Brian Jones

A man and a woman were involved in a car crash and both of their cars were demolished.  After their cars came to a grinding halt, both of them miraculously walked out from their cars, neither one of them were hurt in any way.

After both of them crawled out of their cars the women said, “Can you believe this?  Both of our cars are completely destroyed, and both of us, a man and a woman, are left unharmed.  This may just be me, but this seems to be a sign from God that we were to meet and live the rest of our lives together.”

The man said, “I agree!  This is a sign from God!”

Then the woman continued, “And look at this, here’s another miracle.  My car is completely destroyed, but a bottle of wine in my back seat didn’t break!  Surely God wants us to drink this and celebrate our good fortune!”

The man shook his head in agreement. 

So he took the bottle of wine from the back seat of her car, opened it, took three or four big swigs, and then handed it back to the women.

But the woman took the bottle and immediately put the cap back on and handed it back to the man.

He asked, “Aren’t you having any?”

The women replied, “No, I think I’ll just wait for the police.”

Couples, how they get together never cease to amaze any of us.

How they break up, though, often does.

Psychologists Cliff Notarius of the Catholic University of America and Howard Markham of the University of Denver discovered that none of the factors that one would guess might predict a couple’s durability actually does: not how in love a newlywed couple says they are; not how much affection they exchange; and not how much they fight or what they fight about. 

In fact, the researchers said that couples who endure and those who don’t look remarkably similar in the early days. 

Yet when Notarius and Markham studied newlyweds over the first decade of marriage, they found a subtle but telling difference at the beginning of their relationships. 

Among couples who would ultimately stay together, on average 5 out of every 100 comments made about each other were putdowns. 

Among the couples who would later split, roughly 10 out of every 100 comments were insults.  That gap magnified over the following decade, until couples were flinging five times as many cruel and invalidating comments at each other as happy couples. 

The researchers commented, “Hostile putdowns act as cancerous cells that, if unchecked, erode the relationship over time, and in the end, relentless unremitting negativity takes control and the couple can’t get through a week without major blowups.” (US News & World Reports, Feb 21, 1994, p. 67)

I’m not quite sure whether or not I believe their research (how do you accurately record the conversations of newlyweds for ten years?), but what they found sounds remarkably similar to what the Bible says in Ephesians 4:29.

It reminds newlyweds and oldyweds alike, “Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths, but only what is helpful for building others up according to their needs, that it may benefit those who listen.”