Connect And Conquer

[00:00:00] Kyle: I wanted to make sure I had this since we were gonna talk about, uh, cleaving unto your spouse. You know, I wanted to make sure I brought

[00:00:06] Cameron: that’s right. Two definitions of cleaved.

[00:00:13] Kyle: Yeah. Are we recording?

[00:00:15] Cameron: Yeah. We’re recording.

[00:00:16] Kyle: Okay, perfect. Perfect. So that’s what we’re gonna talk about today, Cameron.

[00:00:21] Cameron: Yeah. What, so you, you watched the video of Sara and I talking about CCLE unto none else and some of the struggles we had, and you told me, you said, I’m gonna try and quote you. I’ll come close it. You said, that’s so foreign to me

[00:00:38] Kyle: Yeah,

[00:00:38] Cameron: that that was a, that was an issue and we’re so similar in a lot of ways. I love to pick at the things where we’re different because that’s where I learned the most.

[00:00:51] Kyle: yeah. It was foreign to me because, you know, it, it was, um, her, your wife wasn’t sure she could trust you yet. Like she, you know, obviously her father, she had grown up with her father, he’d been there forever. Right. And through that, you develop trust just because somebody’s there, you know, but when Shelly and I got married,

[00:01:19] Kyle: I’m not sure she had some of those.

[00:01:23] Kyle: Some of those unique hangups may, and I’ll call ’em hangups. And maybe that’s the wrong word. Again, the disclaimer for this is if we say something that offends you, that’s not what we’re trying to do at all. We we’re, we’re just trying to be helpful, and we might use the right word, please forgive us. Right.

[00:01:38] Cameron: Sure.

[00:01:39] Kyle: I don’t wanna, my wife didn’t have those hangups when we start, when we got married. It’s almost like, uh, I don’t know. I was, I, I kind of felt I wasn’t, I had some issues with my mom,

[00:01:55] Cameron: Mm-hmm.

[00:01:58] Kyle: but I didn’t. And so it, it’s interesting. I had some issues with my mom because my mom, I had four brother, or three brothers and one sister.

[00:02:05] Kyle: And we were wild growing up. We were wild.

[00:02:09] Kyle: And so my mom would lose her patience and she would whoop us good. I mean, she would, I, I can name probably a hundred things I got whooped with. Right. And I took my last whooping at 19 years old. Right. So when I started dating, I was looking for a woman who was not i’ll, I’ll call it crazy, right?

[00:02:27] Cameron: Okay,

[00:02:28] Kyle: I wanted steady. And when I met Shelly, she was the most steady, solid. So when she was good for me, ’cause I was more of the crazy one, you know? And so when we, when we got married, it was like, I, I just loved this girl, right? I was just like, she was what? I needed a stabilizing force in my life. we got married, we didn’t, we didn’t have those issues like you’re talking about.

[00:02:54] Kyle: Most of our issues were she was quietly stubborn, passive aggressive,

[00:03:00] Cameron: Okay.

[00:03:00] Kyle: and so, and I was aggressive, aggressive with my issues. So we kinda had to organize our together that way. But we really, what we really made an effort to, to talk about those things, if we had some conflicts, we would try to figure ’em out pretty quick, you know?

[00:03:16] Kyle: And so we, we didn’t go through kind of some of those, to me, what you discussed

[00:03:21] Cameron: Uhhuh.

[00:03:22] Kyle: with your wife initially

[00:03:25] Kyle: seemed like silly, like surface level, silly, you know what I’m saying? But, but deeply, I mean, but frankly it’s not silly because it creates this,

[00:03:38] Kyle: it creates other stuff, right? So even the surface level silly stuff creates, can create contention and frustration

[00:03:46] Cameron: Mm-hmm.

[00:03:46] Kyle: that’s can become a problem, right?

[00:03:48] Kyle: So I, I get, I understood it. It’s interesting. I told my son last night I was gonna talk to you about, uh, I always like to ask him what he thinks right about leaving unto your

[00:03:57] Kyle: spouse. And I shared with him your kind of the basics.

[00:04:02] Cameron: how long has, how long has he been married now? It’s gotta be

[00:04:05] Kyle: He’s,

[00:04:05] Cameron: four years.

[00:04:07] Cameron: That’s awesome. Okay, go ahead.

[00:04:09] Kyle: and, and I kind of shared with him

[00:04:11] Kyle: your, the story that you kind of told with your wife about fixing the car and he. That sounds really interesting to me. And I said, what? And he said, yeah, it’s, maybe it’s the way you just described it was interesting. Maybe the way that maybe it didn’t connect with him. And I said, oh, okay. Well maybe I’m just way off base here. You know,

[00:04:38] Cameron: Well, well, okay, so for those who haven’t seen that video, um, my wife, when we were first, when we first got married, um, we were young. How old were

[00:04:49] Cameron: you when you

[00:04:49] Cameron: got married? Kyle.

[00:04:51] Kyle: I was 25 and she had just turned 20.

[00:04:54] Cameron: Okay. So there’s a five year difference between you and Shelly. Sara and I have a two year difference and I married her when she was

[00:05:03] Cameron: 19.

[00:05:04] Cameron: I was 21

[00:05:06] Kyle: Okay.

[00:05:08] Cameron: she had never been out on her own. And she grew up in a home where, um, you know, she was the youngest of eight kids, so it was normal for her until all of her siblings left for her to sleep in the same bed as a sibling, like, you know, little House on the Prairie style.

[00:05:26] Cameron: Instead of it being a bunch of ’em, it was just, you know, two. And, um, so when we first got married, there was. She was used to relying and relying upon her parents and specifically her dad who would do things. And as she’d gotten older, she had watched her older siblings go out into the world and do things, and she was able to just kind of absorb what they would do and in their marriages, how things would work.

[00:05:59] Cameron: And she had, uh, just like all of us who aren’t exposed to other things, that’s, that became normal.

[00:06:08] Kyle: Right.

[00:06:09] Cameron: And so whether it was a sibling who moved back in to live with her folks, because that’s, that was normal. Um, in fact, when we first got married, we lived in the basement apartment of her parents’ place. And it was really cool because we were the, she was the youngest of eight, so every child who lived there, and I think all but one lived in that apartment, they would do an improvement.

[00:06:37] Cameron: So by the time we got there, we had a kitchen. And um, you know, I guess there, the, at first there wasn’t even a door to the apartment making it separate. So that, I could imagine that was a challenge. But anyway, so that’s how it was, right. Um, reliant upon her dad, reliant upon her parents, and. For me, I wanted us to rely on each other and to c unto each other and none else.

[00:07:06] Cameron: it, it wasn’t an instant fix. It wasn’t something that immediately took effect for her. And the story I share in the other podcast is when, uh, we had a Buick Park Avenue. It was a sweet ride it was so awesome and it needed a break. It needed its brakes replaced. And I’m not mechanically inclined, but I can read books back then.

[00:07:30] Cameron: I read books now. I use the internet. But, um, and I would, it was normal for me to go down to the library or go down and buy a book or check out a book and read it on how to do it and then do things. Um, and I had never done, uh, breaks by myself. I probably, you know, held the flashlight from my dad growing up and, uh, it was hot.

[00:07:52] Cameron: And so I told her I was gonna go get the brakes. I was gonna go replace the brakes over at my dad’s house. And somehow, uh, in her mind, because all of the vehicles were all taken care of by a mechanic, her dad would take it out. And our mechanic was awesome. Um, their, their mechanic was awesome. Uh, we adopted their mechanic, uh, but we couldn’t afford a mechanic.

[00:08:16] Cameron: We could barely afford to get the brakes changed. So I was gonna do it ourselves, and it caused some great anxiety inside for her. And for whatever reason, she started talking to her dad. And she invited her dad to come help me replace the brakes on my car before she even talked to me. And then the mistake that was made was she came out to say, Hey, would you like some help from my dad?

[00:08:43] Cameron: And I said, no. So now what is she supposed to do? Call her dad and say, don’t come.

[00:08:49] Kyle: Right.

[00:08:49] Cameron: that’s what we’re supposed to do. I didn’t want her dad to come help me. I needed space to figure out things dis discover my own, you know, manhood and replace the brakes on our car.

[00:09:02] Kyle: Right,

[00:09:03] Cameron: she didn’t tell me that she had already talked to her dad.

[00:09:06] Cameron: The next thing I knew, her dad showed up and it, uh, to me that was a little bit of a betrayal. ’cause I had just told her, no, I don’t need any help. And then, you know, half hour, 45 minutes later, her dad shows up to help me replace the brakes on a car.

[00:09:26] Kyle: right.

[00:09:26] Cameron: That, that was an example of not cleaving to anyone else.

[00:09:30] Cameron: She didn’t use me as her helpmate. She still was reliant upon her dad. Now, this was early in our marriage, but it was an example that was as clear as day to me of an example of where we weren’t cleaving unto each other. We, we were still cleaving upon others

[00:09:49] Cameron: first. So,

[00:09:51] Kyle: And and I,

[00:09:51] Cameron: was,

[00:09:52] Kyle: I think that’s a great

[00:09:53] Kyle: example. You know, when I told, when I talked to my son about it, he said, I’ll, that’s a good example. And I was like, oh, well, I guess maybe I’m just jacked here, right? Because it was, it’s it. But I think what you’re describing here is there’s a transition period, right?

[00:10:11] Cameron: Mm-hmm.

[00:10:11] Kyle: For, and there’s probably a transition period.

[00:10:14] Kyle: I.

[00:10:15] Kyle: There’s probably transition period for both of us, right? Because I know I’ve, I’ve talked to, there were times when my wife would come to me and say, Hey, could you talk to this guy? You know, she’s got a girlfriend and her husband is a mama’s boy. And I’m like, no, I’m not talking to that guy. And she’s like, what?

[00:10:35] Kyle: I’m like, that, that’s not my stewardship, that’s not my deal. That Why is she talking to you about that? First of all, that that sounds like something she needs to figure out with her husband. Right.

[00:10:48] Cameron: Right.

[00:10:49] Kyle: it, and, and I think a lot of times we, you know, we come into these relationships with different, we’ll call it baggage, you know, it, it, it’s good and bad stuff.

[00:11:00] Kyle: It’s different stuff. Right. And we don’t know, you can’t know everything about who you marry, so you don’t know what they’re bringing in until you, till they bring it in. Right.

[00:11:09] Cameron: Right.

[00:11:10] Kyle: And I think a lot of what we’re talking about is just starting with an open line of communication and trying to, trying to understand what people are bringing in.

[00:11:20] Kyle: Right now, the way we handle it is the interesting part, right? Because when you use the word betrayal

[00:11:29] Cameron: Mm-hmm.

[00:11:31] Kyle: betrayal for a break job, it sounds like you’re being super dramatic to me. Right? It’s a break job. It’s not. I understand what you’re saying. Right. I get it

[00:11:42] Kyle: in, it’s in its essence.

[00:11:44] Cameron: Is there another word that I could use

[00:11:46] Cameron: instead of betrayal? Because for

[00:11:48] Kyle: Well you were

[00:11:49] Cameron: think of another word.

[00:11:50] Kyle: you were probably a little hurt that she didn’t come to you first.

[00:11:53] Kyle: Right? I mean,

[00:11:54] Cameron: Well, I was mad. Uh, so maybe primary emotion was hurt. A secondary emotion. I was ticked off

[00:12:02] Kyle: Well I

[00:12:02] Cameron: I was not gonna deal with another person trying to do this brake job after I told her I didn’t

[00:12:07] Cameron: want

[00:12:07] Cameron: help.

[00:12:08] Kyle: yeah, I think that’s what men do though. We, we take hurt and make it anger. ’cause hurt is not masculine a lot of times.

[00:12:15] Cameron: All Right.

[00:12:16] Kyle: It’s not, it’s natural for us to go to anger when we get hurt.

[00:12:19] Cameron: Sure.

[00:12:20] Kyle: But yeah. So when you, when you use the word betrayal, I’m thinking betrayal sounds so, it sounds harsh, boy. And I’m like, she was just trying to help.

[00:12:30] Kyle: You know, my perspective is

[00:12:32] Cameron: Oh, interesting.

[00:12:33] Cameron: Okay.

[00:12:33] Kyle: what you’re saying. Yeah, I get what you’re saying. You know, and, and I think too,

[00:12:39] Kyle: it probably comes from,

[00:12:43] Kyle: it probably comes from, there were probably other little, other little things that happened that got you to that word. Right. That got you there.

[00:12:55] Cameron: Well, is there a minor word for when someone does

[00:12:57] Cameron: something against your own wishes

[00:12:59] Cameron: and you’re supposed to be in a

[00:13:00] Cameron: partnership

[00:13:01] Kyle: I dunno that there’s, I don’t know that there’s a great

[00:13:04] Kyle: word for it. I’m trying to

[00:13:05] Cameron: I’m gonna

[00:13:05] Cameron: Google it.

[00:13:07] Kyle: That’s not a bad idea.

[00:13:09] Kyle: Yeah, because if I were to use the word betrayal with Shelly, I don’t know that that’s a word I would ever try to use with my wife ever right now. And I don’t, and again, it has this connotation of something deeper, but I think that’s, it’s, you know, words are powerful.

[00:13:31] Kyle: Right.

[00:13:33] Cameron: Yeah.

[00:13:33] Kyle: and personally, if, if I’m doing the breaks and my, my father-in-law wasn’t, isn’t mechanical, so that wouldn’t have happened. But had she said, do you need help? And I said, no, I got it. And then her dad showed up, I probably would’ve said, I personally probably would’ve said, she’s just probably trying to get me help.

[00:13:54] Kyle: ’cause I’m not, I don’t, maybe I’m not perfect in this situation. It wouldn’t have, it wouldn’t have affected me the same way. However, it, it might be something different, right. I mean,

[00:14:04] Kyle: there’s different circumstances.

