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Contents

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Introduction

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You Can’t Change Your Spouse, But Your Spouse Will Change

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Your Spouse Married You For A Reason—Just Not The Reason You Think

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Don’t Try To Be Humble. Just Try to Be Yourself.

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Don’t Compromise. Negotiate Instead.

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It’s Okay to Fight Over the Little Things

Introduction

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I think I had been married about six days before I realized I had no idea what I was doing. We were on our honeymoon at the Oregon Coast. I’ll never forget. We had just visited this quaint little shop and were on our way to dinner when my brand new husband said something… I can’t remember now… but that was it. This was my breaking point. At the next stop sign, I climbed right out of that rental car. We were on our honeymoon, for goodness sake. We couldn’t even make it through our honeymoon without fighting? We didn’t stand a chance. Here are some things I wish people would have told me—not necessarily before I got married, since that would have killed the mood of the whole thing, but if nothing else during those first few days and months. I wish someone would have said, “it’s okay. It’s normal. You guys are normal. You’re going to get through this. You’re going to have some big feelings about it. We’re here for you. We all fight.” Instead, I kept the whole thing to myself. To make matters worse, my husband and I were on staff at a church at the time and I would go to church and people would say to me, “Isn’t marriage the best?” They would emphasize it like that. “The best?” “Isn’t it like a constant sleepover with your best friend?” And I would hold back tears until I got home because it felt like something must be wrong with us. If I had known everything about marriage before I got married, I probably wouldn’t have done it. But there are a few things I do wish I would have known before I got married. In the end, I’m so glad I did it. It’s been the best thing I’ve ever done. But it would have been a lot easier if I had known these five things up front. If you’re thinking of getting married, I hope they help.

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Introduction

You Can’t Change Your Spouse, But Your Spouse Will Change

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Before I was married, I heard this advice all the time: “You can’t change your spouse!” I can see what people were trying to do with this advice. They didn’t want me to marry someone with a list of objections in the back of my mind, thinking to myself, “Oh, don’t worry. That bad habit he has, that anger problem, that tendency to disconnect when we’re in an argument… I’ll be able to fix that later.” Nobody wants to be fixed. And nobody wants to marry someone who only wants to fix them. That much is good advice. But the thing with that advice was I interpreted something from it that maybe wasn’t necessarily intended. I thought to myself, when I got married, “My husband will never change. What I marry is what I get.” That’s why I was so shocked, after our first year of marriage, that I was married to a different guy than I was the day I said, “I do.” When we got married, he was a pastor. Now he’s an entrepreneur and business owner. When we first got married, he had the tendency to be a little bit harsh or abrasive with me. He’s really pretty gentle with me now. He’s much more humble now than he was when I met him. He’s always been generous, but he’s even more so now. Every day I notice how excited I am to see the man he’s becoming. And I didn’t expect this. I thought the wedding day would be as good as it gets. But our wedding day pales in comparison to the days we spend together now. The more we get to know each other, the more we love each other and the more we learn how to bring out the best in the other person. You don’t marry someone who will never change. Thank God, you marry the person your spouse is becoming. And they marry the person you are becoming. So then what should you look for when you’re looking for a spouse?

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You Can’t Change Your Spouse, But Your Spouse Will Change

Before I met my husband, I had a lot of things on my list like, “plays the guitar” (because, well, he couldn’t possibly be a Christian if he didn’t play the guitar) or “loves babies”. And I’m not saying those things are bad things. But looking back, I realize how most of the things on my list were preferences or talents when I really should have been looking for character. He can learn to play the guitar or learn to love babies. She can learn to love football or how to cook. But it will take decades for someone to learn to treat people with respect when they’ve spent their whole lives treating people poorly. So when it comes to looking for qualities in a potential spouse, if I was doing this whole thing all over again, I would only really be looking for one thing. And the good news is, I lucked out. My husband is the very epitome of this one thing: Someone who is willing to adapt and change. People are going to change. Period. You’ll change. Your spouse will change. Circumstances will change. Kids will change you. New jobs will change you. Tragedy and loss changes you. Life changes you. So I would look for someone who has a desire and an ability to roll with the punches as those changes come. Someone who isn’t too scared to take life as it comes.

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You Can’t Change Your Spouse, But Your Spouse Will Change

Your Spouse Married You For A Reason—Just Not The Reason You Think

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I attended this seminar awhile back where they asked us to introduce ourselves in a way that took me totally off guard. They said, “think of the person who is closest to you and introduce yourself to the group from that person’s perspective.” I knew I wanted to introduce myself from my husband’s perspective. But what on earth would he say about me? I had no idea. I stumbled over my words for a little bit. I think I ended up saying something like, “She’s smart and creative. She’s a good cook…” I trailed off. I wasn’t sure what else to say. It occurred to me in that moment that I hadn’t ever spent much time thinking about what my husband loved about me. When I got home, I told my husband about the experience and how difficult it was for me to share what he would have shared about me. I asked him what he would have said. Some of the things he said seemed pretty predictable. He did say I was smart and creative. But he also said a few things I wasn’t expecting. For example, he said “if you could only have one friend, forever…you would want it to be my wife. She’ll be loyal and compassionate and giving and forgiving…” he went on and on. It was so cool to hear that from him and also to realize I probably had never done a very good job of telling him what I loved the most about him. So I explained how what drew me to him the most was how, when I first told him I had this dream of writing a book, he didn’t try to discourage me by telling me how hard it was going to be, as so many others had done. Instead, he said something to effect of, “That’s amazing! You can do it! How can I help?” I told him I loved his sense of confidence, his audacity, his unrelenting determination to get things done.

