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Amberly shares “confessions” or things that might surprise you based on assumptions you may have about someone who is a “marriage expert” or in the marriage and relationship field for their career.
It is time for the long-promised, long-awaited episode of the Prioritized Marriage Podcast, Confessions of A Marriage Expert, Volume 1. Volume 1 because I plan to make this a regular thing, maybe every few months, maybe once or twice a year, whenever I have enough content for an episode. I will keep a running list and see what happens.
This episode was inspired by a few conversations I had during a content creator retreat that I attended a couple months ago. There was a moment when I shared a fun fact about my husband, one that I won’t share here because I don’t have his permission to put it out into the universe for everyone to hear, but maybe I’ll ask him to do his own version of this and share it there. Anyway, everyone was appalled, surprised, shocked, And I put my hands into a frame under my face and said, “confessions of a Marriage Expert.” And so this episode was born.
P. S. Check Instagram, Facebook, TikTok today. And I’ll do that face frame, Confessions of a Marriage Expert thing on video for you, since I’m not doing a video recording of my podcast quite yet. (Coming soon.” Because I know you’re all dying to know what it looked like when I said, “confessions of a Marriage Expert.” and framed my face.
First things first, I wanted to discuss the title of “marriage expert” that I have chosen for myself. I went back and forth on this a lot of times and decided that I’m going to own the title of marriage expert. I chose marriage relationships as the focus of my career in family life education really early on. And although I love relationships and relationship dynamics of any kind, whether it’s friends, family, professionals, etc. (like work professionals), I really love applying what I know and continue to learn to marriage relationships. Although, like I said, I could and have applied it to other types of relationships with various work opportunities I’ve had, I really focus a lot on marriage and marriage relationships. I chose the word expert because, well, I’ve done and continue to do a lot of studying and research and consider myself an expert in the field. Not one who knows everything, but someone who knows a lot and is continuing to become an expert.
My one caveat is that being an expert in marriage relationships does not mean I am a master of my own. I have seen a lot of people over the years position themselves as experts on marriage relationships, share things that are working for their relationship, and almost posing it as a “have a marriage like ours” type of advice. And then those same couples divorce soon after and the couples who have followed them and applied their advice and see them as marriage experts feel deceived and sometimes even afraid that what has been shared isn’t actually real and isn’t going to work for them because they’ve been following a marriage that failed.
So my first confession is that my marriage is not perfect. I am learning and working on my own marriage relationship right along with you all. There have been moments when I have told those closest to me that I feel like an imposter over here, sharing all of this marriage goodness when there are times that my marriage has not been in the very best spot. I hope that you know that I am human. I am married to a human. And while I have the education and credentials to back up my marriage expertise, there are a lot of times when I fail to apply what I know, and even what I am actively sharing with all of you, to my own relationship.
Everything I share can be used to strengthen and improve your marriage, and I will always share a variety of ways to use what I share so that you have inspiration for your own unique situation in life. Because one piece of marriage advice is not one size fits all. It may not work for you, or it may not work in the way prescribed, you’re going to have to adjust and adapt it to your situation to make it work for you. And you might even have to throw it out the window because it doesn’t work for you.
While I often share things I am doing in my own marriage to make it a priority, I won’t ever, maybe not ever, but I will very rarely share struggles we’re having in the moment, unless we are fully us against the problem and looking for suggestions, or ready to share what is working for that moment, or our process to get through the challenge is something we want to share. I may, and already do, share those challenges later on, what they looked like, and how we got through them. My goal is to be real and vulnerable and relatable, while also keeping the things in my marriage private that need to be private.
Now that I got that confession out of the way, here are a few fun, silly confessions.
The first one, we didn’t have a wedding song and still don’t really have a song we consider ours. As we were planning our wedding, Joe jokingly told me that our song should be ‘Just Say Yes’ by Snow Patrol, based on our proposal story, which I will link in the show notes if you want to read it and see how that applies. We have always also really loved ‘Come What May’ from Moulin Rouge, and we have some of the lyrics from that song hanging on our bedroom wall. I did sing a song to Joe, at our wedding luncheon. ‘Unexpected Song’ was the song that I sang and if I can find the recording of it, maybe I will share that.
