Have you ever wondered what would have happened with the fairy tale characters of Cinderella and Prince Charming if their lives would have been true? Would they truly have lived “happily ever after” after marrying? The answer would most likely have been “NO” —not if they didn’t do what it takes to overcome obstacles that marriage brings with it and make the right choices to continue to nurture and grow in their love for each other.

There’s a really good book we came across titled When Prince Charming Falls off His Horse by Jerry and Judy Schreur, published by Chariot Victor Publishing. It’s out of print, but if you find a way to obtain it, it’s a fun and yet practical book that explores what could have happened after these fairy tale characters married and what they and all of us could do to combat the common problems facing most marriages.

One of the solutions is “choosing” to be more creative when we’re faced with a marriage which is unhappy. Here’s what Jerry and Judy write about that:

“Many of the choices we make in marriage are tough ones. We choose commitment in the face of a desire to run away. We choose understanding when it is we who crave to be understood. We choose obedience when going our own way is much easier. We’re afraid that after we do all of the right things, there will be no fun, and there will be nothing left but the hard work of staying married. That isn’t necessarily the case. You can choose creativity. It’s up to you.

“Creativity is a vital component of any growing marriage. In choosing creativity, we add some of the excitement that the years have worn away. We don’t try to re-infatuate ourselves, but rather we take what we have, look at it differently, add something new, and together make something different exciting. …When we choose creativity, we take responsibility to re-make our marriages. We choose to create a new, life-giving relationship. We choose to rediscover some zest for life.

“You don’t need to add entirely new ingredients to choose creativity It involves taking what’s already present in your relationship and enhancing it, making small changes that lead you into an entirely different kind of relationship.

“It isn’t about throwing away what you’ve worked years to build, but taking the good stuff and making it better. It involves dreaming of how it could be and then taking the steps to make that happen. Choosing creativity involves at least 3 changes:

“Choosing creativity means choosing to change your view of your relationship. That involves two key things. First of all, when we decide to change our perspective, we need to begin to accentuate the positive. Many of us are in the habit of finding what is wrong with our marriage partners. We spend a lot of energy letting them know where they fall short. When we creatively rework our marriage, we start by looking for the good in our marriage and the good in our partner.

“A friend of mine put it this way: ‘I realized that I’d come to the place where I expected Sandy to annoy me. So I was looking for those things. It was as if I didn’t expect to like her anymore. And besides, it was easier to blame her for the lack of feelings I had toward her. So I continued to look at her with a mixture of contempt and disgust. One day she stopped fighting back and told me, ‘I can’t ever please you. So why should I even try?’

“I thought about that for a while, and I started to notice little things she did well—like how good she was with the kids; how kind she was to me when I was overworked; and how she didn’t complain about my parents. I began to spend more time thinking about those qualities, and before I knew it, I liked her again.

“Together with the help of a counselor we began to look for the good things in our marriage. The poison that had seeped into our lives almost disappeared, and while I can’t say it is the greatest marriage in the world, it sure seems to have a lot more possibilities than it did a few months ago.’

“Changing our perspective also involves something that’s key to creatively re-making our marriages. We need to re-frame our negative situations or negative character qualities. Re-framing isn’t tough. It means placing a new frame around the same picture. The frame changes the setting for the picture and gives it a different look. It doesn’t change the picture itself. It changes the way we look at the picture, and it changes our interpretation and our perception of the picture.

JUDY: “Re-framing is a key element in reworking in our marriage. You may have a hard time believing it, but Jerry isn’t perfect, and some of his negative qualities really bother me. Instead of concentrating on the negative, I try to re-frame it—look at it from a different perspective.

“One example is that Jerry loves to spend money. Tomorrow is a long time away for Jerry, but I think about it often and want to save for the future. We could, and have, in fact, argued long and hard about our differences in this area. But many years ago I began to see Jerry’s spending habits differently. First I noticed that he gave a lot of money away. So he wasn’t irresponsible. In fact, he was rather generous.

“I also noticed how he liked to help people in small ways by taking them for dinner with us, buying a part for their car, and little things like that. So instead of seeing him as irresponsible, I began to admire his generosity to others. It literally changed the way I viewed him.

JERRY: “Judy and I could share story after story of how re-framing has helped us. Re-framing doesn’t mean we gloss over areas that need work. It does mean that we try to look at behaviors and situations in a new light, seeing the positive in them and then changing our perspective. When we choose creativity, we choose to build our own model. It doesn’t have to conform to our friends’, or families’ ideas of what a marriage ought to be. It’s your model and yours alone.

“Too many times we long for a marriage that never was—a golden time when we were blissfully happy and the real world never intruded on our marriage. The truth is that time probably never existed. Time has obscured the images of the past, and when you compare your life now with your life then, now seems wanting. But my guess is that it never was perfect, and yearning for a return to those days doesn’t help the both of you build a better relationship in the here and now.

“We want our marriages to be fresh and exciting. While we can’t promise romance, when you shift your paradigm, when you throw out the old model of what a marriage was supposed to be, and when create something new, you can find new excitement and satisfaction.

“Dream with your partner about what your marriage would be like if you could build it from scratch. Talk about how it really could be if everything you liked about it now was even better. Try to visualize the picture in your mind. Share that dream, and then work toward it together.”

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We pray that you’ll choose to be creative and re-frame how you see each other. It’s the kind of thing that can help us whether we have a spouse who also makes the same choices or not. If they don’t also choose to do so, it makes things more difficult for you but it’s not an impossible task. 

With God’s help, “all things are possible” when it lines up with God’s will and principles for living—which this would. Choosing to be a spouse who “always trusts, always hopes”, and “always perseveres” lines up scripturally in 1 Corinthians 13. We hope you find the courage to do so.

God Bless,
Cindy and Steve Wright

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