McKay: The main concept of The Marriage Playbook is to get husbands and wives working as teams and to get them into the mind-set that the husband and wife should be a team, as God intended. When a sports team goes out on the field, they have a plan for how they’re going to win, and they play to their strengths. The same goes for marriage, we need to play to each other’s mistakes. We need to look at the things we’re doing well and build on that. We need to look at things that need to improve and work together to make sure the marriage thrives.

 

 

McKay: The main concept really started because my wife and I went through struggles of our own, and when we were looking for resources to help us, we found that a lot of them were very female-driven. It was a lot of getting in touch with your feminine side, but as a guy none of them really connected to me personally. When I sought after God in my own marriage, for some reason my passion for sports just came up a lot. Both my wife and I love sports and love to watch games together. So as we were watching games things would come up, whether they were metaphors or themes, and I would talk to my wife about how appropriate they were for marriage. It’s so mirrored to marriage. We really felt that God has told us to use these metaphors to talk the language that guys really speak and use it to help their marriages.

 

 

McKay: One of the things we talk about is being a 12th man. If you know sports, you know that “the 12th man” is the crowd. In our marriage, you need a crowd of friends to help you when things get tough and cheer you when you’re doing good. You need to be able to talk with other couples about what each of you did in this or that situation, and they can talk to you about what you did. It’s something that God designed for us, to be in community and to help each other. When you surround yourself with the right kind of godly marriages, you’re going to be there for them and they’re going to be there for you.

 

 

McKay: My wife and I had grown up in the church, but we weren’t really walking with the Lord when we got engaged, and our relationship wasn’t built on godly things. After we got married, we made a commitment to go back to church and put God at the center of our relationship. And we did that for the first six years. But then I got very busy with my job, and my wife has struggled with depression her whole life, and at that time she was struggling with post-partum depression. Since I was consumed with work, I didn’t notice. It was a slow decline, and we didn’t even realize that we were sinking. But after about a year of that, I ended up having an affair.

 

Once I came clean to my wife, we committed to fixing our relationship. We tried to identify what we had done that lead to us that point. Even though I had the affair, we recognized that is was the attitudes of both of us that led to it. So we talked about it in counseling, and everything seemed good. But after a while, we got back into our old patterns. The problem was we had only recognized our problems, but we didn’t have a plan to fix them. So after two more years, I had another affair.

 

And all of this time I was working in ministry. When you’re doing that, you have to look and talk a certain way, and I became so good at saying the right thing that I actually drifted apart from God. So after the second affair, we almost ended up getting a divorce.

 

About a month or two into that process, I was talking to a buddy, and he told me something that really made a difference. He said, “Don’t you think that God won’t give you your love back unless you ask Him for it?” I told him that I didn’t deserve that love, and he said it didn’t matter whether I was worthy or not, God had the power to save our relationship.

 

So the next time I talked to her, I brought up the idea of getting back together. I just asked her if she would give me 10 minutes, and if I didn’t screw up, to give me 10 more minutes. We also re-evaluated our priorities. I walked away from ministry for a while. And I had to learn that love isn’t a feeling; love is a choice. I had to learn to choose to love my wife every morning, even if I wasn’t feeling very loving. I also learned that if you are struggling, you don’t need to look at the problems, you need to look at your walk with God.

 

The cool thing for us was that we were able to see God save our marriage. I’ve been a

Christian since I was 6. Until two years ago, if people ever asked me how I knew God exists, I would have given them the typical Sunday school answer. Now if someone asks me how I know God exists, I say I see it in my marriage every day—because I know my marriage was saved not because of anything I did but only because of what He did.

 

McKay: I think the thing that we do is we make an investment into the people who use the Web site. We want people to know that we can use our input, we will pray for them if they leave us a message. We want to be there for people who need us, because we had that. God has made it obvious to us that we should share our story so that others who think no one can understand what they’re facing can see that we understand. We’re also setting up mentoring couples in different regions of the country who can help couples like us who were in trouble.

 

McKay: The one thing that I always go back to, not just with others but with my own marriage, is, “What am I doing today to make my marriage better?” Come up with something today that can show your wife that you love her. You don’t need to shoot for the moon, but find something. And don’t do it expecting something in return. Do it to make it her feel safe and let her know that being married to you is going to keep her loved every day.

 

It can be something as simple as making her first in your affections. When I come home, even if my daughters are strapped to my legs, I walk over and kiss my wife first. That shows her that I love her, and it also shows my daughters that I love their mommy. Or, if my wife has been swamped with laundry all day, sometimes that one thing could be me putting away some clothes. The more you build on this success, the easier it becomes. You build good habits and prevent yourself from giving in to your bad ones.

 

For more, visit themarriageplaybook.com. To read Ace’s blog on Star 88.3, go to www.star883.com/blogs/ace