Areas › Your marriage › Shared spiritual life
Agree with your spouse on one value you want your home to stand for, and live it this week.
Generosity, honesty, patience, prayer. Pick one, name it, and let it show in the house.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Enjoin prayer upon your family and be steadfast in it (Qur'an 20:132). A shared value, tended together, is the family's spine.
وَأۡمُرۡ أَهۡلَكَ بِٱلصَّلَوٰةِ وَٱصۡطَبِرۡ عَلَيۡهَاۖ لَا نَسۡـَٔلُكَ رِزۡقࣰ اۖ نَّحۡنُ نَرۡزُقُكَۗ وَٱلۡعَٰقِبَةُ لِلتَّقۡوَىٰ
Order your people to pray, and pray steadfastly yourself. We are not asking you to give Us provision;We provide for you, and the rewards of the Hereafter belong to the devout
Qur’an 20:132read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A home runs on values, spoken or not. Choosing one together and living it turns a household into a family with a character of its own.
John Mordechai Gottman; Nan Silver (1999). The seven principles for making marriage work
Lay presentation of the Gottman Method: Love Maps, fondness and admiration, turning toward, accepting influence, solvable vs perpetual problems, shared meaning.
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Explicit shared values give a family a spine and a shared story.
Where this sits: Gottman method, Create Shared Meaning.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.