Action Step #5: Put it all in perspective
One husband shared that he and his wife used to butt heads all the time. Both had strong personalities. But their marriage turned around when he had a revelation about one key thing. He said, “I don’t like to be wrong. I’m very competitive. But eventually I realized: there’s one thing I’m not going to compete in, and that’s the relationship in this home. I’ll be wrong and I’ll BE wronged, so we can be right. And that is part of my responsibility.”
That’s powerful, isn’t it? But it’s not easy. It was rare that I heard a happy couple say “letting it go” came naturally. Instead, it was the other way around. It went against every instinct of self-protection (“What if I let it go and he doesn’t?”) or fairness (“What if I’m always the one who backs off and she never does?”). It conflicted with selfish desires to get one’s own way, and understandable desires to see that something was done “right.”
Letting it go is a learned behavior that goes against every human instinct. But in the couples that became happy couples, at least one spouse did it anyway. And, as often happens when we are others-focused, the peace and the unexpected reciprocation that eventually came with it were the best incentive to continue. *
*To discover the 12 other habits that highly happy married couples cultivate – and to move your marriage from blah to bliss – consider my book, The Surprising Secrets of Highly Happy Marriages.
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