But to go along with that confession and maybe explain why we don’t have like a solid us song, a solid wedding song. We didn’t have a first dance at our wedding. And like I said, that may play a role in why we don’t have a song. We did have a carefully curated playlist that was going throughout our reception. But Joe’s not really into dancing and didn’t want to dance at our reception, so we didn’t. I do find often that there are songs that I feel like remind me of our marriage in this time, or is something that makes me think of Joe. And I think it’s just hard for me to pick one song that encapsulates it all at any given point in time, because it changes. Funny story, however, anytime I ask Joe what we should do for a date, an evening, or time we have together, his response is always, “dance.” He never means it, and it kind of reminds me of “let’s dance,” a line in a song from Wicked the Musical. But, yeah, that’s my random little grouping of confessions.
My next confession has never really felt like a confession to me, but I’ve learned through Joe that this surprises people about me based on my background in relationship education, so I am going to share it as a confession. I love, love, love relationship-based reality shows. Love is Blind, Married at First Sight, Bachelor and Bachelorette, Golden Bachelor and Bachelorette, all of them. There’s a new series on Netflix called The Later Daters that seems kind of similar to Golden Bachelor and Bachelorette that I’m really excited to watch after I finish all of my cheesy Christmas movies. I never thought this was really weird, but Joe told me once that he had someone tell him they were surprised I watch shows like The Bachelor because it goes against what I believe in or something like that. But, I love the relationship building and dynamics and always have lots of thoughts and opinions on what the couples, especially in shows like Love is Blind and Married at First Sight, do to create good relationships once they’ve chosen and/or are with each other, and as they are getting adjusted to the realities of what life together will look like. My friend Mary and I have long discussions on Marco Polo about all our thoughts, and I even sometimes share the relationship lessons or thoughts I learned from a TV show or an event on a show I know everyone is watching, over on social media, on my website or here in the podcast. It’s just something I really enjoy.
Okay, my next confession is kind of about my husband, but I’ve got permission to share it and it fits with me and my prioritized marriage content, so we’re gonna go with it. Joe hates being in reels, stories, pictures for the website, etc. There are a lot of marriage and relationship content creators who do this as a couple, or one is doing the majority of the things and the other is a very involved sidekick or support person. That is not us. Joe would rather stay out of all the things. We used to take regular photos for the blog and every time Joe would make jokes about how I should hire a husband to stand in for him in all of my content. But he would, maybe not always so willingly, join me. And I always try to make it worth his time and make it quick and painless.
A common question I get when I put up a question box on social media is how Joe feels about being in my content. And I think you will see when he is kind of forced to be in a story sometimes that it is not his favorite. When we would do photo shoots for blog content, I always put on some sort of lip color or gloss for the pictures, and we would always take a handful of kissing pictures to go with whatever content we were shooting that day. Joe hates kissing lip gloss, chapstick, or anything of the sort. Sticky, wet, gooey, any of that, not his favorite. So if we’re kissing in a picture you see on Instagram, that’s obviously staged for content creation, the behind-the-scenes of that photo is most likely Joe muttering, “Ew, ew, ew” or “Gross, so gross” while we are kissing. Just ask Sadie Banks, our favorite content photographer. She would crack up at his antics during photo shoots, and I like to think we have a lot of fun. He would tell you otherwise, maybe.
That’s it for this episode of Confessions of a Marriage Expert. I hope you enjoyed it. Let me know if you’d like to hear one from Joe’s perspective, which might be me sharing his confessions based on the last one I just gave you, but I think we can make it happen.
I’m going to be taking a holiday season break from the podcast for the next few weeks, but I will be back with more episodes and great content in the new year. And a little addition on that, I do have holiday content on the website, tons of it. Whether you’re looking for holiday date ideas, traditions you can share as a couple, how to make time for your marriage during the holiday season, stocking stuffer ideas, gift ideas. I will compile them all into a quick little link and link it in the show notes.
But also you can go back and listen to three or four episodes from last season’s podcast at the end of season one. And if you’ve listened to them already, feel free to re-listen to them. The holiday episodes are actually the most listened to episodes of the Prioritize Your Marriage podcast so far, with the exception of the increasing intimacy in your marriage episode. I hope you guys will listen and find ways to make your marriage a priority, create romance, and have fun together as a couple throughout the holiday season.