Marriage on Autopilot | MarriageToday | Jimmy Evans

[Music] a couple years ago karen started accusing me of of something it's kind of hard to talk about but but one morning i was walking through the bedroom and karen said uh you pulled the covers last night she accused me of being a cover puller and uh 40 years of marriage never happened before i walked through the bedroom she's making the bed she said you pulled the covers last night and i said no i didn't she said yeah you did and i said no karen i did not pull the cover i do not pull the covers there's nothing worse than a cover puller there's like thieves murderers terrorists and cover pullers and i'm not a cover puller she said yeah you are a cover puller you you pull the covers a lot but no i don't so i was you know kind of put out with that and and so i went i was staying at a hotel i was speaking somewhere and i was by myself so i woke up the next morning after you know when i was about to check out of my room and i was walking through and i looked at the bed and i noticed that i had pulled all the covers to my side and for just a nano second i thought karen might be right but then i realized if you're sleeping by yourself it's not cover pulling it's just using all the available covers right okay and and say by the way i have a basic life principle that i'm not responsible for what i do when i'm unconscious how many men agree with that i'm only confront me for what i do when i'm conscious if i'm unconscious i don't want you talking to me about it anyway so i i thought maybe maybe karen was right but but then i realized not so i go home and so october of last year we had the worst night that we've ever had together it was just cover wars all night long and karen was pulling the covers horribly pulling the covers all night long and about the middle of the night i'm starting to get cold i realize the covers are off the bed all i've got is just one cover left and the main cover has been pulled off the bed and i'm just thinking what is wrong with her she is trying to accuse me of pulling the covers when in fact she's the cover puller in the family she's trying to blame me but she pulled the cover so i get out of bed the next morning and i step out of bed and i step on something and i realize it's the blanket it's on my side of the bed and at first i think i pulled the covers completely off the bed last night and that's what was happening but then i realized karen pulled him off and she came over and planted it on my side so later all the guys understand this so i stepped out of bed and the covers were on my side okay so i'm walking through the bedroom later uh in the morning and karen is standing next to the covers like she's been waiting there for me to walk through and i walked through and she said see what you did last night and i said yeah yeah and i walked through well that's kind of the day that i realized i had i had a problem and i could see myself sitting in a group saying hi i'm jimmy and i'm a cover puller everybody says hi jimmy and you know i just it i couldn't believe it first of all i couldn't believe that i pulled the covers all the way off the bed and and so i told karen and and she also accused me of snoring and um about the same time and i said i don't snore then the neighbors called and that's why we were mowing the yard at night and i said we're unconscious leave us alone and but this is not about cover pulling it's about a dynamic in marriage that happens once we've been married for a while man just about everybody goes through this dynamic but it's a very dangerous dynamic and that's where i was karen had been saying to me for a couple of years that you know that i was pulling the covers and my response to that was no i'm not i didn't and she would say to me i couldn't sleep last night because you were pulling the covers or you were snoring or whatever well i stopped pulling the covers as soon as she said that about me sleeping with her what i realized was i didn't care i was not caring about how she slept i was not caring about her experience sleeping all i was caring about was myself and here's the dynamic that happens in marriage once we get comfortable with the relationship we begin to focus on other things and we put the relationship on autopilot and that's when everything bad happens in marriage is when we hit autopilot in dating the thing about dating and when you're newly married is you're highly focused on your spouse and everything that happens to them is very important to you you want them to enjoy you you want them to enjoy what you say and what you do you're highly focused you're very proactive and pleasing each other but the longer you stay married there is the the process that we go through that we hit autopilot we begin to take each other for granted and then our spouse begins to complain about stuff and it actually annoys us whereas before we wanted to hear it and before we were very receptive to what they were saying now we've become insensitive to it well i'm going to talk about flying i'm a pilot and i fly a plane a little planet i just fly a single engine plane but i'm a pilot and i want to talk about autopilot now this would surprise some people to know but a lot of pilots don't know how to fly very well because of autopilot one of my friends runs a charter service a flying charter service and he hired a commercial pilot to fly for him like you know twin engine props and king airs and things like that and this pilot of about 30 years went to work for him and my friend hired him immediately when he knew he was a commercial pilot and had all these you know fifteen thousand hours flying and the guy when he took the job this pilot said well i'm going to have to brush up on my skills because it's been a while since i've flown