The Power of Friendship in Building a Marriage

What makes a marriage thrive for over two decades? How do you stay committed to a common goal while maintaining your individuality? Join us, Eugene and Latanya Gatewood, in the second episode of the We3 Winning Team Podcast, as we reflect on our 21-year journey of partnership. We candidly share our wins, missteps, and the lessons we've gleaned from our shared life. Far from experts, we are simply a couple who have navigated the waters of marriage, with a desire to stir meaningful discussions on setting the right expectations and making informed decisions about this life-long commitment.

Dive into our conversation, where we discuss the concept of submission in marriage, and how our expectations have evolved across the score years we've shared. We delve into the importance of having a common goal in a marriage and how our individual tasks, although different, work together to complement each other. We also dissect the importance of building a friendship before entering a marriage, and how this solid foundation can be the bedrock of a successful union. This episode isn't just for those who are married, but also for those considering marriage or aspiring to marry someday. Whether you are single, engaged, or a veteran in the marriage game, we hope our reflections can serve as valuable insights for you on your journey. [END SHOW NOTES]

Chapters

• 0:30 Marriage Reflections and Podcast Launch
• 14:08 The Importance of a Common Goal
• 18:45 Reflections on Marriage and Self-Discovery

Transcript

Eugene Gatewood: 0:30

Welcome to the We3 Winning Team Podcast. My name is Eugene Gatewood.

LaTanya Gatewood: 0:36

And I'm Latanya Gatewood.

Eugene Gatewood: 0:37

And we cannot believe that we just crossed 21 years of marriage.

LaTanya Gatewood: 0:43

I kept you around. I know, can we even do that? I can't believe it.

Eugene Gatewood: 0:46

I mean honestly, for me it's like, when I think about it, 21 years, like 21 years ago. It's not that I didn't expect us to last this long, but it's like it's gone by, Honestly so super fast, and so it's just really exciting.

Eugene Gatewood: 1:04

But anyway, we're excited about officially launching our podcast. This is episode two of our podcast and, as we've said in the last one, this is not about us being the experts in marriage. This is really about us not telling you what to think, but just giving you some things to think about. We just simply reflecting on who we are and what we've done and hopefully you can learn from some of the mistakes that we've made and even some of the wins that we've made as the winning team. So I know that this is a podcast for marriage, but we believe that this is podcast for everyone.

LaTanya Gatewood: 1:43

So, no matter where you are on your marriage journey, this is for everyone. So, if you want to be married, if you want to stay married, if you newly married, all of the above this is for you. So we hope, as Eugene said, that we can share some things to make you think, share some opportunities to be able to learn or look at marriage even differently, because we are lovers of marriage, we believe in marriage, we believe we are cheerleaders for that. So whenever we hear from young people or older people who are deciding to get married, we are excited about that, because I think society and the world tells you something different about marriage. But how we feel about it is that it's important, it's value from a Christian perspective, it adds to the kingdom, it's what God has ordained, and so we just get excited about it. And so we are thankful that we get this opportunity to share with you and our views on and not necessarily our views, but just how we see marriage and what's important to us.

Eugene Gatewood: 2:59

And one more thing I'll add is that I know we talked about this is the winning team, the W3 Winning Team podcast, but Ashley was saying about all the people aspiring married, but especially those who are single or even considering marriage. We love to sit with, we love to spend time with young adults, and so I think the right time in order to have a successful marriage is to pick them right.

Eugene Gatewood: 3:25

And so it's before you even say amen, I pick right too. So it's before you say I do, and so I think that it's important for us to have the conversation before you say you do and we're going to get into that as well but setting the right expectations. So, even if you're not married but you're an individual thinking about marriage, we think this podcast is for you too. So, 21 years, so it's been 21 years, and so again, as we just crossed this, this, and when you think about the number of people who have, when you think about the number of people who or I should say the statistics of marriage most people don't last this long. So I'm gonna throw a question at you, so think about maybe you can ask about when we first got married, or think about even from this perspective like, what do you think it was that's helped us to stay married for 21 years?

LaTanya Gatewood: 4:31

Yeah, I think initially.

