with the right people isn’t always convenient—in fact, we’ve realized that you often have to initiate time with the people who stretch you. But the benefits are well worth it, because a pro-marriage collective has been the key to our marriage not just surviving, but thriving over the last thirty years.
Related: Read How to Build a Pro-Marriage Collective…
About James & Lisa
James and Lisa Duvall share truths and lessons learned from their 29 years of marriage and over a decade of teaching, coaching, and speaking on marriage.