and my friend said what do you mean it's been a while since you've flown you're a commercial pilot he said the plane that i fly i drive to the runway push a button it takes itself off flies all the way there lands itself and i park it back the gate flying has become so sophisticated that some of the crashes that you're hearing about are actually the autopilot disengaging and the pilots don't have the skills to fly the plane without that autopilot and so my plane has autopilot there's a little there's a little button right on the dash that once i take off i can pre-program the autopilot i take off i get up in the air and i can hit autopilot it'll fly me all the way the runway now my plane won't land itself but i can fly it all the way the runway click off of autopilot and land the plane but the more you use autopilot the more you lose the skills of flying and more and more what my friends and i what we do is we hand fly up to altitude we hand fly for a long time and then we hand fly down when you're when you're on autopilot first of all you lose skills secondly is you become distracted and so when i'm flying my plane by hand i am extremely sensitive to the entire aircraft and what's going on i'm flying it and if i just barely pull my yoke over that plane is going to turn this way if i barely push it forward it's going to go nose down whatever i'm doing with my feet with my hands i'm totally in control of that plane and i'm very very sensitive to it the minute i had autopilot here's the way i fly looking down at the ground you know i'm still engaged with my instruments and everything here we listen to xm radio we'll listen to golf or listen to football or listen to something like that we'll listen to the radio but as soon as we hit autopilot we are not sensitive to the airplane any longer because we know that auto pilot's flying the plane but ultimately you become unconscious there there are pilots that have a pilot go to sleep there have been commercial pilots that have overflown their destination because they got up in the air they had autopilot and they actually went to sleep here's what happens in marriage the minute you hit autopilot you begin to lose the skills of relationship now listen there are couples that have been married for one year that have better relationship skills that couples been married for 40 years you've been on autopilot for so long maybe not completely in the relationship karen and i when karen was complaining to me about you know pulling covers and things like that i mean i wasn't we weren't on autopilot in our relationship but i was in that area of our relationship and it worried me when karen said that and i realized how bad i'd been pulling the covers i just thought you know i really am checked out in that area and i hope there are other areas that i'm not checked out also but you lose the skills as soon as you put your relationship on autopilot you actually begin to lose the skills of relationship and you begin to lose awareness of your spouse and what's going on in their life and ultimately you just become like i said don't don't confront me on what i'm doing when i'm unconscious we shouldn't be unconscious of marriage for example when i when i wake up at night now i told karen and i said you know karen i can't do anything about cover pulling i actually there's two things i can do about cover pulling okay you're semi-conscious you know when you're rolling over at night so the first thing i do is i roll toward her not away from her when i'm rolling over at night and when i roll away from karen i push the covers her way okay before for two years i kept saying i'm not pulling the covers i'm not a cover puller now i'm i'm highly sensitive when i'm in bed of what's happening to karen all night long before i wasn't that's what i'm talking about you you've got to click off i've got two buttons in my plane i've got a button right here that says ap that's autopilot i've got a button on my yoke that's a red button that says ap and that's how you click off autopilot i want everybody clicking off autopilot tonight if you've been in any area of your relationship you're losing if you're on autopilot in any area you're losing the skills of relating and you're losing awareness of each other and it's a dangerous dangerous thing to do [Music] gain instant access to exo conferences and other dynamic marriage teachings with xo now the new on-demand video streaming subscription from exo and marriage today for only nine dollars a month you receive access to life-giving marriage series from jimmy evans dave and ashley willis and other marriage today speakers access exo now from all your favorite devices sync content for offline viewing and enjoy world-class marriage content wherever whenever learn how to be married and stay married a better marriage is possible with the right information and a mutual commitment to success even the most unhealthy relationships can be healed as part of your subscription you have full access to the complete sessions from the latest exo conference be the first to receive marriage today's best content with your subscription to exo now start your free trial today at xonow.tv why do you ever hit autopilot in the first place well the fir the first is you think once you've reached altitude that you can just coast on in other words we worked to date we work to get married you know we're doing great and so we hit autopilot and now we just coast on in well here's what you need to understand planes run out of gas my plane has four hours of fuel that autopilot's dandy until you run out of gas and the best plane in the world without gas is going to crash the other reason that we had all the pilot is we want to focus on something else and so we focused on each other and we fell in love and we