[00:14:07] Cameron: so I Googled it and disloyal

[00:14:10] Cameron: is the other

[00:14:10] Cameron: word I.

[00:14:12] Kyle: Yeah. That

[00:14:14] Cameron: To me, disloyal is, is harsher than betrayal.

[00:14:17] Kyle: it?

[00:14:19] Cameron: So that’s funny for, just so you know, for me it just was another

[00:14:25] Cameron: example of where I was

[00:14:26] Cameron: not worthy of her trust

[00:14:28] Kyle: See that now you just said a word there, another example.

[00:14:32] Cameron: Mm-hmm.

[00:14:33] Kyle: That, that word means a lot. Right? Because at some point she had done some other things that had given you this impression. Right. Whereas,

[00:14:42] Cameron: I just, it wasn’t one story in the first six years of our marriage, this was, this was a struggle for us to come together

[00:14:51] Cameron: and only Cleveland to each other and none

[00:14:55] Kyle: right,

[00:14:55] Cameron: was an ongoing issue. So for me, I just use that as an example of an overlying, uh, theme, which was, in our marriage, one of the hardest things was the, uh, me not feeling worthy of her trust because of the actions that showed her that she didn’t trust me.

[00:15:18] Kyle: Yeah.

[00:15:19] Cameron: And that, that break example, she didn’t trust me that I would do it, that I would do it in a way that was safe. So, and because she didn’t trust me, and maybe she did trust me, but she trusted her dad more, and that to me was,

[00:15:38] Cameron: uh, I can’t think of another

[00:15:40] Cameron: word. Uh,

[00:15:41] Kyle: saying. Yeah. I get what

[00:15:43] Cameron: Betrayal, man, I wish, Hey, someone put in the comments a better word

[00:15:50] Cameron: because it was a request.

[00:15:53] Cameron: She said, you know, no, I don’t want any help. Don’t call your dad.

[00:15:57] Kyle: Mm-hmm.

[00:15:58] Cameron: And her dad showed up. Now, granted, she had talked to her dad beforehand and then in embarrassment, she didn’t tell me, uh, already called him on his way. You know, in her mind she thought I was gonna want the help, right? We were new at, at marriage.

[00:16:14] Cameron: We, we hadn’t been together for more than three years, I think, uh, total, like from first date to this point. And she assumed that, of course, I would want help not realizing that I needed to figure it out. And I, because of the way that I learn, I need space. I don’t, I, I can’t absorb information with someone directing me and telling me to do things.

[00:16:43] Cameron: I need to actually look at the brakes, need to analyze, need to experiment a little bit, and then, uh, reference material, and then go to apply it. It’s, uh, very frustrating for others. ’cause when, um, if we’re chopping wood, Yeah, show me the basics and then give me an ax. You know, tell me what to do to be safe and then get out of the way because I need to figure it out.

[00:17:08] Cameron: I gotta kinetically, get my

[00:17:10] Cameron: hands

[00:17:11] Cameron: on and do it, so,

[00:17:13] Kyle: And that’s something you may have learned late even after your, you might not have been aware of that in its, I mean, the thing is, is Yeah, yeah, yeah. See, we don’t, we, you bring some stuff in and she brings some stuff in and there can be conflict. Right. You know, I asked, it was interesting because I asked my son about this.

[00:17:31] Kyle: And, and the first thing that he said, which was interesting to me is he said, um, see, and I, and I think maybe because he’s been around me so much, is that when kids come along right, it can rip you apart or bind you together. Right? And sometimes it can do both at the same time.

[00:17:59] Cameron: sure.

[00:18:00] Kyle: Right? And, and this is gonna sound harsh to a lot of people who hear it, but my kids knew from day one, if we’re on a boat and you’ve heard this Cameron, and the boat is sinking and I can save Shelly, my wife, or all six kids, one or the other, they’re gonna die ’cause I’m saving her.

[00:18:21] Kyle: Right? She’s top of the heap, you know? And that’s the first thing he said to me when I asked him about cleaving unto your spouse, right? Is he said, is that, he said, that gave me, you know, he’s my son, he would die in this situation. He said, it just gave me confidence that you loved her. So he said, I knew you loved me, right?

[00:18:46] Kyle: You love, we love our kids.

[00:18:48] Cameron: Sure.

[00:18:48] Kyle: But then we got into a conversation about how moms, when they have kids, right? Dads become secondary for many, many, many years to the moms, right? They become secondary

[00:18:59] Cameron: Yeah.

[00:19:00] Kyle: And it’s, we have to understand that that’s, that’s part of their process, right? We have to be patient and kind and loving, because we are not, we do not appear to be like, we are not gonna be top of the heap for a while now. But just because of the, i I, I wanna say just because of the nurture, the mothers, the mothering and nurturing, right. The way they have to, uh, one of, I’ll share something with you. It’s pretty interesting. So years ago, my wife used to like to buy old furniture and refinish it and resell it.

[00:19:36] Cameron: Nice.

[00:19:37] Kyle: And I was her slave labor.

[00:19:41] Kyle: Right. Which it, it didn’t take me long to realize it made her happy. Right? And it kept me busy and I wanted her happy and I probably needed to stay busy, you know? And so I would be out there sanding and painting, and she would come out and, and she would just light up, right? I would say, what are you, what are you gonna do with this?

[00:20:03] Kyle: She’d say, I’m gonna sand it down and paint it, you know? And I would say, well, I know how to sand, right? And I would just, Saturday mornings I would get up and go sand and, and it would light her up, right? And I knew that. And I, that was kind of what I wanted. Like, and the more I served her, the more I, you know, the more you serve somebody, the more you love them.

[00:20:21] Kyle: It’s just natural for that to happen. Well, she had purchased, she had a show coming up that she was gonna do, and she had a bunch of furniture. I needed help. And so at the time, I think Alec and Zach were maybe 15 and 13 teenagers, right? Years where they’re turning into men

[00:20:40] Cameron: Right.

[00:20:40] Kyle: their own thing and be men, right?

[00:20:43] Cameron: Sure.

[00:20:43] Kyle: And I said, Hey, you two boys, I need you to come out here and help me stand this stuff, right? And they’re like, really? I’m busy. I’m like, busy doing what? Well, I’m, I’m reading this book and I’m playing a video game, you know? I said, well, that’s not busy. Just come out and help me. Gimme a, gimme an hour or two and you’ll, it, it’ll be wonderful.

[00:21:01] Kyle: So we went outside and I remember I was sending it with my boys and, you know, they, they put up a battle they didn’t want to, right? And Alec, my oldest, was more of a, Zach was kind of a, he would just dive in and do it. He knew that he wasn’t getting out of it, but Alec would, why are we doing this? Come on, dad.

[00:21:22] Kyle: You know, I mean, every, we gonna do this. Every, he just kept, you know?

[00:21:27] Cameron: Sure.

[00:21:28] Kyle: and finally he said, you know what, dad? Why do we keep doing this? I mean, and I said, you know what, son? You, you learn, you serve people you love. That’s what shows them you love them, right? And this makes your mother happy. And so I’m happy to serve because I know it’s gonna make her happy and you’ll get the same result out of this.

[00:21:52] Kyle: If you sand and she sees it, it’s gonna make her happy. She’s gonna. You’re gonna be serving your mother and we’re doing it ’cause we love her. And guess what? Next weekend there’ll be more furniture. You’re gonna keep doing it. Right? It, it’s, this doesn’t end, but we can do it one of two ways. We can do it, you know, feeling disgusted or we can, we can whistle while we work and realize we’re serving those we love.

[00:22:13] Kyle: Right?

[00:22:14] Cameron: Right?

[00:22:15] Kyle: So,

[00:22:16] Kyle: uh, the next Saturday morning, uh, Alec has something he wants to go do. And I hear the sander come on early in the morning,

[00:22:26] Cameron: Oh, okay.

[00:22:28] Kyle: eight o’clock in the morning. And I look over and Shelly’s gone. She’s already up, which is unusual for Shelly. And so

[00:22:34] Cameron: Mm-hmm.

[00:22:35] Kyle: I think something’s going on. She’s, she’s either engaged him to get to work early or right.

[00:22:41] Kyle: And I go downstairs and she’s peeking out of the back. She’s looking out in the garage, she’s peeking through the door watching him. And I said, what’s going on? And she said, well, Alec wanted to do something this morning, but he wanted to, he came down and started standing kind of early and woke me up and I said, did you tell him to stop sanding and let you sleep?

[00:23:04] Kyle: And she said, no, I, I came down and saw him sanding. I said, what are you doing? He said, I’m sand this furniture ’cause I wanna go do some stuff, but I want to get this knocked out. And she said, well, you don’t have to do that. Why are you doing it? And he said, because I love you. He told his mom that

[00:23:21] Cameron: sweet. Yeah,

[00:23:22] Kyle: and, and she was watching

[00:23:24] Kyle: him. Right. And it was really a, a cool thing to see him. It, it registered with him like that moment, you know, and you don’t really know what your kids catch and what they don’t catch.

[00:23:36] Cameron: sure.

[00:23:37] Kyle: and, and during his marriage, I’ve seen him, she’s his alec, his wife is his queen, and he turns to her and he just talks to her like the sweetest queen, right?

[00:23:52] Kyle: Hey, what do you think of this? Is this okay? And he, his voice changes when he talks to her then when he talks to us, right? And it’s really sweet to see that. And I can see what he’s doing

[00:24:04] Kyle: and it, it, that’s what you want. You wanna model that, right? For your kids. You want them to see you talk to your wife in a certain way and treat her in a certain way.

[00:24:13] Kyle: And I think that’s a big part of cleaving is just realizing that a lot of that is just service. You know, your wife’s gonna have you build planter boxes and she’s gonna have you do all these things that as a man, you’re like, I could just hire that out. You know? Or I, I got better things to do than that.

[00:24:31] Kyle: I wanna go play golf, right? Or whatever it is you decide you want to do. But there’s, to me, there’s so much value in doing it, even if you can hire it out. I don’t want her seeing some other man build that

[00:24:43] Kyle: for her. I wanna see me building it for her, right? Because it shows her, it, the service shows her that I love her.

[00:24:53] Kyle: You know, and to me that’s a lot of what cleaving is, right, is just being willing, being willing to push yourself aside and just do what, because you know, you want them to see your love for them, right?

[00:25:07] Cameron: So for you, doing those little acts of service was an expression of love. Uh, have you read the book, the Five Love Languages or have you, are you familiar with the concept?

[00:25:18] Kyle: I am. Yeah,

[00:25:20] Cameron: Did you know that? I didn’t discover until two years ago, maybe less, that my wife’s love language were, was not words of affirmation.

[00:25:31] Cameron: I thought that’s what her love language

[00:25:32] Cameron: was.

[00:25:33] Cameron: It

[00:25:33] Kyle: what, yeah, right. My, my wife wasn’t either.

[00:25:38] Cameron: Yeah.

[00:25:38] Cameron: which is a shame because I was really

[00:25:40] Cameron: good at pouring out words

[00:25:42] Cameron: of affirmation for her.

[00:25:43] Kyle: Obviously your love language is words of

[00:25:45] Kyle: affirmation probably, because that’s what you typically, we, we determine what ours is and then we, we push it on somebody else. Yeah. No, I get what you’re saying.

[00:25:56] Cameron: Yeah.

[00:25:57] Kyle: Did you find out what.

[00:25:58] Cameron: things I did, and it it’s acts of service. And what’s funny about that, Kyle, is as soon as I started using the combination of af uh, words, excuse me, as soon as I started doing acts of service, I, I pointed out to her that the reason I’m doing this is because I love her. And what’s funny about that is there’s a, I was telling someone else this and they said, well, that just blew it.

[00:26:28] Cameron: I was like, why is that? And she goes, and the lady, it was another person. She goes, because that totally defeats the purpose. I was like, oh no, you’re obviously, your level language is not acts of service because it, she glows, my wife glows when I say, Hey, I just scrubbed the toilet without being asked.

[00:26:47] Cameron: Which is funny ’cause you know, I’m an adult. I scrubbed the toilet. I used to scrub the toilet anyway without being asked. But now I say, Hey, I did this. I. Because I love you, and she just says smiles. You know, she just kind of lights up a little bit and talk about a way to get me to do anything. I don’t think it be.

[00:27:06] Cameron: It can be something I absolutely despise and hate, but to get that little bit of a smile and a little bit of glow, I’ll do that all day long. So anyway, and now when I’ll go load the dishwasher or do one of the chores that the kids didn’t get to, and instead of just letting it go, I’ll just say, Hey, I went and did this.

[00:27:28] Cameron: And I have to point it out because she has so much going on in her life and there are so many people that could have done it. I want her to know that I did that for her. And this other person was like, nah, that it weakens it. And I totally disagree. It does not weaken it in this case. ’cause she wouldn’t know if it was me or one of our other awesome kids

[00:27:50] Cameron: that might have done their jobs

[00:27:52] Cameron: or done something.

[00:27:53] Cameron: So

[00:27:54] Kyle: Yeah, my, it, it’s interesting because even though I, I’m okay with acts of service for my wife, that wasn’t her love language, which either, so her love language was time, just spend time with her walking around and chat. So it it, if we would go somewhere, like if there was a, you know, the Nutcracker or something comes in, I just buy tickets without her knowing and we go together and I say, Hey, we’re going somewhere, put a dress on or whatever.

[00:28:22] Kyle: You know, that was, that was it for her. And, and so, but yeah, you, you, you gotta figure out what it is. Right. But certainly I think,

[00:28:34] Kyle: um, I think it’s not a bad idea to do all of them. Right. All the love languages

[00:28:43] Cameron: cover all

[00:28:44] Cameron: the bases.

[00:28:45] Kyle: cover all the

[00:28:45] Kyle: bases. Right.

