Ozzie & Harriet, Cliff & Claire or Mike & Molly… What’s Your System?

A Christian Podcast Central Classic Podcast

Jefferson Drexler:
Hello and welcome back to Real Stuff My dad Says, the podcast. This is actually real stuff that my dad says, not just once or twice, but this is stuff that my dad’s been saying for years that has really brought meaning to not just my life and value. Not just to my life, but so many hundreds of other people that my dad has come in contact with. My name is Jefferson Drexler. I’m here with my dad, Rod. Dad, how are you doing today?

Rod Drexler:
I am doing pretty good.

Jefferson Drexler:
Dad, today, we’re going to look at television.

Rod Drexler:
Oh.

Jefferson Drexler:
Because we just don’t spend enough time looking at TV these days. I say that sarcastically, because I probably watch more television than 30 other Americans combined, sadly.

Rod Drexler:
Okay.

Jefferson Drexler:
Actually, I blame you. You’re the one that sent me to school to learn about television.

Rod Drexler:
Right, right.

Jefferson Drexler:
Anyways, dad, as we look at married couples in television, we go all the way back to say, The Honeymooners, then I Love Lucy with Lucy and Ricardo.

Rod Drexler:
Ozzie and Harriet.

Jefferson Drexler:
Ozzie and Harriet. The Cleavers. Name the couple, any couple, and if we do look, and obviously it’s not an accurate depiction, but if we look at these couples on television, it’s some sort of reflection of American culture. You can trace it all the way through American history. There’s The Brady Bunch, then The Cosby show in the eighties. The nineties, we saw Everybody Loves Raymond, King of Queens. Nowadays there’s Mike and Molly. There’s been The Family Guy. The ultimate family in American television, the ultimate married couple of American television, in my opinion, Marge and Homer Simpson.

Rod Drexler:
Oh, there you go.

Jefferson Drexler:
God, I love Marge and Homer. But, dad, all of these couples-

Rod Drexler:
You do know that, I think that Marge shows love more than any of those other wives that you’ve talked about.

Jefferson Drexler:
The epitome of a biblical wife?

Rod Drexler:
She really does. I mean, I know that it’s hard to see it through all the other things that have gone on there, but she is a very gifted, caring person in there. And so it’s a funny way to look at that show sometimes, because all the other characters that are just creating havoc around her, but she’s a steady force that just keeps them on the right track.

Jefferson Drexler:
Amen. Let’s just end the podcast here, because I think either right now, a bunch of our listeners either turned it off and said, “I can’t believe that you love The Simpsons that much,” or they all found our Facebook page and hit like, like, like, like, like, because they also love it as much as we do.

Jefferson Drexler:
But, dad, you look at all these couples from Ozzie and Harriet all the way through Marge and Homer, Mike and Molly, the guys and girls that we see on TV today. One thing that is constant and is even constant in our marriages is that there is a system that each marriage has. I know that we go to marriage retreats, a lot of couples before they get married, they do premarital counseling, and there’s a lot of romance and love and chocolates and roses and spa retreats. But, really, marriage comes down to a system.

Jefferson Drexler:
Dad, you’ve been talking about this for years. What is a marriage system, and how does this really play itself out?

Rod Drexler:
My system is going to be just very different than yours. It wasn’t that we designed it that way. It kind of developed, and what happens is that sometimes your system is bad, and we need to make a change to it.

Rod Drexler:
This is where I’ll deal with a couple and they may say, “Okay, you know what? We’ve got a terrible marriage. This is what goes on, and I’ve allowed it for all these particular years, and now what do we do about it?” And I’ll say, “Well, wait a minute. That was your system. You made it. Okay? So now we can see that you made it, now let’s go and see if we can reverse some of these things and make adjustments to it.”

Rod Drexler:
My favorite way of viewing that is, I was watching Major League Baseball one time, and I watched the guy bunt the ball up the third base line. I think it was the shortstop ran over, and he jumped on the ground and started to blow on the ball. Oh, yeah. And then what happens? The third baseman then picked it up as soon as it went foul. There had been over a hundred years, maybe 110 years of baseball to this point, and this had never happened before, at least that it was recorded. What happened is Major League Baseball, the next day, had a meeting of the rules committees and they made a new rule for Major League Baseball, 120 years, new rule said you can’t get on the ground and blow the baseball.

Rod Drexler:
Well, that made a lot of sense, and that’s what happens a lot of times in marriage is you need to make a certain amount of adjustments and everything, but you’ve got to know that it’s in the system. I do believe you need to take it before the rules committee, and you don’t get the one-person demand, “This is the way things need to go.” I think you need to decide those things for yourself.