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Your Spouse Married You For A Reason—Just Not The Reason You Think

And when I told him this, he said, “really? You love that stuff about me? I thought you hated that about me!” In that moment, we realized together that the things we loved most about each other were also the things that drove us the most crazy. In fact, one of the biggest sources of conflict in our relationship has been because I am trying to be someone’s friend and he is trying to get something done. There’s a tension there—even when we’re both really functioning at our best. All that said, the point is, when you choose to get married to someone, you do it for a reason— and so does your spouse. You might not even be totally aware of that reason. They might not be either. But the more you can learn to articulate these reasons over time, and to come back to these reasons over and over, the more secure you can be in your relationship.

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Your Spouse Married You For A Reason—Just Not The Reason You Think

Don’t Try To Be Humble. Just Try to Be Yourself.

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Just before I got married, someone asked me what I was most excited about. My answer was, “I’m just so excited to be a wife. I’m going to be better than the best wife he’s ever dreamed of. I’m going to serve him and love him…” blah, blah, blah. I went on like that for a while. At the time, not only was I being totally serious, I also felt really proud of myself for being so humble. Here was the problem. That whole theory unraveled for me in my first few months of marriage. It just plain didn’t work. Not only was I always conducting this sort of performance for my husband—the cooking, the cleaning, the doing whatever he asked me to do, the always saying yes and always being whoever he needed me to be—I was also slowly withering away. He wasn’t getting the truest or best picture of who I was. In fact, things really started to go bad after just a couple of weeks. While I was busy being the loving and supportive wife I thought he always dreamed about, I had loads of resentment building up inside. For example, I had strong opinions about his work life that I never felt comfortable expressing because I thought it would make me sound like the nagging wife I never wanted to be. And when you have strong opinions you don’t express, they build up like a volcano. They’re going to come out sooner or later. It’s just a matter of where or when and how explosive. I’ll never forget the day this all came to a head. We were having an argument and it was about to go explosive. I could feel it. This had happened before. I was angry but trying to hide it. He was trying to get me to tell him what I was frustrated about. He was poking and prodding a bit. I was swearing up and down I wasn’t frustrated about anything and oh, by the way, why didn’t he just drop it? And before things could get 12

Don’t Try To Be Humble. Just Try to Be Yourself.

out of hand, he said something I’ll never forget. To this day, I still don’t know how he had the foresight to say something like this. He said, “Go ahead, be high-maintenance. I dare you.” What he was essentially saying was, “You don’t have to hide what you need or want from me. You don’t have to keep your opinions to yourself. Having strong opinions doesn’t make you selfish, or high-maintenance or a nagging wife. It makes you a person.” Something clicked in me in that moment. I realized my husband actually wanted me to have opinions and ideas about things. He wanted me to disagree with him, to fight back, to share my thoughts. He wanted me to show my emotions and my thoughts about things. He didn’t want me to be “better than the wife he had always dreamed about.” He wanted me to be myself. What I’ve come to realize over time is that it really isn’t humble at all for me to think this marriage is all about me being the hero, always the “yes” woman, giving my husband whatever he wants. In fact, that was only really serving to feed my ego. My marriage would be better if, you know, I was actually in it. Relationships are about two people with wants, needs, thoughts, feelings and desires. The minute one or the other person pulls their needs, wants, thoughts, etc out of the equation, the relationship falls apart. These days I focus much less on being humble in my marriage. I’m not looking for my husband to say, “she’s the wife I always dreamed of!” I’m shooting for him to say, “I knew her completely and I loved her well.” The crazy thing is, as I focus on this, I think I’m closer to him saying the first one as well. 13

Don’t Try To Be Humble. Just Try to Be Yourself.

Don’t Compromise. Negotiate Instead.

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We asked a lot of people for advice before we got married and one of the most common responses we got was this: “compromise, compromise, compromise. Marriage is all about compromise.” I’ve been married for a little over three years at the time I’m writing this, and I have to say, I totally disagree. I mean, I can see how well-meaning this advice was. People weren’t trying to steer me in the wrong direction. But the “compromise compromise compromise” approach definitely did not work for us. Our marriage is not all about compromise. Our marriage is about negotiation. The biggest problem for us with compromise is it never felt like anyone was getting what they wanted. Let’s say, totally hypothetically, that I wanted to go out hiking on a Saturday afternoon and my husband wanted to lay around watching football. Now I can’t emphasize enough how totally hypothetical this situation is… but anyway… A hypothetical compromise to this disagreement would be one of a couple of options. Either 1) we watch football for half of the day and go hiking for half of the day, meaning my husband would miss a game he really wanted to watch and I wouldn’t get to hike the distance I was hoping for. Or, 2) maybe he would watch football by himself and I would go hiking by myself and we would meet up for dinner. There is nothing wrong with either of these decisions—except that neither one sounded good to us. I really didn’t want to hike alone—or for half the distance. And ultimately he wanted me to watch football with him. For us, this is where negotiation came in. 15

Don’t Compromise. Negotiate Instead.