[00:28:47] Kyle: One of the one of the, one of the interesting things is hers wasn’t acts of service. Right. But my wife, I knew, here’s what, and for those of you that don’t know my situation, my wife passed away almost two years ago. Uh, so some of, some of the people listening to this may not know this. And we were, we were married for 30 years.

[00:29:12] Kyle: We had, we had created what she and I both called a top 1% happy marriage. Now, I don’t know how that can be quantified, but it doesn’t really matter because I said it and she said it, and that’s what really mattered. Right. And I think because we had, because we both said it and both believed it, it was like this self-fulfilling prophecy.

[00:29:34] Kyle: Right? We went to, uh, we went to the bank one time to move our money from one bank to another. One of our, the bank changed ownership and it was a mess. And I tried

[00:29:45] Cameron: How, long, how long have you guys been married at this

[00:29:48] Cameron: point?

[00:29:48] Kyle: about 25 years.

[00:29:51] Cameron: Okay, so this was not that. This was just five years ago. 10 years

[00:29:55] Cameron: ago.

[00:29:55] Kyle: yeah. Not long, not too, not too

[00:29:57] Cameron: Okay.

[00:29:58] Kyle: And

[00:30:00] Kyle: the bank changed ownership. We go to Walmart, fill our basket up, and they won’t, they won’t take our card to buy the, and it’s, we have to push the basket to the side. I call the bank and they say, yeah, whatever their excuse was. And I said, that’s the last straw.

[00:30:15] Kyle: I’m moving my money. Right? So we go to a new bank and we sit down in front of a, this lady, this banker, and we say, Hey, we wanna move our money from that bank to your bank. And, and it takes a little while and there’s a little, you know, you gotta sign certain things and do things. And my wife and I are just sitting there chatting.

[00:30:32] Kyle: As we do this and the ladies, you know, sign this, do this, let’s transfer this. And, and at the end the lady says, she smiled at us, the two of us, and she said, are you guys newlyweds? And my wife Shelly started laughing

[00:30:46] Cameron: Yeah.

[00:30:47] Kyle: and she said, no, we’ve been married 25 years.

[00:30:50] Kyle: And the lady was just shocked. And she said, it’s not unusual for couples that are in their second or third marriages to come in here newlyweds and act like you act. But I’ve never seen a couple that’s been married 25 years that talked to each other and have so much fun. Like you two just did. I it is just, and, and as we left, my wife said, Shelly said, I, it, I feel like we just, you know, reignited her belief in, in marriage, you know, and, and I think it’s because, uh, you know, first of all, she knew she was number one.

[00:31:30] Kyle: Right. And, you know, you talked about a little bit before how, when you, you come in with different things, right? And I’ll share one other experience with you. Um, that illustrates that my wife came into things I didn’t even know with things I didn’t know about. My wife was more, uh, I had to work to get her to share intimate things, like details.

[00:31:57] Kyle: Right? She was, she was just, She was passive and kind of shy and, you know, it, it, it took her time to really

[00:32:08] Kyle: let me see her completely. You know what I’m saying? And so one night we would, we had been married about 20 years and we used to go into our room and we would pray together at the end of the bed.

[00:32:19] Kyle: Which by the way, you wanna, that’s really helpful if you want to develop a, a beautiful relationship together. Right? Pray together over your kids and over each other, and over your situation and over finances and over, right? And we would, we would sit at the end of the bed and just talk about what are some of the things that we should probably focus on and pray about.

[00:32:41] Kyle: Right? And then we would pray together and we stood up from praying together and we sat down in the bed and we were just kinda, I think I was about to grab a book and read for a few minutes ’cause it easily makes me tired. And my wife Shelly turned to me and she said, you really love me, don’t you?

[00:32:58] Cameron: Hmm.

[00:32:59] Kyle: And I said,

[00:33:00] Cameron: 20

[00:33:01] Kyle: in my mind, I said, what?

[00:33:04] Kyle: We’ve been married 20 years. We got six kids. I mean, I, I live for you, right? I work for you. I, everything, I, I didn’t say this,

[00:33:15] Kyle: but I was thinking it. And I said, of course. Right. Of course. And she was tearing up. Right. And it, and it, it kind of made me a little upset. That she didn’t even know that until now.

[00:33:34] Kyle: How could you question, you know, this is all going through my mind, but I’m not saying anything. I, I realize sometimes it’s better to just be kind of quiet, you know?

[00:33:42] Cameron: Sure.

[00:33:43] Kyle: But, and over the next couple of days, I, the more I thought about it, the more I realized it took my wife 20 years. I don’t know. You know, maybe she had some insecurities, maybe there was things that she was figuring out.

[00:33:59] Kyle: Right. But now she knew. Right. And what a wonderful thing that was for her to now absolutely know

[00:34:10] Cameron: Know it. Yeah. Not just conceptually, but to have it be part of her now that she can. A, what identifies her as her is an external, someone loves her externally beyond her, regardless of how she feels about herself. She

[00:34:30] Cameron: knows that her husband loves her, that

[00:34:32] Cameron: That’s really neat.

[00:34:33] Kyle: and what the cool thing about it

[00:34:34] Kyle: is, and what I’m suggesting here is many of us men, we, we can pour our hearts and souls into our women

[00:34:45] Cameron: Yeah.

[00:34:45] Kyle: we don’t know

[00:34:47] Kyle: Right. Who, what they come into it with. We don’t know their insecurities. We don’t know all that stuff.

[00:34:53] Cameron: That’s right.

[00:34:54] Kyle: We don’t know. Right. So,

[00:34:57] Kyle: Sometimes it just takes time.

[00:34:59] Kyle: You just gotta do the right things, simple right things on a consistent basis. Apologize, be kind. And eventually, hopefully, you know, I had never done anything to make her think I was anything other than a, you know, a hardworking, you know, we, obviously marriages are hard and you have conflict and you go through all the same things everybody does.

[00:35:22] Kyle: But there had never been any infidelity or anything that would make her challenge that assumption. Right? And so, for it to take her 20 years made me realize that there’s probably, you know, people that are in 15, 16, 17, 18, 19 year marriages that your wife might not really know.

[00:35:43] Cameron: Mm-hmm.

[00:35:44] Kyle: She might still be figuring it out, right?

[00:35:47] Kyle: And so it’s important for us men to understand we gotta give them every, I mean, we gotta keep proving it, you know, we just gotta keep proving it and don’t ever stop trying to prove it.

[00:36:03] Cameron: You know that, it’s interesting because to earlier you said there’s a transition period, and I think that’s true for all of these things there. There’s transition periods and some of them are short for some people, and some of them are long for some people. But I think there’s probably, um, a bell curve where, you know, there’s the exceptions on either end, but the majority of women, I feel like they don’t internalize the good and the positive about themselves from the perspective of a spouse.

[00:36:40] Cameron: For a very long time. And it’s almost as if they’re just waiting for this negativity, this little seed of doubt just to be proven correct. And I’ve seen it where, um, things are messed missed. Uh, one, I’ll give you an example. You can have like, uh, 30 acts of love and then a negative little seed. One thing it sprouts and that’s what they nurture.

[00:37:13] Cameron: And you know, they feed, and I say they, because my wife has worked hard to not do that, uh, purposefully. But it, uh, it’s kind of a warning to husbands to be gentle with your spouse because if, um, even if your spouse fights back and you have words of contention, you better choose your words to not be digging at them.

[00:37:42] Cameron: Make it, uh, you know, make your words going towards something else. Uh, sorry, I, I’m thinking of examples that I’m not allowed to share ’cause the, it’s not my story, but I will say this. Um, another word that

[00:37:55] Cameron: I’m gonna replace betrayal

[00:37:56] Cameron: with is let down

[00:37:59] Kyle: Yeah. There you go. That’s much better. That’s much better. I feel like, at least for me, maybe other people are okay with betrayal, but betrayal seems so harsh. Oh my gosh. It seems, yeah.

[00:38:09] Cameron: so for me, and you know what, it was, that was the word that came to my mind. Betrayal wasn’t a permanent thing though. But if you look into the definition and how it’s used historically in language, it’s a betrayal in relationships. And that’s not what, that’s not the word I was trying, that’s not the meaning I was trying to use.

[00:38:29] Cameron: But let down that phrase of being let down, that was just another bump in this long road we call marriage. So I’ll use

[00:38:37] Cameron: that one from now on and I appreciate you calling me out

[00:38:40] Cameron: on that.

[00:38:40] Kyle: I really, I like that so much better. I, because there is betrayal in marriage and when you hear somebody say, I, there was some betrayal in my marriage. You’re like, oh, that ruined it. Right. It, it almost makes you jump there immediately. Right. Because betrayal just seems so harsh,

[00:38:56] Cameron: Yeah. And what’s funny is I, I understood what you were saying, but I couldn’t come up with another word because it hurt so

[00:39:04] Cameron: bad.

[00:39:06] Cameron: It, you

[00:39:06] Kyle: You’re a big sissy

[00:39:07] Cameron: that, that says more about me than it does about my wife.

[00:39:14] Kyle: I’ll, you know what? Here’s one of the things that, and as I was thinking about this subject, and you know, for those of you who don’t know, Cameron and I, Cameron will throw it, we’ll throw a subject out and we think about it during the week, right? It crosses up. ’cause we wanna, we wanna come a little bit prepared, right?

[00:39:30] Kyle: I had an experience, um, when that changed me as a man. And I think it’s, it, I’m not gonna say it saved my marriage, but I can tell you it dramatically changed my marriage for the better.

[00:39:46] Cameron: Okay.

[00:39:46] Kyle: I wanna share it because I think,

[00:39:50] Kyle: um, I think it can be helpful, right? So for men specifically,

[00:39:56] Kyle: and so when my wife, uh, my wife and I had four sons and we had stopped after four sons.

[00:40:04] Kyle: My wife said, that’s it. We’re just gonna be, I’m just gonna be the mother of boys, right? And I said, okay. Right? ’cause we had boy after boy after boy, and we were trying for a girl every time. If we’d had a boy and a girl, we might’ve stopped. I don’t know, right? So after four boys, we stopped and six years later my wife came to me and she said, we need to try one more time for a girl.

[00:40:28] Kyle: Can we pray about it? I said, let’s pray about it. ’cause you know, I mean, we got kids now that are, my youngest is six, he’s about to go into elementary. That changes things right now. You don’t have babies around, you’re, it’s like freeing a little bit, right?

[00:40:44] Kyle: Yeah.

[00:40:45] Kyle: And we prayed about it and, and didn’t take long for us to realize we should try again to have a girl, right?

[00:40:53] Kyle: Well, she ended up getting pregnant with twins. This really scared me ’cause I thought if I have two more boys, she’s gonna kill me, right? But one of ’em ended up being a girl, which is fantastic. I have twins that are one boy and one girl. They’re now 15. So this is, you know, 15 years ago. And so she gets pregnant with the twins and shortly after about, I don’t know, six weeks into the pregnancy, I have this intuition, right?

[00:41:26] Kyle: A thought crosses my mind

[00:41:28] Cameron: Okay.

[00:41:29] Kyle: that Shelly’s gonna die in childbirth.

[00:41:34] Cameron: Oh,

[00:41:35] Kyle: And I know, well, all thoughts cross my mind all the time. And I’m really good at pushing them out and saying, that ain’t right. I’m really good at that. But if it keeps coming back, I start to pay attention. I feel like I have divine guidance.

[00:41:52] Kyle: I like to, I like to think I have. God on my side to help me, right? And so when things, when it kept coming back, it, it, it scared me and it got kind of real right? And I started to get a little nervous. Well, with, uh, with six months left, they put her on full bed rest.

[00:42:16] Cameron: What

[00:42:17] Cameron: at how many months?

[00:42:18] Kyle: She had six months

[00:42:19] Kyle: left. So after three months of being pregnant, they put her on full bed rest. She was not allowed to do anything. Right?

[00:42:27] Cameron: whoa. Okay.

[00:42:29] Kyle: in my mind, this was a check mark. I’m gonna lose my, my wife and childbirth, right?

[00:42:35] Cameron: Yeah,

[00:42:36] Kyle: So I’m getting scared now. And I think, who can I, I can’t tell anybody. I can’t tell her

[00:42:43] Kyle: I can’t.

[00:42:43] Kyle: So I start, I get serious about this. I start praying, this can’t be right. Comfort me. Let me know that I’m just off my rocker. And that’s not, that is not what I receive back,

[00:42:57] Cameron: Oh,

[00:42:59] Kyle: okay? I receive back, prepare yourself, right? So I’m inside. Now keep in mind, I’m really good at hiding my pain, right?

[00:43:15] Cameron: sure.

[00:43:16] Kyle: And I don’t wanna, I don’t want to, and I could be wrong.

[00:43:19] Kyle: I’m hoping I’m wrong. And I don’t want to dump this on the world, or I, it’s, it’s all me. It’s me and God, right? So I start, I start kind of a little preparing, but thinking I’m just, I can’t be right. I can’t, this can’t happen, you know? And I’m praying to God this

[00:43:39] Kyle: well with six weeks left, left. They take her and put her in the hospital.

[00:43:43] Kyle: They take her away from us.

[00:43:45] Cameron: Yeah.

[00:43:45] Cameron: Put her in Antipartum or whatever

[00:43:47] Cameron: it’s called.

[00:43:48] Kyle: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:43:49] Cameron: Oh.