LaTanya Gatewood: 4:34

I think, when I think back to my perspective of marriage prior to even though we did marriage counseling, we did even I think we may have talked to you a little earlier about how we had a whole what we call family life series at our old church, which I just believe was God ordained, because neither one of us we are both from single parent households.

LaTanya Gatewood: 5:02

My parents were married but divorced early, and so neither one of us really grew up in within a married family, in a nuclear family, as you see sometimes in tradition, in a traditional family, and so I think my personal concept of marriage, I think initially, was that I do I don't wanna say do everything that he says, but it's all. He's my husband, so he's the head of the house and so that means he gets to, he makes all the decisions he, from what we eat to how to pay bills in the house. And very quickly I believed in our marriage. I learned that that just wasn't going to work and that wasn't fair to him, and so I think I changed that, my perspective shifted over the years to this concept of teen and really being able to say that he should not carry the heavy and the weight of the family and the family decisions and what goes on, and even things as simple as well where are we gonna go out to eat? And I be like I don't know, I don't care, whatever you like.

Eugene Gatewood: 6:21

And it's like now he has to make all the dinner decisions, like no, so but even thinking about that, like, what do you think caused you to have that perspective of marriage, given that you were saying that you grew up in a household, that where you didn't see it? But where did you get that thought from? Because I know quickly, it very quickly has shifted. Because that wasn't even what I expected from you. So it's not as if it was something that I was projecting or requiring. That was just an expectation of a wife that you decided to carry. But what do you think you got that from?

LaTanya Gatewood: 6:57

Yeah, I mean, I think that's a good question and I'm you know I could blame television.

LaTanya Gatewood: 7:03

You know I could, and blame is probably not the best word, but you know the imagery that I've probably seen on television, maybe I don't, I don't really know. I just think it was well, this is what is supposed to happen in marriage. And again, even being in our that family life series, that wasn't necessarily said to me, but I think you know, when you think of, even from the Christian perspective and I'm gonna say the S word, that submission word, I think that for me in my mind it was you do everything, I submit to what has what you say, you know, and that's not what you ever thought of but or said to me. But I think again, just like that just didn't, that doesn't work, that didn't work for our family, that didn't work. And I think for me, I realized that that's not who you married. You know, you married Latanya, the individual Latanya, and it was important for me to bring that to the table and not this version of a wife that you didn't even really want.

Eugene Gatewood: 8:18

I think that that's actually a very key point, cause we often talk about, you know, this winning team and everybody. We said this in the last episode that there's no I in team, but there are individuals. And I think you just said a very key point is that when we got married, I married, I love, fell in love with Latanya and then when you became a wife, it was almost as if you were like, okay, I'm no longer Latanya, I'm now a wife. It's like no, you are not the roles that you occupy, you're still Latanya Gatewood, or you were Latanya Reading and now you become Latanya Gatewood, but and that's who I was, that's who I had grown to love. So it's expect it was. My expectation is that you would continue to do that, and so so for me when I think about you know, my I don't know 21 years ago, in my perspective or concept of marriage, the same, I didn't have a, a married couple that I grew up into the same household with. I did have an aunt that was married, but other than that, not many other people around me were married. Even in my neighborhood where I grew up, it was a bunch of single parent families all around me, all of my friends who were my closest friends. They were all single parent households, and so that's just what I had always seen.

Eugene Gatewood: 9:38

And so the family life series that you are referring to that we both went to at church when we first got engaged.

Eugene Gatewood: 9:47

It was eye-opening to me because one of his first questions he talked to the series was talking about the expectations of a husband and the expectations of a wife, and I think what that did is it caused us to have some very deep conversations in regards to what do you expect from a husband and what do I expect from a wife.

Eugene Gatewood: 10:04

But I think also in that it helped me to say what do I expect from me as a husband, and so it caused me to even get to formulate how I would lead and act to be the priest, provider and protector of my household, and I learned that from that, or I should say it caused me to think about that in that series. And so I think that that was one of the first times I started to say wait a minute, because you said that you were looking at it from a perspective of submitting to me, but if we're going from a biblical perspective, it says submit one to another, and the funny thing is I remember him in the the first questions, one of the first questions Pastor Jennings asked. He said wives, would you be willing to wake up at two o'clock in the morning to cook your husband breakfast, and almost all of them in moan like nah, I ain't getting up at no two o'clock in the morning if he asks that.

