The Surrendered Wife
Remember What Made You Fall in Love
Sometimes the things that we’re most attracted to at first become the things we find most irritating later on. Maybe you think he’s irresponsible now, but at first you enjoyed his great sense of fun.
Perhaps you were impressed with his success in business and now you wonder why you married a workaholic.
Nothing’s changed about your husband but your perspective.
Examine your complaints to see if you can re-frame them as qualities that you delight in. You’ll soon remember what made you fall in love with your husband.
Why Did You Marry Him?
Are you dismissing the talents he brings to the relationship because you don’t see them as valuable? If that’s the case, then you’re missing out on one of the biggest gifts of marriage — having reinforcements in the areas where you’re weak, and the benefit of two perspectives.
If you still think your husband is not as smart or capable as you, ask yourself why you married him. Answering that question will remind you that those traits are right before your very eyes, and that they’re there for your benefit.
For A Close Connection, Curb Your Urge to Communicate
You may have heard, just as I did, that the key to a good marriage is to communicate. I figured that if some communication was good, more was better.
I was dead wrong.
Even though I have a degree in communications, trying for years to “communicate” with my husband never got me the connection I craved. Instead, I found that my propensity to talk things out actually worked against me because so much of the time I wanted to talk about what he was doing wrong, or wasn’t doing at all.
Of course John and I still talk a lot — about serious and silly things. But now that I practice surrendering principles, we rarely have to “communicate.”
The result? Our emotional connection is better than ever.
Enough said.
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Very very good reminder, thank you!
This is profoundly true for me as well: “…trying for years to “communicate” with my husband never got me the connection I craved. Instead, I found that my propensity to talk things out actually worked against me because so much of the time I wanted to talk about what he was doing wrong, or wasn’t doing at all.”
Obviously my husband doesn’t enjoy my criticizing his parenting, his purchases, or his tone of voice, so he was prone to answering sharply when I did this, which was rather often. I didn’t enjoy it either, even when he was nice about it. It made me think that there was something wrong with him! A counselor basically agreed with me and suggested that we have regular “meetings” wherein we talked about stuff and would agree to listen carefully and assume the other person’s goodwill, but all they involved was me criticizing my husband. Of course, it made us feel worse, not better.
Reading “Fascinating Womanhood” helped me so much with stopping this and getting a sense of how to spot the rare occasions when I should let him know something he’s doing wrong and how best to do that. I can accept that he’s going to parent from a dad perspective and I’m going to parent from a mom perspective, but that’s a feature, not a bug. He’s going to want to spend more and I’m going to want to save more, but he works so hard to provide for us and he’s perfectly capable of making his own judgment calls about buying things. I just had such a hard time understanding that before.
Thank you Amelia, for such an excellent comment. It is good to hear a testimonial on how this has played out in a real life situation. 🙂
Very interesting point and timely for me: I am reading a book on better communication in marriage and how to work things out in a Godly way; so this is a good reminder that it does not mean that you now talk “every little thing” out, but have to give leeway in the way we would want leeway to be given to ourselves. Mercy, forgiveness and patience and a realization that we have no business micromanaging other’s “issues” when we can’t even get our own in line as we would want. LOL