[00:43:50] Kyle: And this is another check mark in my mind. And, and now I get serious, real serious about preparing, right? And I remember making a plan, you know, I’m a planner. If I’m gonna raise six kids on my own, I better be, I better have a plan. I, this can’t be, I can’t wing it, you know? But one of the things that I start doing is, you know, at the time my two, my four oldest boys, the youngest is six and maybe nine and, you know, 13 and 16 or something. So she’s in the hospital, and I want my sons to know her as if she’s gonna leave. I want to spend as much time as possible with her. I want them to know her in, right. And so I, I create this habit. I wake up in the morning, I get all the kids ready. I take ’em to school. I go to work. At lunchtime, I go take my wife Shelly lunch and spend an hour with her. I go back home or I go back to work. I work till the kids get outta school. I go pick ’em up from school. We go home and we immediately go over to see her. And this is every day, right? On the weekends we wake up, we take her breakfast, we hang out with her all day. And while we’re there, I’m asking her all questions, cons, questions about her childhood, about all ki the kids are learning all these great things about her,

[00:45:22] Kyle: right? And, and I’m doing this because I want them to know her deeply, right?

[00:45:32] Cameron: Yep.

[00:45:33] Kyle: And I’m doing it and I, I I, something interesting happens to me. I start doing these things in this love, in a spirit of love so deeply because I love her so deeply.

[00:45:50] Cameron: Yeah.

[00:45:52] Kyle: It’s all about, I don’t even care about the work. I don’t care about taking care of all the kids by myself and cooking dinner, and I don’t care about any of that stuff, right?

[00:46:02] Kyle: I don’t care about having to take the kids to school and pick ’em up and go to work and go back to see her. And, and I, and I, I realize with about, with about two weeks left, right, she’s scheduled to have the babies with about two weeks left. I’m working. And my brother, I worked for my brother at the time, his name’s Craig.

[00:46:23] Kyle: Craig walks by my office and I’m distraught,

[00:46:27] Cameron: Yeah.

[00:46:29] Kyle: and he sees it,

[00:46:32] Kyle: right? And he says, what’s going on? And I said, nothing. I, I, I got it, you know? And he says, and he walks in my office and shuts the door and says, what’s going on? Right? And this is the first time I’ve told anybody. So I tell him what’s going on, and he stands there and just listens for a while.

[00:46:54] Kyle: And then he says to me, you know what? Maybe there’s a lesson for you to learn, and if you learn the lesson, maybe she doesn’t have to die.

[00:47:05] Cameron: Ooh,

[00:47:07] Kyle: These are his exact

[00:47:08] Cameron: that’s a blessing and a curse in a

[00:47:10] Cameron: sentence

[00:47:12] Kyle: and

[00:47:13] Kyle: I think, and it, what it does for me is it gives me hope,

[00:47:18] Cameron: yeah.

[00:47:19] Kyle: right? And, and, and I think, huh, what do I need to learn? Right? And if I can learn it, she can stay. Right? And so I, uh, I realized very quickly in that moment that the old Kyle, I would do things out of obligation because I was supposed to be a good husband.

[00:47:46] Kyle: Right. If she asked me to do the dishes, I would do the dishes because I’m supposed to, and I’m a good husband. But sometimes I would seethe, I would seethe,

[00:47:56] Kyle: I’d come home from work and there’s dishes in the sink, and I’m like, what did she do all day? I, I mean, why are the dishes, why is there so many dishes in the sink?

[00:48:04] Kyle: And she would say, could you do those for me? And I would say, sure. And I would do ’em, but I wouldn’t do ’em in a spirit of love. I would do ’em because I’m supposed to be a good husband. Right. Well, what I realized is during this event and having to take my kids up there, I was doing things not out of obligation.

[00:48:21] Kyle: I was doing things out of pure love for her. Right. And I thought, you know what?

[00:48:27] Kyle: Maybe I need to stop doing things out of obligation. ’cause I wanna be a good husband and I need to do things because I flat out love her.

[00:48:38] Cameron: Hmm.

[00:48:40] Kyle: I’m, maybe I’m doing things in the wrong spirit, and that maybe is the lesson I need to learn.

[00:48:45] Kyle: Right. So I’m filled with hope.

[00:48:49] Kyle: Right. I’m filled with this hope because I, I feel different. You know, I feel like, and I start, I mean, I’m telling you, you know, you read in the scriptures how people would pray for hours or days, or, let me tell you, I understand that now

[00:49:05] Cameron: Yeah.

[00:49:06] Kyle: because I

[00:49:06] Kyle: was, I was praying for her to be spared and for me to learn whatever lesson.

[00:49:12] Kyle: Well, anyway, The good news is she was spared and the kids are healthy and every she was. And it was interesting because it, it changed me to my core, this experience.

[00:49:23] Cameron: Mm-hmm.

[00:49:23] Kyle: And I would get home from work and I would see dishes in the sink. And I would run to do ’em because I loved her. And I would feel great about it.

[00:49:32] Kyle: And she would say, Hey Kyle, could you help me with this? And instead of doing it because I was obligated to, to be a good husband, I would run to do things for her because I loved her and I was so grateful she was here. Right. It, it, it changed me, the spirit of, in which I served my

[00:49:50] Kyle: wife and about I’d say about six to nine months after the kids were born and we’re at home one night, she came to me and she said, something is different. I feel like you love me more. And she said, what’s going on? And I said, I nothing, I, it’s not something. I mean, how do you tell somebody,

[00:50:12] Cameron: I was scared you were gonna die, so I thought I’d actually show my love through action.

[00:50:17] Kyle: Yeah.

[00:50:18] Cameron: tell, just say,

[00:50:20] Kyle: she said,

[00:50:21] Cameron: you were gonna die. It’s just an old habit. Don’t worry. It’ll wear off

[00:50:24] Cameron: few

[00:50:24] Kyle: Yeah. Yeah. Well, she, it was interesting ’cause she said, no, I really want to know. You’re different. You’re, I, it feels different. The way you do things feels different.

[00:50:36] Cameron: Yeah.

[00:50:36] Kyle: so I said, well, and I shared with her and we both cried. Right. And it was,

[00:50:41] Cameron: Mm-hmm.

[00:50:42] Kyle: She said, and I, she said, did you write out a plan?

[00:50:46] Kyle: Because she knows me right. When things go wrong. I say, we need a plan.

[00:50:50] Kyle: And I say, yeah. And she said, can I see it? And I said, really? Do you really want? And she said, yeah, I wanna see it. It was 12 pages of detailed plans. And she just, you know, we just looked at it together, just was, we were so grateful.

[00:51:08] Kyle: Right? And I think what happens is, as men, sometimes we do things out of obligation, right? We think I’m being a good man. I’m gonna do it out of obligation. I’m gonna serve because it’s what I’m supposed to do.

[00:51:19] Cameron: Mm-hmm.

[00:51:20] Kyle: And I don’t know that I could have learned that lesson

[00:51:23] Kyle: any other way unless I was pushed to the brink of, of tragedy, right?

[00:51:30] Cameron: Yeah.

[00:51:31] Kyle: I had to be pushed into the deepest, longest lasting, most painful experience. Right? It was just, it was, it was brutal. And nobody, I had to, I couldn’t tell anybody. I, I suffered alone, you know? And, and I’m so grateful for that experience because it changed the way I did things for her and how I served her.

[00:51:55] Kyle: And I think that’s a big part of cleaving, right? It’s not just service, it’s service. In a spirit of just love, right? Doing things, not because you’re supposed to or you’re obligated, or it’s what good men do, do things because you love them deeply because you care, because you want them to feel that deeper love, right?

[00:52:15] Kyle: And I don’t know, maybe not everybody even gets there, but I’m so grateful now. I think that’s one of the reasons she actually came to the conclusion that I actually, you know, really truly loved her is because she felt it more than just me saying it or acting like it. She felt it, right? And I think that’s a big part of cleaving is, is realizing service is not enough service and a spirit of love, true love, right?

[00:52:42] Kyle: But just because you love them is such a powerful, uh, way to connect with your spouse.

[00:52:50] Cameron: So I love that story, Kyle, and I’m gonna say three or four things about it. Number one, your brother was very brave Craig saying that that’s a curse because saying that, hey, maybe you have the ability to prevent the death of your spouse by changing, and then if you hadn’t, if she had passed away, that that’s, that’s crazy.

[00:53:18] Cameron: So good on your brother for being bold enough to plant the seed and good for you to be able to get, get hope out of that instead of dread. ’cause you know where my mind would’ve gone, oh crap, this is up to me. Ugh. And then, um, I love you, you call it obligation. I call it duty. I love doing things out of duty because I recognize that I don’t have to like it.

[00:53:46] Cameron: And that’s not what you’re saying. You’re saying don’t, you’re not saying to, uh, stop doing that what you should do. You’re saying look for the higher calling, the higher purpose, the higher motivation. Get more out of what you’re going to do anyway. ’cause you’re gonna do it. We’re men. We do stuff all the time, we hate.

[00:54:07] Cameron: That’s, you know what, that’s kind of the definition of being a man is to do the stuff that sucks and that you don’t wanna do. That’s, you know, that’s maturity in becoming a man as a teenager. You do things to avoid doing the things you don’t wanna do. When you grow up and you become a man, you go, you know what?

[00:54:26] Cameron: This stinks. I don’t wanna do it, but I’m gonna do it anyway. I’m a man. So you’re not saying to stop doing those things. What you’re saying is now that you’re doing those things, you ought to see if you can find joy, see if you can find some purpose, higher purpose in doing it beyond just duty, which is a great starting

[00:54:50] Cameron: point.

[00:54:50] Cameron: And I think everybody should do things out of duty,

[00:54:53] Kyle: I do too.

[00:54:54] Cameron: there is a higher law there. And I, I love that story transitioning from sense of duty. To sense of calling. And that’s, that’s really neat because you, you went from doing, serving your spouse and your love, your, your, um, the person that you love in a certain way and you’re doing it out of duty and obligation and you made it so that it was a much higher, fuller calling and it’s much more

[00:55:26] Cameron: rewarding to do it that way

[00:55:28] Cameron: ’cause you don’t have that resentment.

[00:55:30] Kyle: you

[00:55:30] Kyle: know, I feel, yeah. I ch I went from seething to, I would come home and look for dishes and I would be happily washing dishes. You know, I, it wasn’t long after that when I, that I realized there was two things my wife didn’t like to do. Right. Dishes. And she didn’t like folding clothes. Right. The rest of the stuff she was good with, well, those became my things that I loved to do.

[00:55:56] Kyle: Right. And I would come home and look for dishes. I would come home, look for clothes, and I would, we would be doing stuff and I’d be folding clothes and she’d say, stop, just talk to me for a little while. Right. And I’d say, okay, I’ll stop. But I, I knew and she knew, and I know she inherently knew

[00:56:13] Cameron: Yeah.

[00:56:14] Kyle: he’s doing that because I don’t want to, and he loves me and he, he’s doing it happily.

[00:56:18] Kyle: Right. And, and to this day, Cameron.

[00:56:20] Cameron: Yeah.

[00:56:21] Kyle: I can’t fold clothes without som because I feel like I’m serving. I look for dishes, I look for clothes folded, and, and there’s plenty with my kids. Right? And so, and it, and it, it fills me when I get to fold clothes. There’s some in the dryer right now that are dry and as soon as they’re done, I’m gonna run back there and grab ’em and fold them

[00:56:42] Cameron: Yep.

[00:56:43] Kyle: because it feels like I’m serving

[00:56:46] Kyle: her. And that feels so good to me still. Right. Those two things specifically feel so good to me that it’s, it’s something I look forward to. Right. And I think that’s kind of the point is that you made a great point. You’re gonna do it anyway. Why not get everything you can out of it. Right. Why not do it happily, number one, and get good stuff for you out of it.

[00:57:12] Kyle: And number two, let your spouse see you doing that. You know, I, I don’t, I think the lady that you talked to that said you ruined it when you told your spouse that you were doing it. My wife didn’t like to hear that either. I tried, I’ve tried all kinds of things with her. But she saw you. Right? If I said, Hey, I’m doing dishes ’cause I love you, it would ruin it for my wife.

[00:57:34] Kyle: She’s, she is the same way as that other lady

[00:57:38] Cameron: Yeah. It’s not it, it’s not her love

[00:57:40] Cameron: language, so.

[00:57:42] Kyle: Right, right, right. But I know I would come home from work and head to the kitchen. Smile and start washing dishes. She’d say, come down. And well, first thing I’d do is she taught me to come in and kiss her and say, I love you. And, and, and first when I got home, I hunted her down no matter what she was doing, and gave her a kiss and said, I love you.

[00:58:03] Kyle: I’m, I’m home. I’m happy to see you. That she taught me that that’s the first thing she needed. And then I would head to do dishes or folk clothes. Right. And she would all the time say, stop, come hang out with me for a little while. Right. But she knew why I was doing it. And, and I’m a, I’m a big fan of leverage.

[00:58:21] Kyle: And you know this, if you’re gonna do something, get everything you can out of it, not just for you, but for everybody else too. Right. And a big part of that

[00:58:28] Cameron: good,

[00:58:29] Kyle: yeah, get, it’s the, it’s the, the bar graph. Right. How much good can you get out of it? How much good can you give out of it? And I’m

[00:58:37] Cameron: but as many squares. As many squares as you

[00:58:39] Cameron: can.

[00:58:41] Kyle: and

[00:58:41] Cameron: Do you remember drawing that up on the whiteboard for everything?

[00:58:45] Kyle: I’m gonna be very thoughtful in how I approach everything. Right. Because I’m gonna get everything I can out of it, and I’m gonna make sure everybody else gets everything I can get out. They can get out of it. Right. If you have to do something,

[00:58:59] Kyle: get everything right. I’ll, I’ll share a quick story about John Cox.

[00:59:03] Kyle: You know John Cox. Right.

[00:59:04] Cameron: Oh yeah. I love

[00:59:05] Kyle: Hopefully his, hopefully his

[00:59:06] Cameron: should get him one

[00:59:08] Cameron: calls.

[00:59:08] Kyle: Yeah. He’s, he’s a great dude.

[00:59:11] Cameron: Okay.