Eugene Gatewood: 11:05

And so then he went on to teach for six weeks about the expect or the expectations of a husband. And then later, the six weeks later, he then said, I remember when I asked y'all if y'all were willing to get up, and he said, you know, for the husband, he's supposed to love his wife as Christ loved the church and Christ was willing to die for his bride. So if Christ was willing to die for his bride, meaning the husband is willing to die for his wife then is it reasonable for you to just get up at two o'clock in the morning and cook him something to eat?

Eugene Gatewood: 11:37

Yeah, yeah, so I'm still a work in progress and I still ain't got my two o'clock in the morning breakfast.

LaTanya Gatewood: 11:43

I'm still a work in progress. Yes, I am. Yes, I am because I like sleep.

Eugene Gatewood: 11:49

I do, but again, the thing is is that it was never an expectation for me for you to get up at two o'clock in the morning, because I know that you do like sleep, and so I think that you know, when we think about this, this, we three winning team.

Eugene Gatewood: 12:03

I think that the thing for me, over 21 years, when I think about the concept of marriage is I believe that we have evolved as individuals, but as we've evolved as individuals, we've stayed connected because we've partnered in this thing called life to make sure that we compensated and evolved with one another so that we can stay a team. And so there was one definition that we looked at when we were talking about what is a team, and so a team is defined as a group of people or a group of people who perform independent tasks to work toward and accomplish a common mission for specific objectives. And so when we really break down the team I'll start with you what is that way? When you put that definition of team in a concept in the context of a marriage? Because I believe that most marriages fail because they don't look at them as a look at their marriage as a team. And so when you think about winning team. What do you think has made us a winning team over the last 21 years?

LaTanya Gatewood: 13:14

Yeah, I think, as it relates to that particular definition, it's the common goal, part of it for me that I think becomes pretty vital in a marriage. Like you're not gonna always agree, like just human nature won't you know? That's just how we're designed, so we're not gonna always agree, but at the end of the day, what's the common goal? You know, what are we working towards in this family, in this household, and then figuring out what that looks like. You know, we've watched a lot of basketball thanks to our amazing and wonderful son. We have spent a lot of time on the basketball court and I think, even as we were evolving the winning team, a lot of the analogies that we saw on the court and things weren't working well. What impacted the team when they were not winning? When someone wanted to be solely on their own agenda and not look at the greater good for the goal of what was to be accomplished, which was to win that game, then that impacted the team. And so I think that's the same.

Eugene Gatewood: 14:28

that common goal, as simple as that sounds, is so vital to the marriage team, in my opinion, for me, no, I agree, and I think that's what honestly has always helped us is that we've been able to reflect about the common goal and, as opposed to us trying to be right, I think what we've done is we've said, all right, what's the common goal, what's the mission? If it was to get out of debt, if it was to buy a house, if it was to raise our son, you know, those are the things that we looked at and we said, all right, if the goal is this thing, anything that we're doing that's contrary to that. Then we were able to self-regulate and check ourselves and say, all right, that's against what we were trying to do. Now, of course, that don't mean that we always agreed. Sometimes there will have to be conversations.

Eugene Gatewood: 15:19

But even and especially, I can't wait till we talk about the team aspect of raising our kids, because what I love in this part it says the individual task, a group of people or, in our case, two people who perform independent tasks. Those independent tasks may not always be the same, but they may compliment one another, because there are sometimes where you gotta play good cop, bad cop. There are sometimes where one person has to give 100% when the other person has to rest and so I think that you know, just like you said in the basketball court, you know you do have positions and roles that people play, but just because I'm the point guard don't mean I don't get rebounds. So I'm sorry y'all for all of the sports references, but they're gonna come and they're gonna keep coming.

Eugene Gatewood: 16:01

We're gonna talk about them a lot.