married but now i want to focus on my career or we want to focus on the kids or we want to focus on something else listen the instant you hit autopilot and your focus turns someone somewhere else your marriage is in danger you cannot your main focus like i said we have the instrument panel in front of us when i hit autopilot and i'm flying i look out the window for a minute and i do my scan of the instruments the knowledge of what is happening at the instruments has to be the number one thing that i'm doing when i'm flying listen in marriage yes we have careers yes we have children yes we have other things but our spouse has got to be the main focus of our lives except for jesus christ we have to keep our if you're saying we you know we've got other things to do and i've got to focus on something else it's the beginning of the end the minute you hit that autopilot and you begin to put your focus somewhere else bad things happen the other reason that we did is that's how we were trained to fly you said well jimmy isn't that normal let me say if if your parents or whoever trained you in marriage if your parents were on autopilot they either flew very low or they crashed i want you to get to a high altitude and i want you to stay there for the rest of your marriage and i want you to hand fly the airplane i never ever want you for the rest of your married life to ever hit autopilot and if you're on it right now i want you to click off if you hit this button i want you to click off with this button right here and we're going to hand fly it in here's the truth about the flight of marriage number one no marriage can fly itself it requires human input you've got to have two human beings working at the marriage for the marriage to work number two is marriage is a two pilot plane my my plane is a one pilot plane but the best planes are two pilot planes you have to have two people in the cockpit to fly that plane okay marriage is the two pilot plane don't make your spouse fly the plane by themselves they can't marriage requires the input of two people the other thing is flying the plane is the most important thing you can do if you value the other lives on board listen if your plane goes down your children are going to get hurt if your plane goes down other people are going to be hurt imagine for just a minute you get on a commercial plight and it's a two it's a big plane it's a two two pilot plane and you see both the pilots in there maybe it's a man and a woman you get on the plane you're boarding you see this male and female pilots in there and you're thinking that's great and the plane takes off there's a couple hundred people on board and after about 20 or 30 minutes of the plane being up in the air both pilots walk out the door and just come out and start visiting with everybody and they're just having the biggest time they're just visiting with everybody and that's okay for five or ten minutes you're thinking okay well they got all piled on this plane but they leave the door open you can see there's nobody up there and then 30 minutes goes by and an hour goes by and two hours goes by and you're thinking hey you people need to get up that cockpit up there when you're not tending to your marriage that's how your children feel your children need mom and dad up in the cockpit flying that plane it's a two-pilot plane and if it goes down those children are going to get hurt and so the very best thing that we can do for our family is to work on our marriage so i want to talk about how to keep your marriage flying high i'm going to give you a little flying lesson here okay and this is what they teach you when you're when you're taking flying lessons number one believe that you could crash when you're taking pilot's lessons in the classroom part of it they talk to you about feelings of invincibility and they say if you believe that you're bulletproof and 10 feet tall and you're not going to crash you're the guy that's going to crash because pilots need to be sober-minded people and they need to understand it could happen to me now when karen's karen and i started our marriage ministry over 20 years ago there was a couple a wonderful couple and they had a wonderful marriage ministry and they went all over the world ministering to marriages and they they registered the success of their ministry by how many divorces were canceled tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of divorces were cancelled or were were cancelled and they they were on our program we interviewed them and then they divorced this powerful marriage ministry and in the letter he ran off with some gal and in the letter that he wrote explaining the failure of their marriage he said we didn't i didn't listen to my own teaching karen and i could crash we're not invincible and we understand that and when you understand that you're not invincible you work on your marriage the second the second way that you keep flying high in your marriage is learn the laws of aerodynamics and respect them there are laws of aerodynamics i don't fear flying the more you learn about flying flying's the safest listen flying is the safest method of of transportation right okay marriage is the safest relationship on earth did you know that with all of its warts marriage is the safest relationship on earth and did you know that the way that god designed it you have a 100 chance of success in marriage did you know that this marriage is the safest relationship on earth when you do it god's way since 1994 marriage today has used every medium at its disposal to strengthen families and marriages through its diverse ministry outreaches every day across north america and around the world we provide help and hope through television live events social media crisis coaching and over 100 unique