[00:59:12] Kyle: he came to me one day at work. He

[00:59:14] Kyle: used to work for me. And, uh, He said, Hey, Kyle, my wife is going to the doctor’s. His wife was pregnant, she was gonna have a baby. And he said, uh, she wants me to show up at the sonogram with her, but I told her I might not be able to, but she already has a babysitter.

[00:59:30] Kyle: So if I can, it’s okay, but if it’s okay with you, can I go? And I said, well, it sounds like you’ve already got it cleared that she knows you may not be there. And yet he’s like, yeah, she, she already has a babysitter, so if I can’t go, it’s okay. I said, John, this is a great chance for us to leverage this for you.

[00:59:49] Kyle: He said, what? I said, here’s what you want to do. Uh, tell her you’ll try to be there, but don’t tell her for sure you already got a babysitter. He’s like, yeah. I’m like, perfect. I said, what I want you to do is, is meet her there. Tell her you might not be able to go there, but meet her there and go get flowers on the way. So show up to the sonogram before she goes in to meet the doctor and have flowers. And he’s like, what? Yeah. And then you tell her, you say, you know, Kyle really didn’t want me to go, but I said, I really need to be with my wife. So I told him, I’m, I’m, I’m going. And you and Kyle said, okay, if you need to be there, go and tell her you fought for this, and then, and then go over there and give her the flowers, and then take her out to lunch afterwards and take your time.

[01:00:38] Kyle: Come back when you, whenever you can. Right? And John’s like, what the crap? And I’m like, dude, leverage this. I mean, show her how much you love her. I mean, this is a great opportunity to, you’ve already got a babysitter. Yeah. Perfect. This is perfect. I said, take a three hour lunch if you need to. I don’t care.

[01:00:55] Kyle: And he, so that’s what he did, right? I don’t know exactly the words he used or anything, but he came back and he said, you have no idea. And for months after that, she was telling all her friends what a wonderful, great husband he was, right? Because he thought, how can I express my love in a, in a deeper, more full fashion?

[01:01:20] Kyle: Right? Let me think this through. Now, some people might call that manipulation. I would call it love your wife. Love the crap outta your wife. Do love your wife, right? I mean, she, you know, you know this in, in, I’ve told you this before. My wife liked flowers and,

[01:01:39] Cameron: Mm-hmm.

[01:01:40] Kyle: and I would go to the florist in December of every year and fill out 12 cards, and I would give them my credit card and I would say, every day, next, next year, on a certain day of the month, I don’t care what day it is.

[01:01:55] Kyle: I want you to deliver $35 worth of flowers to my wife with one of these 12 cards. I don’t care what day it is, but all next year, once a month, she should get flowers from you. Here’s my credit card on file. Make sure they’re great looking flowers. You’ve sold, you know, 12 times, $35 worth of flowers all year.

[01:02:11] Kyle: If you do a great job, I’ll renew. Right? And my wife, once a month would get flowers. And some days it would be after we didn’t get along the day before. Some days it would be when we’re getting along. Wonderful. It did not matter. When I got home from work on the day she got flowers, she ran to the door and she, uh, she hugged me and she said, thank you so much.

[01:02:30] Kyle: Right. And I knew she liked flowers, but I’m not the best at remembering all these things. Right. I got a lot going on, but if I can systemize it,

[01:02:40] Kyle: and, and she, well, here’s what’s interesting. I told some friends about this. I’m, you’re not the first one I’ve told, I’ve told a lot of people about this. You know, then we’re not good at showing our wives.

[01:02:50] Kyle: We love them sometimes. What, whatever we can do to magnify that. They know we love them. We should, right? And I told a buddy of mine and he told his wife and his wife didn’t like it. She thought it was manipulative. So she went and told my wife and I came home one day and my wife said, Hey, I just heard something interesting.

[01:03:12] Kyle: And I said, what’s that? And she said, I heard that you don’t actually buy flowers once a month. You get ’em delivered. You kind of do it more systematically. And I said to her, who are you gonna believe the man that loves you? Or some stranger that, that obviously is not looking out for you? And she smiled the biggest smile you’ve ever seen.

[01:03:37] Kyle: And I think she knew it was

[01:03:39] Kyle: true. She knew

[01:03:40] Kyle: it was true,

[01:03:42] Kyle: and she did not care. Right? She wanted those flowers, she loved them. She knew I loved her. She did not challenge me on it. She did not say, tell me the truth, right? She just smiled because she realized I was doing that out of love. Right. Call it whatever you want.

[01:04:06] Kyle: She knew that I wasn’t the best at it, at being romantic, and it, it was my attempt, right? And we never had that discussion again. And

[01:04:15] Kyle: it was interesting, the month after she passed away, guess what? Showed up flowers for sheley. They were still

[01:04:23] Kyle: coming. Right? And, and it’s interesting how

[01:04:29] Kyle: as men, we, we gotta think about it, right?

[01:04:34] Kyle: Our wives shouldn’t be the afterthought. Our wives should be the thought we should take some time and plan out and map out and meet their needs on the highest level we possibly can. And if we’ll do that, that is cleaving and they’ll feel it and they’ll reciprocate. They just want to feel it and they’ll reciprocate.

[01:04:55] Cameron: So on that note, um, I think it’s important to, to allow grace for our spouse to not reciprocate. And because otherwise you get into the realm of, I do this for you, you should do this for me. And that’s a lower, that’s not out of do duty, that’s not out of love. That’s out of I’m trying to get something from you.

[01:05:20] Kyle: Right.

[01:05:22] Cameron: And, you know, there’s a, I love this quote from Ether. Now I’m looking. It says, if men come unto me, I will show unto them their weaknesses. I give unto men weaknesses that they may be humble. And my grace is sufficient for all men that humble themselves before me. And then this is the key thing. If they humble themselves before me and have faith in me, then I will make weak things, become strong unto them.

[01:05:50] Cameron: And doing things out of duty, I think is kind of the weaker side, right? The obligation. And then by changing that and making it a sense of love, you’ll find ways to get the most out of it. And, you know, your flowers an analogy. Yeah. Manipulation is one way to call it. You can also call it engineering a happy marriage.

[01:06:11] Kyle: Ready?

[01:06:13] Cameron: I’m just architecting it out. I’m putting in, Hey, the requirements are this for safety and this is what I’m gonna do. So

[01:06:22] Kyle: Sure.

[01:06:23] Cameron: call it what

[01:06:24] Cameron: you want. Manipulation, love engineering. I prefer,

[01:06:28] Kyle: gonna start using that engineering, engineering romance. That’s what I’m gonna do.

[01:06:33] Cameron: there you go. That’s a fantastic, that’s a great way to say it. So I, I agree with you. Um, I, the, it’s in the same vein as, you know, you gotta know your spouse.

[01:06:49] Cameron: And for my spouse, the fact that I tell her that I’m doing this because I love you, that makes it better.

[01:06:56] Kyle: Yeah.

[01:06:58] Cameron: If it didn’t make it better, I wouldn’t do it. So if, you know, if someone’s listening to this and they start telling their spouse, Hey, I’m doing these things for you, that that might come off really bad.

[01:07:11] Cameron: Right. That’s whew. Yeah, that’s on something minor. And see what the reaction is and don’t go off of the first test. Go off of, you know, do it, spread out doing things minor, see what the reaction is, get a sample size of at least five or 10 before you start doing it all the time. For me, doing it when I do something for her and I point it out, she’s grateful because she would not have noticed

[01:07:39] Kyle: yeah.

[01:07:39] Cameron: and she wants to notice, but there’s so much going on in her life.

[01:07:45] Cameron: She’s got the focus on the kids, which, you know, we talked about earlier. That’s kind of that nurture spirit and, uh, this is an interesting one. Have you ever been jealous of your kids?

[01:07:57] Kyle: No, never. I’m not, I don’t, I’m not kind of, I’m really not that way. I,

[01:08:03] Cameron: Yeah.

[01:08:04] Kyle: you know, I think,

[01:08:06] Kyle: I think it’s, uh, my wife, my, my love language is words of affirmation,

[01:08:13] Cameron: Mm-hmm.

[01:08:14] Kyle: that was, my wife never did that.

[01:08:18] Kyle: And, and so maybe this is probably a good point to transition to, you said grace, and I think that’s a beautiful way to approach it, right?

[01:08:26] Kyle: Because, uh, my wife, I can’t recall her ever really saying to me, I love you first.

[01:08:36] Cameron: Hmm.

[01:08:37] Cameron: Yeah.

[01:08:38] Kyle: said I love you, she would say, I love you too. Right? There was no, and I knew she loved me, but she was not a cheerleader at all. Right? So I’ve talked wonderfully about my wife, and there are so many wonderful things. This is a side of her that I was never, ever going to. She was never gonna, I was never gonna get that, right?

[01:08:59] Kyle: I had to become, you probably know this, I have to be, I had to become my own biggest cheerleader, right? I had to, I had to perceive those things, right? And I had to look for ways that she showed me she loved me, and, and form fit. Right. Because if I would’ve ever said to myself, I just wanted to say I love you first, and that, and if I told her that, it just, it just wasn’t her nature.

[01:09:24] Kyle: Right. And I would’ve been, I would’ve been disappointed forever. You know what I’m saying? And I think it’s important for us as men to to realize there’s, there’s, we have to give them grace in a lot of areas that they’re, you know, there’s certain things we’re never gonna do. Right? Because our nature is just cer a certain way, right?

[01:09:46] Kyle: And we want to change that and be as good as we can, but we also need to extend a lot of grace to our wives and say, I gotta figure that it’s, you know, we can’t change other people. We can change ourselves, right? And so I’ve got, I’ve gotta figure this out

[01:10:02] Kyle: so that I feel loved. I know she loves me, right?

[01:10:05] Kyle: And I need to feel loved and I need to figure this whole thing out. And it was one of the things I kind of, that was one of the things I kind of struggled with early on. And I, and I kinda started to come to the conclusion, you know, she’s here, she, we get along. She ha she loves me, you know?

[01:10:25] Cameron: Sure.

[01:10:25] Kyle: And, after she passed away, Hey, Eric, after she passed away, I actually had people come to me and say, let me tell you what Shelly said about you.

[01:10:35] Kyle: And I’m like, why did she say that to me? Right?

[01:10:38] Kyle: I, you know why? And, and maybe it’s because I, I have this, I think people think. I’m pretty buoyant anyway. He

[01:10:48] Cameron: Well, you’re,

[01:10:50] Kyle: I am. He doesn’t need to hear that he’s doing a good job. He knows it. Right. Or, or, I, I think people perceive that of me. You know, and, and you might tell me I’m, yeah, okay.

[01:11:03] Kyle: You probably nod in your head. Yeah, Kyle’s, he’s doing fine. He doesn’t need to hear it. He knows. Right. And I think that’s kind of the, the vibe I give off. But I had multiple people let, I mean, her friends come up to me and say, I’m gonna tell you a story about one time she told me this about you. And I’m like, holy crap.

[01:11:22] Kyle: I wish she would’ve told me that. Right. I could’ve used that, you know? But knowing that she was out there doing that third party kind of stuff was made me feel like it was in her. It just, it was just this thing between us, right. And, and, uh, obviously you have to extend that grace, right? There was so many things, and I think this is it.

[01:11:45] Kyle: There’s probably so many things that your spouse does wonderfully, that it becomes second nature and you don’t really focus on those wonderful things. You tend to find the things that annoy or frustrate or aggravate

[01:11:59] Cameron: Right.

[01:12:00] Kyle: and spending time in those areas, it makes you start to ignore those wonderful things.

[01:12:04] Kyle: And I, I guess I, I just was always, I had this cognitive confirmation bias that said my wife was wonderful and I was always looking for, and always finding. Right. And that’s what I

[01:12:16] Cameron: That’s a,

[01:12:17] Kyle: on

[01:12:18] Kyle: more than anything. Right. And I think that’s a big reason why we had that kind of relationship. I’ll tell you one in one funny story.

[01:12:26] Kyle: I was never the jealous type. And my wife wasn’t. My wife wasn’t either, right? And I’m super friendly. So when we’re in the cashier’s line, we’re checking out, I would chat people up, the cashier, I would say, how you doing? Good. And we would leave and she’d say, you know that that lady thinks you’re flirting with her.

[01:12:44] Kyle: And I would say, what I, I’m just being friendly. And she would say, I know. And I would say, should I stop? Is that bad? She’s like, no, no, don’t, don’t worry about it. So I knew she wasn’t jealous, right? She had no jealousy in her. And she would say to me, that’s a handsome fellow over there, right? And it didn’t bother me.

[01:13:00] Kyle: It was, we would just talk to each other. Well, I remember one time we were in Walmart and I saw a lady across Walmart and I said, oh, that’s a pretty lady over there, right? And my wife looked and she said, you know what you’re doing, don’t you? And I said, what am I doing? And she said, look at her. She said, she’s fair skinned.

[01:13:23] Kyle: It looks like from here she might have blue or green eyes. She’s a brunette. She’s, she looks just like me.

[01:13:31] Cameron: Yeah.

[01:13:32] Kyle: said, you always do that. Everybody that you point out as being pretty, they look like me.

[01:13:38] Cameron: Mm-hmm.

[01:13:39] Kyle: said, I didn’t even realize that. She said I, she said, I, I’ve come to this conclusion that I’m your picture of beauty.

[01:13:46] Kyle: And when you see other people that look like me, and I think it’s because I had so focused so much on her becoming my right, I wanted that. I want her to be, I want Cleave to her. I want her to be my picture of beauty. I want her to be my picture of femininity. I want her to be my picture of wonderful.

[01:14:05] Kyle: Right? So I’m looking for and finding those things in her. And I think when we start to do that, that that really is cleaving, right? That that draws us closer. And they feel that. And I think it’s not a bad idea. Women, you wanna make your man happy.