LaTanya Gatewood: 16:03

Or football.

Eugene Gatewood: 16:04

Yes, but I agree with you is that the common task is what kept us centered, to say, hey, what are we focusing on as a team during this season? And if there was something that and we didn't always agree initially, and so sometimes you had to have a conversation, you had to have a huddle, to say, all right, let's get into this huddle and have a conversation about what the common task are. So I love the fact that we started off with that definition. So we're gonna break that definition down a little bit more because, again, I think that one of the primary things that, as we're thinking about the winning team, it's funny how, in the context of the world, the team process and aspect makes sense. So, for example, if you're on a team and if you're watching a sport and you're watching any sport and you see two team members fighting each other, most people would go that's crazy, like you're on the same team, why are you fighting one another? But why don't we take that same strategy or that same concept and apply it into the house to say that's crazy, why are we fighting? We're on the same team, and so I think that that's the thing that we have to figure out and that's why I love the phases of a team and we won't get into them this episode. We'll get into them on the next episode. But when you know and it's very common, we talk about them all the time If you're in corporate America, you've been in business, you've worked anywhere, you've heard the concepts, the four concepts or phases, of forming, storming, norming and performing.

Eugene Gatewood: 17:37

The same thing is true even in a relationship, and sometimes, if we don't take our time to figure out, how do we form this team and that's how you pick them. We talked about that early. How do you form this team? And I'll just give one example. If you're the star basketball player and you're trying to form a team with another person, and even though you see a person that's a star football player, if you don't have a common goal and you know one person is trying to do a slam dunk, the other person is trying to score a touchdown, although they may be number one in their individual sport, is that the right person to put on your team? You may have to look. You might be a good shooter. You may need to find someone who's a good dribbler or a good rebounder. Just because they're number one in their respective areas Don't mean that that's the right person that you're supposed to form a team with, and so I think that we have to really identify. It's appealing, they look good, they're attractive, but are they the right person for you? And that's something that I know.

Eugene Gatewood: 18:45

When I met Latayan, that was a conversation that I had to have with myself because I started thinking about and maybe I was way too young and going way too deep, but it was like look, how is she going to be as a friend? First of all, who is she as a person? And then, if she's going to be a good friend, it's like all right, maybe I can try this girlfriend thing, and if she's a good girlfriend, then maybe she has the potential to be a good wife. And if she's a good wife, what could she be a good mother? And if she's a good mother, can she be a good partner? And maybe those are a little bit flipped, but again, sometimes we skip from the friend straight to the wife.

Eugene Gatewood: 19:21

And you can't trust a big button to smile. So, again, we're going to spend some time going over those phases of a team. But right now I know that you always have some rapid fire questions for every episode, so we're going to jump into these rapid fire questions before we dive into the, before we sign off and go on to the next episode.

LaTanya Gatewood: 19:41

So I really only have like two today.

Eugene Gatewood: 19:44

Are they rapid fire? They always going to take me a long time to answer.

LaTanya Gatewood: 19:47

Um, don't take a long time to answer. I'm just going to say that. So you need to answer, but don't take a long time. Okay, okay, all right. So question number one why marriage for you?

Eugene Gatewood: 20:00

Why marriage for me? You know, honestly, I can't even say that I've ever I was a person who dreamed about being married one day. I think that you and I were in a relationship, and there's a difference of somebody being with you and for you, and so what I realized is that I had been with several people, but being in the course of being with people, I don't know if they were necessarily for me, because they were doing things that I would call were selfish, and so what I realized with you was that you were a person that was not just with me, but you were for me. And once I realized that I was like wait a minute, this might be a young lady that I may wanna keep around for a very long time.

Eugene Gatewood: 20:52

The other thing was that how I initially realized, even before I got to the width and the four, you were just a good person. You were just a cool person that I didn't mind being around often, and so for me it wasn't just about love, because, please hear me, love is not enough and what I realized is that you were just a good friend, you were a good person. So then, once I realized, not only are you a good person to be around. Then I realized, dang, you were for me. Then that made me say, okay, that can equal to a couple of feathers, and so we can keep you around for a little while you like that couple of feathers.