With negotiation, rather than compromise, you’re not trying to meet halfway on everything. Instead, you’re bartering. So when one person wants to go for a hike and the other person wants to watch football, you can trade for it. “I’ll watch football with you today if you go hiking with me next weekend.” Or, “I’ll go on a hike with you today if you do the dishes this whole week” In this circumstance, everybody gets something they want. Everybody wins. Here’s the cool thing about negotiation over compromise. It allows people to begin evaluating the real value of their needs and wants. In a compromise situation, I can overvalue my needs and wants. By that I mean, when it comes to hiking and watching football, I can get so focused on meeting in the middle that I miss the fact that I don’t really want to go hiking that badly anyway. What I want is to spend time with my husband—and to know my thoughts and ideas are valuable to him. In a negotiation, you can’t miss the value of your needs and wants. “I’ll go hiking with you if you do the dishes all week” really brings that into focus. Is hiking really worth dishes all week? Are dishes really worth spending your Saturday doing something you don’t like? If so, great. We have a deal. If not, we have to find something else, another area where we are willing to negotiate. It took us awhile to get the hang of this and the value behind it, but now it really works for us. If you want taco bell for dinner and I want Cantina Laredo, a compromise is a middle-of-theroad Mexican restaurant. Nobody gets what they want. If you want to buy a new car and I think we should wait, how do you compromise on that issue? Buy a less expensive car than the one you originally picked out? Again, this is a lose-lose situation. Nobody gets what they want. Instead of that, negotiating says, “You can buy that new car as soon as we have x amount of dollars in savings.”

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Don’t Compromise. Negotiate Instead.

Here’s the really cool thing. The more we negotiate, the less we feel like we need to negotiate. I do things for him and he does things for me. That’s marriage. Negotiating, for us, has been a way we can both help each other win.

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Don’t Compromise. Negotiate Instead.

It’s Okay to Fight Over the Little Things

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If I were going to write the book of our first year, I would title it, “Fighting Over The Littlest Things.” Nobody would buy that book. But it would be accurate. Name a task and we could fight over it. How the dishwasher was supposed to be loaded. If you should turn on the bathroom fan during your shower, or just after. The proper way to dispose of a wet towel. What clothes belonged in the dryer and which ones needed to be line-dried. Then, literally, we would argue about where to hang the clothes in the house as they were drying. I can remember one night where we were up until probably 2am talking about whether or not we should keep a box of letters and cards I had collected over the years. We were planning a big move and we only had so much space. Do we bring the toaster, or the box of cards? Someone had told us before we got married “never to go to bed angry” so we stayed up, getting angrier and angrier the more tired we got. I always felt like this was a major failure of our marriage. In fact, a little more than a year ago we started going to marriage counseling and this was one of the first things I brought up. The fights were wearing on me. I didn’t feel like I could do it for much longer. Here’s the thing our counselor told us that was surprising to me. She said her goal wasn’t to get us to stop fighting about the little things. Instead, it was to help us make more progress in our arguments. “It’s important to fight about the little things,” she assured us. “Fighting about those little things is how you each establish your own identity in this relationship.” Not to mention, she said, the “little things” usually aren’t as little as we make them out to be. 19

It’s Okay to Fight Over the Little Things

Sure enough, as we talked with her, we found that what I was really fighting for when I was fighting about the dishes was not to load the dishwasher a certain way—but the freedom to do a task how it made sense to me. What my husband was fighting for was to create a home where efficiency was valued. He wanted systems to make our lives easier, faster and more costeffective so we could really enjoy the extra time and money this freed up. Once we began to understand this about each other, it was easier for us to adjust. This wasn’t about winning anymore. This was about understanding the other. Over the past year, we’ve learned to really use these “fights” to our advantage. By that I mean, when we fight, we try not to see those fights as an obstacle getting what we want. We try to see them as an opportunity to get to know each other. So in other words, when we had been arguing about how to load the dishwasher, if I could have slowed down for a minute and said, “Hey look, here’s what I’m really asking for here. I want to feel like I have the freedom to be myself. And I’m not always thinking about efficiency first…” If I could have listened to my husband say, “Look, I’m really trying to save us money and time here. Systems and plans are really important to me and here’s why…” we would have walked away from the situation without a clear plan about what we were going to do about the dishwasher, but with something better: A really clear picture of the other. The coolest part about that is this: Our fights don’t feel much like fights anymore. Next time you’re having a disagreement with your significant other, try this. Think to yourself, “even if the outcome doesn’t go the way I would hope, what do I hope my partner knows about me?” Is there a way you can communicate that instead?

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It’s Okay to Fight Over the Little Things

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© 2015 Donald Miller Words, LLC

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