Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd Lincoln

Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln may have had a difficult marriage. It's said that they couldn't communicate well. When something went wrong Mary would scream and throw things. Abe would just withdraw and walk away. I wanted to find out more about this marriage. I learned that they had trouble with food too.

Mary had been raised on fancy expensive delicacies. Abe on the other hand had been raised on very he plain inexpensive food. Abe wanted cornbread, mush, bacon, eggs and milk. Honey was a delicacy for him. When Mary set out food such as "Aspic of Tongue, Pate de Foie Gras, Turkey stuffed with Truffles, and all sorts of wild game, such as venison, pheasant, or canvasback duck" Abe would probably just pick at his food. Learn more about what went wrong. The food disagreements were probably a side-effect of bad communication and lack of compromise in their marriage.


Ryan and I had our very first disagreement as newlyweds about food. One of us wanted canned corn, while the other wanted frozen corn. That disagreement was solved long ago when I developed an allergy to a preservative in canned food. Today we eat corn-on-the-cob or frozen corn.

In our kitchen now there are onions which I bought just to make Ryan happy. There is fresh broccoli Ryan bought to make my favorite dish, Beef with Broccoli. And I just hastily cooked up the last of the potatoes, because we always disagree on how to store and wash them. So, I guess our food represents our marriage. Mostly we try to please each other, but we definitely have our disagreements.

So, does the food in your house represent compromises, tolerance or problems between husband and wife?


Information about the food of Abraham and Mary was taken from The Food Timeline . Also from ---The Presidents' Cookbook, Poppy Cannon and Patricia Brooks [Funk & Wagnall's:New York] 1968 (p. 236-7).

Tiny Thoughts

 "Marriage is a gift from God to us, the quality of our marriage is our gift to God." Elder Clayton

Is it worth saving?

We go to incredible lengths to save a life in danger. The world might be a very different place if we worked as hard whenever a couple's life together was in danger.

New News

My friends Ashley and Craig share one of their tips for staying happily married in Ashley's words:

"The first couple months of our marriage my husband would ask me if he was still "new news". I realized this was important to him to feel special and loved and I began to make more of an effort to treat him like I did when we were newly engaged. I did this by greeting him when he got home with a hug, kiss, and big smile! By listening attentively to his interests (even when they are technology related and way over my head). Also, I treat him like new news by still kissing him a lot. Craig treats me like new news by bringing me home a treat he got at the store or at work, contacting me during the day to see how I am doing, and letting me plan our weekends. Treating each other like new news has helped us to stay in love and honestly we fall more and more in love all the time."

One Dozen Years Married Together

Today we happily celebrate 12 years married together. We never regretted our decision to get married together. By getting married together in the Latter-day Saint temple, we invited God to help us in our marriage. I recently taught this concept in simple terms to children. I asked them, "who knows you better than you know yourself?" The answer, "God". Then I asked, "Who will know your future spouse better than anybody else?". The answer was again, "God". Then, I asked, "So, if you fall in love with somebody and want to get married and stay married, then,  wouldn't it make sense to invite God to help you in your marriage?". They understood this idea. Then, I mentioned that anybody can ask for help in their relationships with anybody and especially in their marriage. However, if you are married in the temple, then, God promises to help at all times. So, if you love somebody enough to live together, or enough to get married, then why not do it the way God intended, so He can best help you stay married happily. Also, this is the way to be married forever, even after death.

I can think of a time in our marriage, when I wasn't happy with Ryan. I prayed to figure out what to do. I had the prompting from the words of a song sung at church, "In the quiet heart is hidden, sorrow that the eye can't see". Then, I realized he must be hurting for some reason, so I approached him much more kindly than I would have. I couldn't have really known about his hurt, without God's help, because Ryan probably was only vaguely aware of it himself. So, I'm grateful to an all-knowing God for teaching me that lesson.

Mother's Day Marriage Musings

On Mother's Day I compared notes with a friend of mine about our mother's day experience. Her husband had bought some presents and was getting ready to cook dinner for her. I thought that sounded like a nice mother's day.
Then, I happened to chat with this friend's husband a few minutes later. He was feeling horrible, because he had forgotten to fix breakfast for his wife. She had had to make it. He was nervous about making dinner, wondering if he'd give anybody food poisoning. I laughed at that part. He was totally focused on helping his wife have a good day, even though it hadn't started great.

This couple has been married close to 30 years. So, I thought maybe I could learn something from them. They'd had the same experience, but they looked at it differently. The husband was recognizing his mistake with breakfast and trying to reconcile by making the rest of the day better. The wife had chosen to look at the positive side of the day, by focusing on what could happen, instead of what did not happen. The husband had bought the presents ahead of time and was willing to tackle the dinner that he really did not feel confident about, just because he thought his wife would like it. I hope their special day ended well.

It seems to me that if we look for the positive things our spouse is doing and sacrifice our comfort zone to help our spouse, then hopefully our marriage can last 30 years and still be strong.

Money, Money, Money - Family economics

We've talked a lot about the impact of healthy marriages on people, but they also have a huge impact on the economy and economic well-being of families. We recently encountered a study that details just how big an impact, and for how long the connection has been known. It's super-long, super-detailed, and cites several dozen earlier studies. We've pulled some highlights for the impatient:

• Multiple studies show that married men have 20-30% higher income than their single peers, with the effect strongest for low-income and at-risk demographics.
• A stay-at-home mom has such a strong economic impact on the family that she would have to earn $120,000/year or more to break even working full time outside the home.
• Married couples file less than half of all income-tax returns, [but] they pay nearly three-quarters of all income taxes paid by the American people.
• It can be argued that the continuing housing market downturn is at least partly due to the fact that single parents (an increasing fraction of all parents) are drastically less likely to qualify for a mortgage, driving real estate demand downward.
• Two-thirds of children born out of wedlock live in poverty at any given time, compared with only 12% of those born to married couples. A child born and raised out of wedlock can expect to spend at least 50% of childhood living below poverty level vs. only 7% for a child of married parents.
• the English term economy originates from the Greek word, oikos, which means household
• Adam Smith and Alexis de Tocqueville both wrote that the strength of the American economy (vs. that of Britain) was partly due to the colonists marrying younger and having more children than their British counterparts