The single most important thing that you need in your marriage
Your spouse just did that thing that makes you so mad… again! It’s the 20th time you’ve talked to them about it! How hard is it! What if it’s always like this? You are either steaming mad or coldly hopeless.
I’m going to tell you how to totally fix this situation.
I know you’re skeptical, as you probably should be, but I am dead serious that if you can do this, it will completely transform your marriage for the rest of your life. And the best part is, it’s not complicated. It is hard, but it’s not complicated.
What am I talking about? The single most important thing that you need to take the above situation from a spiraling conflict, to a chance for joy together is this: Love.
I can hear the high-pitch sarcastic voice in your head right now: Psst… love… riiight. Give me a minute, and I’ll prove it to you because I have seen love transform SO MANY of these exact kinds of situations in my marriage and in the marriages that I work with.
But before we dive in, I want to give you a gift. One problem that I see a lot with couples is that they want to love each other, but don’t know how to communicate in a way that their spouse doesn’t feel attacked. I want to help you with that, so I want to give you my free training: Communicate Better, Be Happy Together. How Faith in Jesus helps you overcome the 7 most common obstacles to communication. In that training, I cover the most important tool for communication – so that you can actually say what your feeling, and your spouse will be open to it – I give you the most important goal of communication – so that you don’t get lost in circular arguments- but I also cover the 7 most common obstacles to using these tools, and how Jesus helps you overcome those obstacles so that you can understand your spouse, your spouse can understand you, and you can love each other and be happy together. Go to my website, nickperrine.com and get that free training.
How does Love solve recurring marriage arguments?
So how does Love solve these recurring arguments that you have in your marriage? Let’s look at 1 Cor 13 1-4 (ESV):
13 If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. 3 If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned,[a] but have not love, I gain nothing.
Just one point that I want you to notice from this passage: without love, you are meaningless noise, none of your talents matter, none of your accomplishments matter. Without love, whatever you are and whatever you do IS NOTHING.
You’re thinking: “OH… that does help with our conflicts!! Life and marriage is NOTHING! So I should just succumb to hopelessness, give up, and go cry in my bed!” Please… sit back down, maybe take some vitamin D pills and let me explain.
Conflict is all about what we love. If we are mad that we come home and the house is a mess, our love of cleanliness is being offended. We pick a fight with, or make snarky digs toward our spouse because our love for cleanliness feels, in this moment, more tangibly important than our love for our spouse.
When my wife and I were first married, we fought about sex all the time. I kept fighting for what I thought sex should be because I cared more about attaining my ideal sex life than I did my wife. When I chose to love my wife instead of my ideal sex life a few things happened: 1) We fought a lot less often because I wasn’t acting like a one of those dogs that tries to hump you all the time. 2) We could actually talk about sex because I was able to communicate that I loved her more than sex, and I really meant it. 3) We had better sex because I wasn’t making it all about me.
I get that I am speaking in very black and white terms, and there is some gray in here. I think, in most cases, the gray just serves to muddle the issue. The issue is, I could choose to love my spouse more than what I want, or love what I want more than my spouse. I had to let go of the idea of having it both ways, so the black and white choice helped me clarify my options.
And the decision was obvious. If I have the sex life I want, but have not love, I gain nothing, I am nothing.
I’m not saying this is easy, but it’s not complicated. Once you choose to love your spouse over your desires, you can probably come up with a dozen different things that you can do the next time that same old conflict starts that would steer the conflict away from tearing down and toward building up.
Here’s how it looks for me: If I’m feeling offended at something, I take a breath, relax my body and picture a scale. On the one side of they scale is what I’m offended about. On the other side is my bride: the mother of my children, the woman who said yes to me, who I promised to love. The scale gets very tilt-y very quickly.
Is the offense gone? No. It just doesn’t matter as much, or better, it doesn’t matter nearly as much as my wife does.
Here’s the gospel for when you are getting focused on an offense instead of on loving your spouse: You are Jesus’ spouse, and you have been super offensive to him. You not only let him down, but blatantly ignored and rejected his desires (and his desires are always perfectly good, yours are at best, partially good). BUT HE CHOSE TO LOVE YOU AND DIE FOR YOU ANYWAY. If Jesus’ love can cover over your offense, your love can cover over your spouses offense.
I have two questions, and I’d love to hear from you in the comments: 1) why is it hard for you to love your spouse when you’re feeling offended? 2) What other questions about marriage, conflict, or loving each other do you have? I’d love to help, so let me know.
And before I go, if you have found this helpful, you are going to love my free training, Communicate Better, Be Happy Together. So go to my website, nickperrine.com and grab that training FOR FREE.
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