My clinical supervisor and mentor once told me this about marriage:
Make sure you don’t bury them [hurt/resentments] alive.
It inspired these lessons from zombie hunting, for reanimating your marriage when it isn’t quite dead but isn’t quite alive.
One way to fight for your marriage is learning how to kill zombies.
The zombies of betrayal, disappointment, bitterness, old patterns, unforgiveness.
Here are few ways surviving the zombie apocalypse can help you fight for your marriage.
1) The zombies are the zombies, not your spouse so don’t take the hatchet to each other’s knees.
2) Sharpen each other’s machetes and fill each other’s chainsaws with gas every day.
3) Find ways to the kill the zombies dead, once and for all. If you bury them alive they spawn and come back worse than ever.
4) Guttural language, listless shuffle, glassy eyes, aimless wandering…your husband may look like a zombie at times but don’t kill him, he may just be tired after work.
5) The zombies are relentless so remember to have fun while blowing gaping holes in them. There’s always comic relief needed at some point.
6) If you escape the clutches of the zombie horde but leave your spouse behind to be overrun, in the end, you still lose.
7) Bringing up the past is the toxic fluorescent green sludge that reanimates the zombies, get rid of that ASAP!
8) Nurse each other’s wounds. You can’t always be in fight-or-flight mode. At some point, you have to pull back from the zombie horde. Besides humor, the zombies can steal away empathy. When you’re constantly under stress, you lose your ability to think of anything but survival. You may lose your ability to find solace in each other. So, find that pause in the you-against-the-world and care for each other’s wounds. Who knows with that intimacy and vulnerability you might even get naked and reconnect with a love scene in the middle of the war.
9) Last one: A zombie’s Never Say Die attitude is worth imitating in pursuing an awesome marriage.
What would you add?