[01:14:19] Kyle: You wanna make your man work hard for you. Let me give you a little secret.

[01:14:23] Kyle: Tell him you make me happy and watch what he does. Watch. If you walk up to your man and you say, I want you to know, you make me happy. I know you work hard for me. You work hard for our kids. Whatever it is he does. That’s good. Call it out and say that happy your man will do anything to make you happy.

[01:14:46] Kyle: It’s when he thinks he can’t make you happy. He stops trying.

[01:14:50] Cameron: Yep. And he, he doesn’t just stop trying, he actually will withdraw because it’s painful to expend energy without any reward. And so we will stop, we will start to withdraw. And if your man is withdrawing, you can suck him back in. You can do it quickly, simple. And, you know, some, the, the stereotype is, uh, be physically intimate with him.

[01:15:18] Cameron: That yes, that can help, but it’s whatever that love language is for him. Whether it’s a word of affirmation saying, Hey, you fulfill me. You, you, cause sensations in my heart that I can’t get from anywhere else. You know, that’s really neat. Um, or it could be making, maybe it’s his favorite dinner and say, Hey, I know how much you love this.

[01:15:44] Cameron: I’m doing this right. Here’s your favorite dinner. Whatever it is that’s

[01:15:48] Cameron: meaningful to them,

[01:15:49] Cameron: you can suck ’em back.

[01:15:51] Kyle: and I’ve never, I’ve never

[01:15:52] Kyle: met a

[01:15:52] Kyle: man, I’ve never met a man that if you tell him I’m doing this because I love you and you make me happy, I’ve never met a man that says, you’ve ruined that. Men will eat that crap. I mean, you, you can capture your man so quickly if you just say you, I, I, Cameron, I remember I called you one time, remember this?

[01:16:14] Kyle: I called you and said, Hey, uh, go ask your wife if she makes you happy, right? Because I do you, you remember

[01:16:23] Kyle: this? So I

[01:16:24] Cameron: of do. Yeah.

[01:16:26] Kyle: yeah, I was talking to a friend of mine and. We were talking about the subject, all men want to do is make their women happy. That’s what we wanna do. And if we’re making you happy, we’re good.

[01:16:39] Kyle: The problem is way too many women are afraid to say that it seems right. I went to my wife one time and I said, Hey, do I make you happy? And she said, what do you mean? And I said, do I make you happy? And she said, is this a trick question? I said, eh, right? And she, and I said, I just wanna know. She said, yeah.

[01:17:01] Kyle: I said, okay. It took me three times to, all I wanna do is make you happy just right. Well, I thought I got a great wife. So I started calling all my buddies. I said, Hey, I got a question for you. What? Go ask your wife if she makes you happy and what? See what she says. And I called about 10 friends. You were one of them. And I remember your wife said, no, you’re not supposed to make me happy. I’m supposed to make myself happy. It’s not your job to make me happy. It’s my job to make me happy. And I said, see, I told you. I told they women. I’m telling you, women just say to your husband, and you know what, if you don’t feel like he does look for reasons that he, that you can call out and he will make, you’ll intensify

[01:17:45] Kyle: those reasons if you say it.

[01:17:48] Cameron: and you know what? Here’s the real secret. If you do that, if you do that, it will make you happy. If you look for explodes inside you

[01:18:01] Cameron: inside, it just doesn’t

[01:18:02] Cameron: help him. It helps you.

[01:18:04] Kyle: You know

[01:18:04] Kyle: what,

[01:18:05] Kyle: what we look for, we find, right, if you look for reasons

[01:18:10] Kyle: that your husband makes you happy, you’ll find them. And if you go tell him, he will, he will magnify those things. Because I promise you the reason men give up and withdraw and quit caring, it’s not because we don’t love you, it’s because we don’t think we can make you happy.

[01:18:29] Kyle: We try, but if you don’t, if we don’t feel that or you don’t say that, or we just go, nothing I do makes her happy. I just, I’m, I’m giving up. And that is dangerous. Right? And so, you know,

[01:18:43] Cameron: is such an action word. Um, if you, that faith causes action, right? The reason people say, Hey, if you just have the faith of a mustard seed, you can move a mountain. Well, it’s because when you look at the mountain, you go, well, I can’t, so you don’t even try. But if you think you can impact your wife in a positive ho, honestly, honest to goodness manner, if you think you can, then there’s less barriers to prevent you from trying, and it most men will likely try because we want to make you happy.

[01:19:17] Cameron: We, that’s the whole reason we got into the marriage together, was to be able to be in a happy relationship with someone else who can, where we can be the best that we can and have the greatest good outcome with someone else where we cause some action. That leads to the emotion of happiness. If you can’t stand to be made to be happy, ’cause you’re supposed to be happy yourself, then by golly, just change the words if you need to and allow us to have an influence or have contributed to your joy and happiness.

[01:19:50] Cameron: If

[01:19:51] Cameron: we’re not gonna make you happy, at

[01:19:52] Cameron: least let us contribute.

[01:19:54] Kyle: Let us contribute. We

[01:19:55] Kyle: wanna, I promise, we wanna, we wanna so bad. You know what, here’s, let me tell you what a man loves. A man loves. When he walks into the room with his wife and she’s smiling,

[01:20:07] Kyle: it doesn’t matter what she even looks like. Okay? It’s not your figure or your hair being right, or your eyelashes or it what shows what a man, what a man loves is when people see his wife happy because they know he’s making her happy, right?

[01:20:27] Kyle: This is all, this is. We, I loved going places with my wife because she would smile at everybody and she would engage people and people. She connected with people and they saw her happiness. And I’m telling you, I felt like I was part of the reason,

[01:20:45] Kyle: and it made me glow, right? It, it just, you know, and, and that’s what men want.

[01:20:50] Kyle: We. You know, uh, you see sometimes couples walking around together and men just seem defeated, right? They’re just, they’re not. ’cause they’re trying and they’re, you know, and the women are un you know, it’s just, man, if you can smile with each other and walk around happily, it makes such a difference. Look for, and maybe that’s the, the point to this whole thing is look for and find wonderful and beauty and joy and service in your spouse.

[01:21:20] Kyle: And if you look for, and you’ll find it and if you find it, announce it to each other. Right? It’s okay to, to pump your spouse up. Right? It’s okay. It’s not, you know, and I think that’s, when I talked to my son, he said something that was interesting because he knew we were a team, right? It was Shelly and I against the world.

[01:21:42] Kyle: And by the way, my kids were part of the world. They weren’t, I mean, they were also are my kids, but it was her and I against them in some cases, right? And they, they realize those two are a team. Those two, they’re inseparable, right? They’re, they’re one, if I talk to mom, I’m talking to dad, and there ain’t no, there ain’t no going back and forth between the two of them, right?

[01:22:06] Kyle: They’re together on this crap. And, and it, it saves you a lot of, a lot of problems and trouble because kids can use you against each other and they can create conflict if, if you are not. Together in your approach to a lot of things, right. Finances, uh, you gotta get together on this stuff and, and cleave in, in all those areas.

[01:22:29] Kyle: And when you do, it’ll connect you in a way that people will see that these people are connected. You know, I, I had a, I had a guy come up or a, a lady come up to me one time.

[01:22:39] Kyle: Uh, when we used to go to church. I had one son that didn’t like to really get ready and he was always kind of late. So I would take half the family to church and we would sit on a certain row every week and my wife would come in sometimes on time, sometimes a minute late, sometimes 2, 3, 4, whatever, sometimes 10 minutes late.

[01:22:57] Kyle: But every time she would come in the door would open and I would see her walk in and it, it would light me up. ’cause she had this feminine beauty about her. Right. And it would just, and I always, and I remember I started looking for it. She would come in, she’s wearing a dress, she’s dolled up for church, right?

[01:23:16] Kyle: And, and it’s, it’s my picture of her, of her just feminine beauty, right? And she would walk in and I had a lady come up to me one day and sit, she said, I love watching you watch your wife come into church. And I said, what? And she said, yeah, I sit where I can see you.

[01:23:38] Kyle: And she said, I can see how you look at her. And I said, well, go tell her that. You know, I like, I pulled the, and so she did. Right. But I know, I, I, I, I, I did, I knew I was doing it, but I didn’t really, it wasn’t kind of conscious, you know, but

[01:23:57] Kyle: I know it mattered to her too. ’cause I was watching and I wanted to see my wife walk in. Right. And I just wanted to see it every Sunday.

[01:24:06] Kyle: And it just, it, and, and, and she would come in with the, this look on her face. Right. Even though she’d been battling one of my sons to get to church, she would come in and she would smile at me and I would smile at her. And sometimes it would be a smile of he was troubled today, I’m here now you can help me out.

[01:24:24] Kyle: Right. Or sometimes it was a smile that he, he, he did. Okay. Right. But it was all we knew, we were a team and we were gonna battle this together no matter what it was. Right. So I see you looking up something, what’s on your mind.

[01:24:37] Cameron: Uh, well, I was just looking up, so Adam Smith is an economist and you know, I’m an armchair economist. I love those type of things, but this is one of the best quotes about what men desire. And I think it applies to women, but to a lesser degree. Um, or maybe, you know what, it’s not to a lesser degree, it’s just more complex for them.

[01:24:58] Cameron: I think it’s simple for men, and it’s man naturally desires not only to be loved, but to be lovely or to be that thing, which is the natural and proper object of love. And I just love that quote. Anyway, so

[01:25:19] Kyle: That’s, that’s so true. How can you argue with that right now? A lot of men won’t say that because it’s not a very masculine thing to say,

[01:25:29] Kyle: but it’s true. We, I think we all have that desire. It’s one of the six basic human needs, right? You want

[01:25:36] Cameron: I don’t know. So where, where,

[01:25:38] Cameron: does that fall? ’cause you got

[01:25:39] Cameron: shelter and food and shelter or water and

[01:25:42] Kyle: The six basic human needs are

[01:25:43] Kyle: different.

[01:25:44] Cameron: okay.

[01:25:45] Kyle: Yeah. Six basic human needs. There’s Tony Robbins talks about six basic human needs. Yeah.

[01:25:51] Kyle: Certainty, uh, variety. I think it’s significance, love and connection. Growth. And I wanna say the last one is contribution. Maybe I might be getting those wrong. Somebody can fact check me, but

[01:26:05] Cameron: right. It’s

[01:26:06] Cameron: Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is the one I

[01:26:08] Kyle: Yeah.

[01:26:08] Kyle: That, that’s different.

[01:26:09] Kyle: Yeah.

[01:26:11] Cameron: Well, this one actually is different than the one I was saying. So this is, uh, self-actualization, achieving one’s, potential esteem, accomplishment, love, belonging, safety, and psychological.

[01:26:25] Cameron: So that’s different too. But anyway, go

[01:26:28] Cameron: ahead.

[01:26:29] Kyle: Yeah. It loving connection either in either list. Right. It’s a, it’s a, it’s a major desire that we all have. Uh, and I think it’s interesting, you know, you and I had this quick conversation, even though my wife passed away almost two years ago, I still feel married to her. I still feel connected to her.

[01:26:52] Kyle: Right. So deeply, you know, I can’t talk to her, but I, I kind of do. In the evenings, I, I kind of report, you know, and, and listen for guidance and those kind of things. But I still feel so intimately connected with her that it’s interesting to me. ’cause, you know, I’ve, I’ve actually been called out by multiple people now, and some church hierarchy have called me in and said, you know, it’s okay to date. And, and I said, okay, I, I understand that whenever the time is right, I will, I have, I have zero desire. I still feel like she’s, you know what I’m saying? I just,

[01:27:34] Cameron: Yeah.

[01:27:34] Kyle: and I know

[01:27:35] Cameron: It’s, it’s a consequence of becoming one with someone,

[01:27:39] Kyle: Yeah. Yeah.

[01:27:41] Cameron: That’s the, what a wonderful little testimony of the unity that you had with Shelly because it, it would still, it still doesn’t feel

[01:27:55] Cameron: right to go out and try and date somebody. It essentially, and you know what, Kyle, I predict this. If it ever comes to that point, it’s not that you’re gonna go be trying to find somebody to join you.

[01:28:09] Cameron: It’s gonna be that you’re gonna go find somebody to join with, and that’s gonna be different. And someday we can talk about the difference between joining you and joining with, but I don’t, man, you know, I can’t imagine trying to have to. Navigate those waters Again, I, I’m so crazy happy with my bride and I I, my wife of 25 years, the thought of dating somebody else

[01:28:41] Cameron: is

[01:28:45] Kyle: Yeah. Yeah.

[01:28:46] Cameron: but it’s, it, it seems foreign because essentially what they’re gonna be doing, because I’m so united with Sara, they’re gonna end up dating

[01:28:55] Cameron: Sara, which is weird

[01:28:56] Cameron: to say out loud.

[01:28:58] Kyle: That is,

[01:28:58] Cameron: not even go there. I did, I said it because I’m, and all the baggage now, it’s not just my baggage that they would have to deal with.

[01:29:11] Cameron: It’s gonna be my baggage and Sara’s baggage.

[01:29:14] Kyle: right. Yeah.

[01:29:15] Cameron: I don’t know how they do it. I, and I’ve watched my in-laws who have, uh, lost a spouse through div death or divorce, and they get married again. And I’m just, I’m in awe with the transition. ’cause I can’t, I know that I would have a hard time being alone, that that is a truth statement.

[01:29:36] Cameron: I don’t know what I would do if I was not, if I didn’t have Sara with me. Like,

[01:29:42] Kyle: Yeah.

[01:29:43] Cameron: would, that would be torture. I don’t know what I would do. But making that transition where then you, it’s okay to have someone else. So Sara’s the ruler in which I measure. Greatness and beauty and everything that’s desirable

[01:30:01] Kyle: Right.