resources there is a fierce battle being fought for marriage right now but we can win it we want to raise the standard we want to unite families restore marriages and conquer divorce at marriage today we believe every marriage has a 100 chance of success if you do it god's way [Music] god said for this cause a man will leave his father and mother well how do we know that god wasn't just saying that to adam and eve how do we know that god was also saying that to us because adam and eve didn't have a mother god directly created adam and eve they were the only people ever created they didn't have a belly button so god says for this cause a man is going to leave his father and his mother and cleveland to his wife and they too shall become one flesh marriage has to be first now listen to me when you break a law you're going to get hurt marriage operates within god's laws karen and i violated every law of marriage when we first got married and we were on the brink of divorce and so when you understand the laws of marriage and you understand it doesn't matter how intelligent you are how rich you are how talented you are no one is the exception gravity doesn't care who you are it will drag you down and kill you it doesn't care who you are it's an impersonal thing the laws of marriage will help anyone succeed or if you violate them anyone will fail okay number one law marriage has to be first for this cause a man will leave his father and mother the most important relationship that you had before you got married now has to be reprioritized in real terms okay so here's what i'm saying if your job comes before your marriage your marriage is at risk if your children come before your marriage your marriage is at risk if any friendship you have comes before your marriage your marriage is at risk let me say here's here's the so that's just true but here's the special challenge that our generation has it's called electronics now listen to what happened in this room i don't know if it happened in other places with the rumble so people say all the time my spouse is sitting across the room from me but they're not with me they're they're on their phone they're texting i can't we're not we're not connecting because they're connected somewhere else when when you when you br when you open up an electronic instrument okay now karen and i don't facebook we facebook on marriage today we don't do facebook one one statistic i read said that one third of all affairs begin on facebook and one half of divorce petitions have a word facebook on okay so i'm saying if i if i said to you here i would like to hand you this and it's probably going to help you a whole lot have an affair get divorced would you would you accept that and i'm not saying anything bad about facebook i'm saying you need a technology-free zone in your home where you are together and no one else is there with you and if you can't shut your phone off or shut your computer down it means it's in control of you you're not in control of it technology is a wonderful servant it's a terrible master and technology is destroying marriages is keeping us from connected if you're sitting in the same room you're both on the computer talking to somebody else you're not with each other karen and i used to come home i would come home we would eat together as a family we would put our children to bed we taught them to respect our marriage they knew that they had a certain time up to a certain time of night was their time and then we put them to bed and then it was our time and we went into the bedroom and we had a little area a little sitting area when we went into the bedroom we popped popcorn and we without television without any anyone or anything uh you know distracting us we would sit and talk face to face for an hour or two and i look back on that as some of the most important time of marriage connecting every single day but i hear people right now telling me all the time we just don't have any connection you know it's it but they're texting they're they're emailing they're they're on the telephone there's the constant intrusion there the number one law of marriage is your marriage has to be first in real terms it doesn't matter who you are doesn't matter how busy you are doesn't matter how talented you are it doesn't matter how much money you make it doesn't matter no one is the exception your marriage has to be number one [Music] wow every time we hear jimmy evans i learned something new every single time he is one of the most gifted marriage teachers on the planet we've been learning from him for years and now it's a privilege to be working with him in this work of building stronger marriages but just like you watching him now i'm sure you took a lot away from that and we want to help you get even more access to jimmy evans videos because what you've just seen is actually just a portion of a full series from jimmy evans that's right you can see the entire series plus more marriage building videos on exo now you can learn from the best experts including of course jimmy evans and get unlimited access for only nine dollars a month this is the best way to get immediate marriage help and encouragement from the full marriage today video library yeah and of course all of our content is also included along with brand new exclusive marriage building content you can't get anywhere else so don't miss out on the best marriage videos that are out there subscribe now at xonow.tv [Music] hey there we are dave and ashley willis and today we're talking about how we can fly high in our marriage and a big important part to this is having a marriage that is not in the autopilot mode we can never do this we have to really keep our marriage a priority and we do this by being intentional yeah it takes being intentional