Why do I treat strangers better than my own spouse?
That is the martyrdom that marriage is: laying down your life for the other person, loving them, respecting and honoring them, working on your communication. So many times I see people give the dregs, the leftovers, to their spouse. They have the worst communication with their spouse. They treat the Starbucks barista better than they treat their spouse. At work they hold their tongue, they measure what they say, and then they go into their marriage and just let it all hang out, say whatever, use their words as weapons, and are disrespectful and rude and antagonistic, because they have not even forgiven the person.
They have so many underlying resentments and problems without resolution that their marriage is continually poisoned. If you are going to stay married, there is no room for unforgiveness. There is no room for going to bed on your anger. There is no room for not communicating how you think and feel to the other person. And there is no room for anyone in the marriage to get defensive, or to be slow to change, to hear, to listen, to work on something.
There is that old saying that God gave us one mouth and two ears. The person who sees us, and in some ways knows us best, is always going to be our spouse. If we cannot live and work with them and work through the things that need to be worked on, it is more of an indictment of us than of them, because it means we are not bringing our A game to the conversation.
Somebody said to me one time, Father, I reserve the best of all my communication, my speech, my patience, my gentleness for my wife. She gets the best I have to offer. When you have that intentionality in your marriage, to stay married, to communicate, to continue working on your marriage, to not even consider divorce as an option, when you have that right mental framework for marriage, God will work with you.
God will help you. God will heal hurts. God will find a way for you to forgive and get over the things you are struggling with in the marriage, because there is so much hope with Jesus Christ when it comes to marriage. God wants to see you reconciled to your spouse on a daily basis. He wants the two of you to live in peace and harmony, to love each other, and to be devoted and committed on a fundamental level of existence.