[01:30:02] Cameron: to, to be able to date again. How do you s So now everyone has to compare themselves to the ideal.

[01:30:10] Cameron: That’s not fair to

[01:30:11] Cameron: them. I don’t, I don’t

[01:30:13] Kyle: Well, here’s what you would

[01:30:14] Kyle: probably do. You would live in,

[01:30:17] Kyle: uh, you know, you would, I can, I can tell you my experience

[01:30:25] Cameron: Yeah.

[01:30:27] Kyle: you know, you said something

[01:30:28] Kyle: that rings true. You said, um, it’s not, I, I couldn’t be alone. I would live in torture.

[01:30:40] Cameron: Mm-hmm.

[01:30:41] Kyle: It can be that.

[01:30:43] Kyle: Right. And, and that’s a, it’s something that you face, right.

[01:30:51] Cameron: Yeah.

[01:30:52] Kyle: But being, being alone,

[01:30:55] Kyle: still feeling married to her, still feeling her presence still. Being surrounded by people. You know, I was, I was at a high school football game last night. My son played a high school football and there was hundreds of people around me, and I felt alone.

[01:31:10] Cameron: Hmm.

[01:31:11] Kyle: Right. And it’s, it’s like you said, it’s sometimes it is torture, right?

[01:31:18] Kyle: And you can’t escape it. But

[01:31:22] Kyle: I’m so grateful. I mean, I, I can’t, you know, having, having thought I was gonna lose her 15 years ago and then having her for 15 more years, I’m so grateful that my kids got to know her. My twins know who their mother is. They’ve seen and felt her right. I’m so grateful for those 15 years, and I think those 15 years might have been the best because of the change in me and because of the way she and I faced major trials in our lives together and really, uh, turned to divinity, right?

[01:32:06] Kyle: I mean, there were, there were times I, I don’t want people to, to misread the fact that there were times when my wife and I were at opposite polar ends of our relationship was damaged in some cases. There were times when we were,

[01:32:24] Kyle: you know, looking back, I remember one time we were talking about it. She said, there were times where I just didn’t want you ever to come home again. That so, and there were times where I thought, this isn’t the life I signed up for. I’m leaving and I ain’t coming back. Now she never told me that in the moment.

[01:32:42] Cameron: Yep.

[01:32:42] Kyle: never told

[01:32:43] Cameron: That’s smart.

[01:32:44] Kyle: I never told her that in the moment.

[01:32:46] Kyle: Right. But, but as we talked later on about some of the things we’ve faced in our family and some of the just heartbreaking trials and tragedies, it made, it facing those things as a team made us stronger.

[01:33:02] Kyle: Right. Even though sometimes I was ticked off at her and sometimes she was ticked off at me, we still weren’t going anywhere. Right. We weren’t,

[01:33:11] Cameron: Right.

[01:33:11] Kyle: we, we fought through that and fought for us. And I think that’s a big part of it, right? Knowing, trying to find the beauty in each other, trying to find the, the, the value and the wonderfulness in each other.

[01:33:26] Kyle: Right? I think

[01:33:27] Cameron: Mm-hmm.

[01:33:28] Kyle: is just a huge part of it because I, I promise no good marriage is not gonna go through situations where you think, holy crap, this is what I expected. Right? And it’s gonna be, I’m telling you from, I don’t wanna be here anymore. This is my thought and her telling me down the road, I didn’t want you to ever come home again.

[01:33:50] Kyle: You know that. Again, I’m not suggesting we say that in, in real time. I’m suggesting. We, we have these look backs and we say we’ve been through some hard stuff. Right. And it made us stronger. So for when, when I say top 1% happy marriage, I don’t want people to think they were soulmates or No, dude, this is work.

[01:34:11] Kyle: This is

[01:34:12] Cameron: Oh, soulmates. That’s a fun discussion

[01:34:18] Cameron: because the world’s definition of a soulmate is a load of

[01:34:21] Cameron: crap.

[01:34:23] Kyle: Yeah.

[01:34:25] Cameron: You can, you can become soul united and mates, you know, where your spirit and body combined with their spirit and be body combined is a a unit. That is true. I believe you can become that. The idea that you happen upon somebody and it just clicks and works for the rest of your lives together, where it’s not work to

[01:34:56] Cameron: become, oh, that just does not resonate as true.

[01:35:00] Cameron: It’s

[01:35:01] Cameron: work and

[01:35:02] Cameron: it’s worthwhile.

[01:35:04] Kyle: it is worthwhile. Yeah. That’s, there’s, yeah. And, and anything worth having is worth working for, right? I mean, that’s just the reality of how the whole thing works. I think, I think part of the, the problem a lot of us have is we, is instead of focusing on, a lot of us have these goals, right?

[01:35:24] Kyle: What I think my relationship or marriage should be. Right. And we focus on the goal instead of focusing on the growth. And if we focus on the growth, then we get right. We we’re constantly focusing on the growth and constantly making our marriage better and constantly working through things. You know, probably a month before my wife, uh, passed away, we had a nasty argument, I remember, and it was over, I can’t remember what it was over now, and guess what?

[01:35:53] Kyle: It doesn’t really even matter,

[01:35:55] Cameron: Right?

[01:35:55] Kyle: but it, it was one of those knockdown, drag

[01:35:58] Kyle: out, and again, we have a top 1% happy marriage and we were not happy with each other. And there, it, it was a knockdown, drag out conflict,

[01:36:11] Cameron: Yep.

[01:36:12] Kyle: right. A month before she passes

[01:36:14] Kyle: away. Right? Now the good news is, and I, and is, I know within hours, she and I never cold shoulder each other.

[01:36:27] Cameron: Mm-hmm.

[01:36:28] Kyle: That’s one thing that we never did and I know some people, they grow up in that atmosphere and environment and they do that. And so we would figure stuff out, right? We would, we would come to some resolution and conclusions and sometimes, sometimes it was to agree to disagree, but we still loved each other and we were gonna figure some stuff out.

[01:36:45] Kyle: But yeah, a month before she passed away, we had a knockdown drag out argument and we went in our room and closed the door. I think the kids kind of got out of our hair ’cause they knew there was something going down between mom and dad. Right. But,

[01:37:00] Kyle: you know, I mean, I don’t know, hours, day days, they still saw us loving each other.

[01:37:05] Kyle: You know? It wasn’t like that was the

[01:37:07] Kyle: end and that’s what was left on. And guess what, if it had been left on that, it still doesn’t matter. Right. It was, it was periphery compared to our, the total package of our relationship. Right.

[01:37:20] Cameron: The 30 years of what you

[01:37:22] Kyle: Yeah. 30 years

[01:37:23] Kyle: Yeah. Yeah. And my kids know that. They know. I’m not afraid to talk to them about it either.

[01:37:30] Kyle: You know, I’m, we’ll have those discussions and so Go

[01:37:35] Cameron: You know, that’s a, so that brings up a thought about what to share with your kids about and when, about the realities of marriage because, uh, there was a time that I thought it would be wrong for my kids to know that I had conflict with my wife. It wasn’t phrased that way in my mind, but I didn’t want them to think that their mom and dad had issues.

[01:38:01] Cameron: So, just so you know, my, if you ask one of my kids who’s number one, it’s Sara, and it, you ask them the lifeboat questions, I’ve never talked to them about that, but they know that all eight of ’em are

[01:38:16] Cameron: done, and Sara’s the

[01:38:18] Cameron: one who’s gonna live.

[01:38:19] Kyle: That’s a hard thing to say, so I don’t want people to take that the wrong way. It just very clearly distinguishes how much you love your wife, right? And yeah,

[01:38:29] Kyle: Yeah.

[01:38:30] Cameron: Okay. Here’s a real, here’s a real conversation. Um, and, and, you know, I hope people understand what, where this came from, but there was a time when we were having to figure out what to do with our child who we both love, who was having behaviors that put him and others at risk. And I’m six eight, and if things had continued to progress down this road, and I believe in talking about the worst case scenario

[01:39:04] Kyle: Me too.

[01:39:06] Cameron: I like having a flow flowchart. Kyle has plans, I have flowcharts. And, um, when I was talking to Sara and it was heart wrenching conversation because I expressed to her that as much as I loved our child, it was better, it was better that we have him live somewhere else where we could then our, our relationship, my, my, my relationship and her relationship would be protected and we could nourish and strengthen that over.

[01:39:47] Cameron: Potentially having a split where, um, this child became the primary focus, and that was not okay with me, where the child became the primary focus and our relationship was torn,

[01:40:03] Kyle: right.

[01:40:03] Cameron: and it did not go well. I did not phrase things well. I didn’t use the right words, but the, the intent was that I choose her. And so that’s what I finally started saying is when it comes down to it, Sara, I choose you over all the kits.

[01:40:23] Cameron: That’s what I’m saying is you are more important to me. And she’s like, well, the child is important to me. I was like, is it more important than our marriage? And she did not like that question.

[01:40:34] Kyle: Yeah,

[01:40:35] Cameron: Oh boy, that got me into trouble. But we had, we had the full discussion where she know, and I don’t think she ever would say it, I don’t think she’s willing to say it, but I know that she values the marriage over the kids.

[01:40:51] Cameron: But that’s a decision that I think the, the Sophie’s choice is the, uh, um, phrase that people use to describe an impossible decision about who, who lives and who dies. In this case, she couldn’t, she couldn’t even comprehend that choice. But for me, I know

[01:41:11] Cameron: that it’s Sara over any one of our children. It’s Sara and relationship wise too.

[01:41:17] Cameron: So if down the road one of our kids needs to come into our home for a time to receive help, okay, great. If it causes contention between Sara and me, they need to go

[01:41:31] Kyle: Right.

[01:41:31] Cameron: and I love them, but this is, my relationship with Sara is far more important to me than collectively all of my relationships with my kids.

[01:41:43] Kyle: And I think that’s,

[01:41:44] Cameron: is

[01:41:45] Cameron: everything to say.

[01:41:46] Kyle: well, it’s, it’s a,

[01:41:48] Kyle: uh, you know, I’ve heard, I heard somebody one time say it’s bad to make big life decisions in an emotional state. Right. And, and I think what we’re describing here, and I, I would, I would suggest that women that listen to this are not gonna like it at all what we’re saying.

[01:42:08] Cameron: Yeah. Well, maybe they can gain some understanding

[01:42:11] Cameron: about maybe the inner workings

[01:42:12] Cameron: of a fellow.

[01:42:13] Kyle: yeah. Well, and here’s the, here’s the bottom line too. Eventually, hopefully your kids will grow up and be gone,

[01:42:20] Cameron: Yes. Hopefully, maybe.

[01:42:22] Kyle: Hopefully.

[01:42:22] Kyle: Yeah. Hopefully, eventually. And, uh, and who, what are you gonna do then? Right? You kind of need to, it’s, it’s not a bad idea to, to try to connect with your spouse at a higher level.

[01:42:36] Kyle: Right. I, and I realize this is one of the conversations I had with my son last night, and it, you know, there’s this, a natural connection between mothers and kids, right? There’s, there’s, and they are wonderful nurtures and that, that’s by design. Right? And sometimes it feels like to them that we’re saying

[01:42:55] Kyle: we’re being cold and heartless. Right? And when in reality we understand that nurture connection and we, we mentioned this early on, there’s gonna be a time where you’re, you come in second, there’s, there’s gonna be a time where you come second, right? And you gotta, you gotta figure that out as a man. You gotta figure out how to stay involved.

[01:43:14] Kyle: Stay right? Especially if you have multiple kids that have challenges, as we both have. There’re gonna be times where you’re gonna feel like she’s spending so much time with them. I’m not getting nothing out of her, right? She’s given me nothing. Well, they’re your kids. Grace is what you need to look at and figure some stuff out, right?

[01:43:31] Kyle: You gotta figure some stuff out. As a man. It’s, being a man ain’t easy. Being a woman ain’t easy and none of it’s easy. Right? But you know, what you’re talking about is hopefully you had that conversation when the emotions had died down. Right? It there, there’s a time for every conversation,

[01:43:50] Cameron: Mm-hmm.

[01:43:52] Kyle: You know, when, when my wife was in the hospital was not the time to have certain conversations, right?

[01:43:59] Kyle: Emotions were high, you know, uh, maybe six months after my wife passed away was not the time to have certain conversations. Right? Maybe a year after my wife passed away was not the time to have certain conversations, right? That’s a lot of it is just, is being thoughtful again, you know, when the emotions, you know, when it’s in the past or when the emotions have subsided a little bit, there are times to have those conversations.

[01:44:26] Kyle: Right. I I, you know, and tell your

[01:44:29] Cameron: my goal, my goal is to have those conversations before

[01:44:34] Cameron: the emotional

[01:44:35] Cameron: state is there.

[01:44:37] Kyle: good luck, man. Holy moly. That’s, that’s God,

[01:44:40] Cameron: isn’t that nuts?

[01:44:42] Kyle: that’s nuts.

[01:44:43] Cameron: case scenario guy here, oh, well, let’s get a flow chart in place so that when we get into the emotion, we don’t have to, we don’t have to rely on our emotions. We can rely on the flow chart.

[01:44:54] Kyle: Well, and here’s,

[01:44:55] Cameron: this is where we set it and this is the result. This is what our decision was when we weren’t emotional

[01:45:00] Cameron: about it. Let’s

[01:45:01] Cameron: follow the flow chart. Yeah. That’s

[01:45:04] Kyle: I think we do the same thing, but here’s what I do when events happen. Right. And I like, and I think, I didn’t really like the way that went.

[01:45:14] Cameron: mm-hmm.

[01:45:15] Kyle: Right. So I’ll give you an example. Right after, right after Shelly passed away, everywhere I went seemed like I, I’d go to Walmart and see an old couple and I’d, I’d fall apart

[01:45:27] Kyle: and I’d come home and I’d say, okay, now I know that’s tough for me.