because anything left on autopilot will eventually crash absolutely we want to prevent that for our marriages we've got some great questions today that we want to address question one we're in newlyweds and my husband doesn't include me in his business decisions i feel like he's trying to keep this separate aren't we supposed to share everything it's a great question what are you what are your thoughts well first and foremost i would say yes you're supposed to share everything and i would ask your husband you know why do you feel like you can't share your business decisions with me is there something that you know that you feel like is sensitive that you can't share because it's it's going against someone's confidence you know i would really get to the heart of the issue and it may just be that it may honestly be an innocent thing like that where he feels like this is just for my business life and i don't want to burden you with this or i don't want to betray this person's confidence but i would say to your husband you know even so there shouldn't be any secrets between a husband and a wife we need to be completely 100 percent secret free weekly guarantee that's right at the same time assume the best in your husband i think for a lot of us as men there's this need to compartmentalize it's not always a healthy need but we think i've got my home life my work life i've got all these different kind of slices of the pie and i don't want things mixing together and in his mind he might actually think he's protecting you it's like i don't want to burden my wife i don't want to bring home all the stress that i'm feeling or facing at work but at the same time he can't look at it like like that a husband and wife do need to share everything to be able to lean on each other in everything and he's not protecting you by keeping those things a secret he's actually based on your question harming your trust and potentially hurting your feelings and putting a wedge between you and if he would see it that way i think that it might change the whole conversation but i think it all starts with communication as most issues in marriage do to just just talk about this tell him you don't want there to be anything between you and you feel like the barriers he's putting up around work are creating just creating some wedges between you and i think it might change the dynamic that's true i think you know just appeal to his heart in this you know he's probably like dave said looking at as like this is just business why would i need to talk to my wife about it but just tell them say i want to connect with you on every level and your work is a big part of your life and i want to be able to connect with you there so please just share it with me don't make me feel like i have to be on the outside i want to be you know having a front row seat in your life as well all right next question it says after 32 years of marriage my parents divorced it's upset me and my sisters i'm worried that my marriage may suffer the same fate how can we keep this from happening well first off i'm so sorry i mean i i can't imagine that the pain of having your whole world view rocked when the two people you look to is is the example that you want to follow in your own marriage end up splitting out now we're seeing an epidemic of this you're not alone this is happening a lot i think one of the best things you can do is while you're raising your kids make sure you make your marriage a priority one of the reasons for this epidemic of divorce among people who are empty nesters is that they became really good business partners they they did really good at raising the kids together but along the way they stopped investing in their relationship and then one day they wake up and realize they have an empty nest and an empty marriage they don't even know each other anymore and so i'm sure your parents are great people but probably something like that is what happened the focus was on other things other than each other so if you want to not repeat that same mistake then even in the busy season of raising children make your marriage a priority make date night a priority make dreaming new dreams and having new adventures with your spouse a priority where it's not just all about the kids and of course your kids are important but they're going to grow up and move away and your spouse is going to be your spouse forever for life and so yeah invest in your marriage absolutely and just know that no matter what our family members decide to do we're not doomed by their decisions you know god has a plan for you and your husband and it's an awesome plan and you know we can't go through the day and think well i'm just doomed because of so-and-so's decisions we can't allow that to fill our minds and our hearts you know god has called us to something different and you have tools under your belt to make your marriage stronger just like dave said and so don't let that get you down and i hope that encourages you today and we we pray with and for your family and for other families in that same situation and the lord will carry you through this we hope this has been an encouragement to you thanks so much for tuning in you can continue the conversation with us on social media or marriagetoday.com and we'll see you next time [Music] we hope you were encouraged by today's program this program is made possible by the generous support of our faithful partners

Channel: MarriageToday

Views: 2,731

Rating: 4.9626169 out of 5

Keywords: Jimmy evans, Karen Evans, marriagetoday, sex, love, relationship, christian, christian marriage, divorce, marriage advise, marriage help, xo marriage, dave willis, ashley willis

Id: dVMlXwWgvLA

Length: 27min 24sec (1644 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 10 2021