Rod Drexler:
Everybody’s marriage is a little bit different. The way that they do things you may not even know about, because we’ll go back to the previous broadcast, that you thought you saw everything in the middle. Okay? Your marriage was right there in the middle, and you think that everybody does this, this particular way. And it may not be that way, but it’s the way that things have developed for you, and then through these different classes and everything, you can learn how to make adjustments through reading the Bible and seeing how God’s word works in your life. You can make the adjustments to whatever you need to make, but your system is still your system.

Jefferson Drexler:
First of all, you’re saying that every marriage is a system.

Rod Drexler:
Right.

Jefferson Drexler:
Basically, when I hear system, I’m hearing zeros and ones, almost like a computer program. This is the way an organization works. You compared it to Major League Baseball.

Rod Drexler:
Sure.

Jefferson Drexler:
Then you say that if there’s things that need to be tweaked, we have to come together in a rules committee. I mean, dad, you’re really taking every ounce of romance out of marriage here.

Rod Drexler:
Well, I’m not a real romantic person. You’re right. But on the other hand, what happens is I deal with people that have a brokeness in their marriage, and then the wife may say, “Hey, they don’t do this in their marriage.” And you say, “Well, wait a minute. They don’t do a hundred other things in their marriage either, but we can’t just evaluate one thing and change our whole system because of this one thing that you saw.” Sometimes what happens is, again, I always believe that we need to be working on things and making adjustments. This is really, really an important thing, because I believe all of life is a journey. God is taking us on a journey, from the day that we recognize our importance with Him and our need to have Him into our life, to the day that we die, and even beyond that.

Rod Drexler:
But what happens is that this journey, whether we’re doing it on our own, or we’re doing it with our spouse, or we’re doing it with an entire family, we developed our own system, the things that we think are important. And now we need to make those types of adjustments from time to time, and we have to understand that because I view something is now wrong, it doesn’t mean that I can instantly change it. It means that we need to talk about it. Why is it wrong, and how can we adjust it? But we’ve got to know that we made parts in that system and how it was developed. It didn’t develop on its own.

Jefferson Drexler:
Let’s look at a couple examples. I know one couple, they were married relatively young. They were 20 when they got married. 19 when they got engaged and 20, when they got married. Both of them went straight from living with their parents to then … They didn’t have bachelor or bachelorette pads. They went from living with their parents to then living as a married couple. They discovered about six years into their marriage that anytime there was any stress in their married life, that the husband always ran to his mom and had dinner with his mom and kind of, for lack of a better phrase, sought shelter from his mother. And her mother was always coming in and, from his point of view, interfering. But both moms had very prominent roles in their married life, on a day-to-day basis.

Rod Drexler:
That sounds like TNT to me. It’s something that’s going to explode on you.

Jefferson Drexler:
I was able to look at them and say, “Well, let’s look at this system that you’ve got here,” that they didn’t even realize existed until six years later. But it was definitely a system. It was a modus operandi of how they were going to go about, especially when stress came into their marriage. And it’s one that started even before they got married, but it was a system that continued to run through their married life.

Jefferson Drexler:
And then, look at, say, you and mom. You guys had nearly the opposite. You got married young, but you didn’t have moms or other parents, so you were just kind of winging it and doing as best you can for those first several years. But it was definitely a system that you guys had created, that you’re doing your best, but you had no real guide. You guys always told us all the time, “Hey, look, we’re doing the best that we can. Nobody ever told us how to do this, so we’re just kind of doing the best that we can.”

Rod Drexler:
Oh, sure, yeah. When you were young and you were getting into sports, one sport that you wanted to play was soccer, and I didn’t know anything about soccer. I didn’t even know how many players were on the field at one time. I just didn’t know.

Jefferson Drexler:
At that age, it didn’t matter. It’s just one big huddle of kids running around.

Rod Drexler:
Well, probably, that would be true. But what happened is that I didn’t know how to coach a team like that, because I just didn’t know enough about the sport. I was able to read a rule book, and I was able to become a referee, and I refereed soccer for 16 years. But what happened with that is that there was a rule book, and there was a plan, and the funny thing about soccer is if I said to you, “How long is a soccer field?” You would say, “Probably a hundred yards, like a football field.”

Jefferson Drexler:
Biggish.

Rod Drexler:
Yeah. Biggish. Okay. Actually, there is no direct size of a soccer field. They’re different sizes. And so what happens with it is that when you have a rule book or something like that, you have something to follow and that would create a system for you, because you would have something to go by.

Rod Drexler:
But marriage, there is nothing like that. You get married, you take information from your parents and your family life, and she takes information from her family and all, and you combine that. You could say, “Well, we want to keep these in. We don’t want this stuff in,” and you can come up with your own. You may not do that. Maybe some things just start to just develop on their own, which could be either good or bad, but it’s still your own system.