[01:45:31] Kyle: I probably need to sit down and think how I’m gonna approach that next time. And maybe my goal is to go to that couple and say, I love seeing you guys in love and, and find joy in it for them and it’ll fix me. Right. So I I, I can’t say that I, that

[01:45:45] Kyle: I, look, I think what I do is when things happen and they don’t go well, I go back home and I say, okay, it’s probably gonna happen again.

[01:45:57] Kyle: I mean, you know, hopefully not, but if it does, I’m gonna be prepared and I’m gonna, I, I’ll map out some sort of preparation, right. So then when it does happen, I can not fall victim. Right. So, I don’t, I don’t necessarily, I don’t think I’m a worst case scenario guy. I’m really the ultimate optimist, I think. But I’m, I’m, I’m also realize things are gonna happen.

[01:46:17] Cameron: let me ask you this, do you think I’m not an optimist

[01:46:20] Kyle: No, I I’m not saying that I’m, I’m talking about me?

[01:46:23] Kyle: No.

[01:46:24] Cameron: Yeah.

[01:46:24] Kyle: I, because I

[01:46:25] Cameron: so I flowchart things, I, I, I go down the, the awful road

[01:46:31] Kyle: Mm-hmm.

[01:46:31] Cameron: so that then I

[01:46:32] Cameron: can focus in on the, what

[01:46:34] Kyle: And I’m not saying, I’m not saying you’re not an optimist. Right. I don’t wanna, I’m not pegging you that way.

[01:46:40] Kyle: I, I guess I just, I guess I just, once I experience it, then I, then I make the plan, right. And, and try to come up with a, it’s.

[01:46:52] Cameron: see someone else who

[01:46:53] Cameron: experience it?

[01:46:56] Kyle: Well, I mean that, that happens naturally, right? If somebody else goes through an experience and you think, like, when my wife passed away, I knew we weren’t the first ones that that had happened to. knew there was, it can ruin families, it can ruin kids’ lives. I sat down and made a plan with each of my

[01:47:13] Cameron: But you waited until afterwards when your wife passed away. I started flowcharting things right away. My wife’s

[01:47:20] Cameron: still alive and I

[01:47:21] Kyle: Right? Right, right,

[01:47:22] Cameron: is a difference.

[01:47:23] Kyle: That is a difference. Yeah.

[01:47:25] Kyle: Yeah. Now again, I think we’re, we’re running down the same path here. Right? But I’m also, I’m also not prone to,

[01:47:35] Kyle: I don’t know, I, I think it’s just a different approach. But we hopefully we’re, you know, let me tell

[01:47:42] Cameron: I, I

[01:47:42] Cameron: agree. Okay.

[01:47:44] Kyle: Eric, right? My son, my son Eric, who’s more severe on the autism spectrum, would exhibit certain behaviors, right? I didn’t want to go through every behavior, every kid with autism had had ever in his life and come up with a plan. But when he did exhibit certain things, I would sit down and say, okay, what’s the challenge?

[01:48:03] Kyle: What’s the objective? What’s the strategy? What’s the tactics? I’m gonna follow and have a plan so that next time it happens, I’ve got a plan and I can work that plan instead of being overly emotional or getting sucked into the right. So, so I didn’t wanna sit down and say, and maybe it was, maybe it’s just, maybe it’s just me not. Not wanting to. I mean, I don’t know. It’s two different ways to approach it, right?

[01:48:28] Cameron: yeah. Let me tell you this, Sara. I discovered this, um, Jordan Peterson has a personality test to do with your spouse. It is so much fun. We did it for a date night. I think it’s like 25 bucks or maybe $30 total, and you both take it and then it tells you how you as a couple intersect with your personality.

[01:48:48] Cameron: So it was a lot of

[01:48:49] Kyle: Interesting.

[01:48:50] Cameron: We discovered so much during that as we took that test, and then we started down this train of discussing things when our son was diagnosed with, uh, O C D, moral O C D and, um, being on the autism spectrum. We started, I started to realize that I have a lot of the same traits. Like, uh, I’ll tell you sometime about being, uh, there, there’s a number that won’t leave me alone, and I use that because it’s not a choice.

[01:49:18] Cameron: It just, this number is everywhere when I see it. I get a little bit of a thrill. Um, if I see a pattern that includes it, I solve it. It’s bizarre, right? It’s just, it happens in my head. Now. I found out that my wife shows up to, uh, events and social settings and she just exists and she goes with the flow. I didn’t know people did that.

[01:49:47] Cameron: I, I have, if I’m showing up at a social setting, I prepare in my mind who I’m going to be seeing things that I want to say to certain people to help buoy them up. I, I have this plan and a flow chart to deal with conflict. If conflict arises, I have a, a whole thing before I show up. And my wife, she’s like, that, that’s so much work.

[01:50:14] Cameron: I just show up. I was like, how, how can you just show up? So it’s different strokes for different folks. And for me, I, I plan for everything. My wife used to make fun of me ’cause I’d be driving in the car and move my hands and she’s like, who are you talking to now? Because I prepare for conversations and it’s why some people think I’m really quick witted.

[01:50:37] Cameron: No, I’ve just been thinking about the subject before. For ages, you know, so there’s there, there’s a different method. Um, and for me it’s all pre, which is okay. There are some big downsides to it. ’cause I, I faced a lot of demons that a lot of people don’t ever have to face. I, for example, my son who, uh, was tortured by suicide ideation, he’s still alive.

[01:51:03] Cameron: Thank goodness. I’m grateful for that. I’ve mentally, I have prepared for his death so far to have written the, the talk I will give at his funeral. People don’t do that. That’s torture. But for me it was very freeing and liberating. ’cause now I know what the worst case scenario is that I can imagine. I’m no longer scared of that.

[01:51:25] Cameron: And I can work and focus in on avoiding the worst case scenario. So you’re right, different people are

[01:51:31] Cameron: different.

[01:51:32] Kyle: Right. Yeah. Well, either way back to our original subject, cleaving. I think the idea that you just let it happen is, you know, I, I, I told somebody recently, they said they were living on, uh, hope and Faith. Right. And I said, you know, hope and Faith is wonderful, but you need a plan too. And they said, what?

[01:52:02] Kyle: I said, let’s make a plan. And they said,

[01:52:07] Kyle: it says to rely on hope and Faith. I said, yeah, I agree. Now let’s make a plan. I said, a, a plan is where you take action on your hope and faith. Right.

[01:52:17] Cameron: Yeah.

[01:52:19] Kyle: I mean,

[01:52:20] Kyle: and, and I, again, I’m, I’m not the kind of pre-plan everything, every event, but certainly if something causes me to stress or frustration, I’m also the guy that if I get offended by something, I start to ask myself, why am I offended by that?

[01:52:35] Kyle: What is it that I need to figure out about me that doesn’t allow people to say whatever they wanna say, and somehow I’m hurt.

[01:52:42] Cameron: Right.

[01:52:43] Kyle: anybody else hurting me.

[01:52:45] Kyle: Right.

[01:52:45] Kyle: I shouldn’t let somebody else’s words hurt me. So what am I, what, where do I lack confidence? What, what, what position do I feel isn’t stable?

[01:52:54] Kyle: Uh, you know, so whenever I get frustrated with somebody, I always think, okay, what’s wrong with me? That I’m getting frustrated? Am I not just giving them space or, you know, so I’m always looking within. And I think that’s probably, um, a, a part of how we’ve been able to create the world we created in our family, uh, with our kids that are on the spectrum and all those things, is that we have hope, we have faith.

[01:53:19] Kyle: I have a lot of hope and a lot of faith,

[01:53:22] Cameron: Yep.

[01:53:22] Kyle: but I also had a plan. I mean, we also developed a plan and worked at cleaving unto each other. Right? I, I’m not sure it comes naturally. I don’t know if it does or not. Maybe for some people it does, you know, I don’t know. But I do know that if you work at it, if you, if you come up with an idea and you work at it, then you’re got, you’ve, you’re, you’re taking action towards those things, right?

[01:53:48] Kyle: and

[01:53:48] Cameron: If you have faith that should lead to action ’cause you believe it’s possible, so there should be some action. What, uh, what advice would you give and then I’ll share my advice. What advice would you give to someone who’s just starting out in marriage? How to work to cleave

[01:54:06] Cameron: unto your spouse and

[01:54:08] Cameron: none else?

[01:54:10] Kyle: Golly, that’s a loaded question, isn’t it? That’s so loaded. Well, I, first of all, I would say be patient. It may take 20 years for your spouse to know you love them,

[01:54:21] Cameron: Okay.

[01:54:22] Kyle: even though, even though you’ve done nothing out of the ordinary that you know, I mean, I almost think that if you can get through, right, if you can work together to get through the tough stuff, it’s gonna bind you together.

[01:54:41] Kyle: Right? And I say work together to get through the tough stuff. One of the things my wife and I did is we had this little trigger in our relationship, right? We were not above divorce. We never, she and I never looked at each other and said, it can’t happen to us. We knew we were not above anything, right? We knew we had to work.

[01:55:05] Kyle: And so one of the things we did was whenever we found out about a friend or an acquaintance who was getting divorced, we would stop everything we were doing and we would say, okay, let’s sit down and let’s talk about some areas where I need to improve. And just tell me, I, tell me in a loving manner what I can do to love you more and be better.

[01:55:25] Kyle: And you know, we might have a heated discussion about this, but let’s have it. And, and it, it happened almost yearly, right? You, you hear about people that are getting divorced, and if that’s a trigger, if you hear about somebody or your wife hears about somebody that’s getting divorced, it can happen to you too.

[01:55:44] Kyle: Don’t think it can’t. And if you say, you know what? I don’t want it to happen to me. Let me go talk to my wife and say, how can I be a better husband? How can I be a better father and make effort? And, and if she’s willing to say, how can I be a better mother and and wife and be gentle, be kind, be loving.

[01:56:02] Kyle: Right. And treat each other with that. That would be, if I were to say anything, that would probably be it, is, is take those moments to, to lovingly share with each other how you can make each other happier. Right. What you can do to fulfill each other higher. And I think that’s a powerful thing to do if you’re doing that consistently.

[01:56:22] Kyle: And if you, if you connect it to, uh, someone else getting a divorce, it’ll happen often enough where you won’t ever not stop doing it. Right. I’m sad, but

[01:56:36] Kyle: How

[01:56:36] Cameron: that’s great.

[01:56:37] Kyle: What would your

[01:56:38] Kyle: advice be?

[01:56:40] Cameron: Uh, so first of all, re make decisions to act regardless of others’ behavior, including your spouse. So you choose how you are going to be, regardless of how they’re treating you, or how the situation is, and make that independent because that’s the grace you need to recognize. If you’re trying to grow, you’re gonna be working on things that you’re working on, they’re gonna be working on things that they’re working on.

[01:57:08] Cameron: And the things that they want you to work on might not be the things you’re working on right now. You’ll get to ’em. And vice versa. So allow enough grace and enough space for you to continue to work on the things that you’re trying to work on to be a, the best possible spouse you can. And allow them enough room to work on the things that they are working on and recognize that even if there’s something that is really causing you angst and anxiety and hardship, it’s okay ’cause that won’t change the fact that you’re still trying to work on becoming better.

[01:57:48] Cameron: And then probably the next thing is, uh, in order to Cleveland to none else, it’s okay to go through hard things, identify it, don’t avoid it, and then try and go through it together. And if you come up with a plan of action to overcome those things, or a flowchart, in my case, make sure that your companion, your spouse, is on board with it.

[01:58:13] Cameron: Don’t do it unilaterally. Don’t make the decision and then act on it. Make sure that you’re cleaving unto her and none else, or in my case, her and none else, instead of just yourself and none else. ’cause that’s a lone man in the wilderness. So

[01:58:30] Cameron: that’s, that’s my

[01:58:31] Cameron: advice.

[01:58:32] Kyle: Yeah. And, and maybe the best way to close this thing up is, is, um, we all need checks and balances, right? I mean, you, you said it alone, man, in the wilderness. It’s all of us need someone that loves us, that will tell us you’re running down the wrong path here. Right? Be open to that, you know, and be willing to put your ego aside and, and, uh, and you know, you can, even if somebody’s wrong, even if they’re completely wrong,

[01:59:06] Kyle: it makes sense to at least listen, right?

[01:59:08] Kyle: You can find stuff that,

[01:59:11] Kyle: you know, when your ego’s out of the way, you can really make changes in your life that are gonna be beneficial to, to you and to your spouse, you know? And, uh, don’t take your spouse for granted. I’m, I’m, uh, from experience and, and I, and I don’t think I did. You know what I’m saying?

[01:59:29] Kyle: I, I really don’t. I have a friend of mine after my wife passed away. It didn’t make me feel better in the moment, but it does now. He said at least she knew how deeply, right? She knew how deeply you loved her. There’s no question. Right? And it, and it gives me

[01:59:50] Kyle: comfort, and I think she still does. I think she feels it now probably even more.

[01:59:56] Kyle: She probably knows the depth even more now, you know, but make sure

[02:00:04] Kyle: that you’re doing things that are exhibiting that. Right. Consistently. ’cause no, tomorrow’s never promised. It’s not promised. So. Yep. Well, Cameron, interesting

[02:00:16] Cameron: um, yeah, I was gonna say, so on the note of Cleveland to your wife and none else before it’s too late. that’s, the best title, but there you go.

[02:00:32] Cameron: Yeah,

[02:00:33] Cameron: Thanks for talking about this again. Um, and when I say again, because we’ve talked about this probably 10 years ago in different ways, and it, it’s so much fun.

[02:00:44] Cameron: I look forward to

[02:00:45] Cameron: these every week. Thanks for,

[02:00:47] Kyle: do.