Eugene Gatewood: 21:26

You know, yeah, throw it in. Okay, that's good, my girl Layla.

LaTanya Gatewood: 21:29

That's good, that's not.

Eugene Gatewood: 21:30

Layla, who was that? Chrisette Michelle, chrisette, michelle. Okay, my bad, that's right.

LaTanya Gatewood: 21:33

Okay, all right, but yeah, that's good, I would say for me. Why marriage for me? Again, I agree, we were friends and I enjoyed spending time with you Like I wanted to, and you challenged me because, I will admit, I am a spoiled brat.

Eugene Gatewood: 21:54

Lord have mercy.

LaTanya Gatewood: 21:56

And he knew that getting into this, so you know what you got. But you challenged that wasn't scary for you, but then that you challenged me to be a better person, like you, challenged me to try some things and not be so dependent on my family or my mother and just like who was with Latanya? What do you want? What are the things that are important to you? And so you definitely pushed me out of some comfort and was like I don't care that you're pouting about something. So I was like, oh, I'm gonna have to keep him around for a minute.

LaTanya Gatewood: 22:30

And if I didn't keep him around, I think my family would have divorced me because, yes, linda, I'm talking to you, she loves him, my uncle's, my aunt, everybody. So I think they would have divorced me if I had not kept him around. But again, it was that, knowing that we could grow together. So I wanted to do that. I wanted to be a part of that, I wanted to be part of my world.

LaTanya Gatewood: 22:55

That's great, okay, wait, I got one more question. Oh man, okay, one more question. So what have you learned about you over the last 20 years?

Eugene Gatewood: 23:04

What have I learned about me?

Eugene Gatewood: 23:09

So, what I've learned about me, honestly, I learned this a lot during that COVID season, because I think life slowed down enough where I was able to just spend some time reflecting, and what I realized is that I was a repressor of my feelings and so over the course of time with me and I didn't realize how it impacted the marriage until COVID.

Eugene Gatewood: 23:35

So again, I'm telling y'all this is, you know, we 20, almost 18 years into our marriage and I'm still realizing things about me, and so what I realized is not only that I repress my feelings, but I also realized that I do have feelings, and so sometimes how that manifests itself in the marriage is that I would just not talk about it and I would just hold it in, and sometimes I would even withdraw from a situation and I would chalk it up. I would chalk it up as one of my only child moments, but really I was in my head thinking about whatever it was, but y'all, when I started realizing this and I started talking about it, then she wanted me to throw all of my stuff back on the inside, because it was a lot that came pouring out.

Eugene Gatewood: 24:22

And what's crazy is that it was like I don't know, it was like stuff was being unlocked and I just realized and I would recount stories and things that have happened to me throughout my entire life and it was great for me to just to be able to pour it out. But now, when things happen, when I feel some kind of way about something, I can easily just vocalize it, and so over the years I just appreciated the fact that I have someone who didn't weaponize the feelings that I had, but was there to listen and to be patient. And I didn't expect her to fix it, I expected her to listen, but she did offer comfort where you did offer comfort and you did offer a safe place for me to be authentically who I was, even in the course of that discovery process.

LaTanya Gatewood: 25:12

So I appreciate that that's good. Okay, oh, you're welcome baby.

Eugene Gatewood: 25:17

All right, cool. So again, as we said, we thank y'all for sticking around. We know this episode was a little bit longer than normal, but we expect y'all to stick around. But before we go, as we tell you at the top of every time, we're not trying to tell you what to think, we just want to give you all something to think about. So if you're in your marriage and you're processing and trying to figure out, you know who you are as an individual.

Eugene Gatewood: 25:39

Here's a question that I want you to ask your partner. Y'all perhaps have a little conversation. So the question today is what do you think is the hardest part about being your partner or being their partner? So just what do you think is the hardest part about you being their partner? So just think about it and then y'all have a conversation and throw it down in the chat. We would love to hear from y'all, please. And so, again, we appreciate y'all hanging out with us today on the We3 winning team podcast. Please click, subscribe, share, send it to a friend and we'll see y'all again next month. Peace.