As we’ve counseled many, many couples over the years and shared this advice, we’ve seen it work beautifully. It has the power to mend broken relationships in extended families, to bring peace to previously contentious relationships, to smooth things over and to set the stage for a lifetime of peace and harmony.

Wanna hear the best pre-marital advice Mark and I received?

Well, maybe it’s not the best, but we sure do refer to it a lot. We use it and we tell it to other couples all the time. It even feels a little bit like a marriage hack because it’s so simple and yet pays huge dividends.

Here it is:

Whenever we deal with my family, I do the communicating and whenever we deal with his family, he does the communicating.

Probably not the profundity you were expecting. But I promise, it’s gold.

Our pastor wisely instructed us that each of our families of origin would always love us—meaning the one who came from that family. My parents are always going to love me. There’s nothing I can do to make them disown me. They may roll their eyes at me and not agree with a lot of what I do and say. But I’ll always be theirs. I’ll always have a place at their table. They’ll always have to take me back.

But not so with Mark (and vice versa with me and his family). It’s possible for him to rub my family the wrong way, to annoy them, to tally up enough points against him that they don’t really like him anymore. It’s far more likely that my family would reject him than they would me. He’s an outsider. There are boundaries in their love for him.

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