Action Step #3: Is this a godly principle or a preference?
One common comment we heard was the power of doing a little bit of triage when a couple is about to hit that point of conflict.
As one pastor’s wife put it, “We have a basis to deal with things. We ask, is this a godly principle or is this a preference? If it’s a godly principle, we usually recognize we can’t let it go – and we can usually deal with it pretty quickly because we have the common standard of the bible. If it’s a preference then we may struggle, because that would come down to who can present their case better. So those are the things we have to choose to say, ‘okay that’s your opinion,’ and agree to disagree.”
One wife had this to say: “The key is to not make something right or wrong… and realize that this relationship is more important than whatever this issue is. That is what matters.”
A common source of this type of conflict was parenting disagreements. One wife told me that she and her husband had gone through many years with their son being difficult and rebellious – and the marriage being under intense pressure. This was in part, she said, because as a stay-at-home mom she felt she knew their son better. As a result, she would make decisions without consulting her husband. She describes how realizing she could ‘agree to disagree’ not only helped their son, but was the start of them truly having a happy marriage:
Eventually we went to a counselor with our son, and I realized I needed to let my husband work with him man-to-man. My son just knew how to push my buttons as mom! I needed to take a step back and let my husband make certain decisions on how to deal with him. He just took the dad approach, which was more like: suck it up, kid. And even if I didn’t agree with his approaches, I needed to let him do them. Now, I can look back on it much differently than when in the middle of it. It was hard but it was totally the right thing.
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