Rod Drexler:
When I talk with people that are in trouble with their system, oftentimes I’ll say, “Okay, you can’t just instantly change this, because this is a system that you made.” We can work towards changing it, but it can’t be just flipped over and say, “I want to change it.” If you do, that’s similar to what you think may happen in a divorce. “I’m going to get a divorce because my system is not working.” And then what happens is you find out that you created that system, so the new place that you go to, you’re going to create something over there, and it’s probably going to be the same thing.

Jefferson Drexler:
And as in any system, you referred to this earlier, that there needs to be a committee. Which, it means a meeting of two people. A meeting of preferably the husband and the wife.

Rod Drexler:
Also, they have to be in like mind when they’re meeting. If one’s angry and the other one’s not, then that rules committee meeting doesn’t go to well.

Jefferson Drexler:
Right. And that’s what I was getting at is you talk about a committee, a committee is not an argument. It’s an actual civil meeting around a table, or together somewhere where emotions aren’t at their peak. So, how does that work? I mean, I think it’s easy when you’re not involved to say, “We need to have a rules committee.” But when you’re involved in something and emotions do run thin, how do you gather that rules committee and make it an effective meeting?

Rod Drexler:
Well, I know a guy that’s pretty controlling. He’s been in marriage counseling for 20 years, and they haven’t figured it out, because he’s real controlling, and he doesn’t know that he’s that controlling in the situation. He just thinks that somebody has got to be in charge. So that’s their system. But their marriage struggles because of it.

Rod Drexler:
It is hard for people to get on the same ground and to learn. Sometimes there’s classes for that. A lot of churches have marriage retreats and things like this. And you can gain really great things from these things. You go away, sometimes on a weekend with a lot of those, and you’ll have so much time in the class that you’ll learn things, and then you go back to your room and you discuss them.

Rod Drexler:
I’ve been to a number of these things, and I say to people, “What do you do when you go back to the room? Do you watch TV, or did you actually discuss them? What do you do?” The plan is you actually go back and you talk about what you learned. Again, my theory is that we’re going to take what we think we heard, and we’re going to apply it to the system that we have, and we want to only do part of it, the parts that were important to us.

Rod Drexler:
And so that’s where I’m talking about people will make their own type of agenda or system like that. If I were to write a book on marriage, and there’s so many of these out there, nobody really does it that exact way, because they have their own thing that they’ve developed.

Jefferson Drexler:
You nailed it on the head there, dad, when you said that when you learn something about how to fix your marriage system, you need to go together and say, “We need to figure out what we learned and how we can apply it.” It’s not, “Hey, what did I learn?” and, “This is the way I’m going to apply this, and this is the way I’m going to fix you,” or “I’m going to fix our marriage,” or “This is what you better learn.” You said a lot of “we’s”.

Rod Drexler:
Yeah, I know. This is sometimes very hard, because sometimes you’ve got a dominant person in a marriage and you’ve got a submissive person. And so the submissive person wants to give their information. They just don’t know how to get it across. And so sometimes that’s where you need a counselor or a third party that can help you to weed through those things.

Jefferson Drexler:
Arbitrator?

Rod Drexler:
You can call them all kinds of different things. Because, sometimes you do need, back to that thing, we need help. We need to see where we need that help. We need somebody in our lives, an accountability partner, that will help us to be able to see things that we can’t see ourselves.

Rod Drexler:
But in a marriage situation, I think that communication, they say, is the number one thing. And the number one thing is that communication is whatever I say. No, it’s whatever we are going to work on this thing together, and we’re going to come up with the things that are important to us.

Rod Drexler:
I also believe it’s going to be changing. It will always change over the years as you add things, as you add children, as you subtract children, because they’ve grown up and moved on, and you’re able to do different things in your life. The system will change. It will always be changing.

Rod Drexler:
Sometimes it’s funny for a couple that have been married 30 or 40 years, they look back at some of the things that they did in the very beginning, and they’d say, “It’s really funny that those things occurred.” I’ve heard so many funny stories. It’s hilarious to talk with people that when they first got married, that what they thought was going to happen in 20 or 30 years, 40 years later, that where they are.

Rod Drexler:
But it is a system, and that’s the only way I can come up with it. I’ve got to say that everybody’s system is slightly different, so don’t expect yours to be exactly like mine.

Jefferson Drexler:
Dad, thank you so much. As you’re listening to this, if you like what you hear, go to our website and leave a comment. It’s at realstuffmydadsays.com, or you can check us out on the E Squared Podcast Network, that’s at E2network.net. Leave a comment there and check out all the other podcasts that are there, as well.

Jefferson Drexler:
If you’re married, take a good hard look at your own system and then realize that you’re probably going to need to have a committee meeting sometime soon, because everybody needs to check and recheck and tweak and redevelop your own system as the years go by. Dad, thank you again so much for shedding some light on this.

Jefferson Drexler:
Thank you again for listening. We really appreciate it, and we really appreciate the feedback that you’re giving us. Like my kids always say, “I’m just trying to help.” And so ’til next week, we’ll see you then.