Motive Matters: Believing the Best of Your Spouse

Dear Hurt –

First, I’m so sorry to hear of the pain you’re dealing with. It sounds like the story of so many people I’ve talked to.

But second, many of those people I talked to started out exactly where you are, and ended up with radically wonderful marriages. And when I started investigating what they did differently to get there, guess what the number one change was?  They decided to believe the best of their spouse’s intentions toward them, even when they were legitimately hurt. In other words, it is not me who is giving you that advice: it is them. It is people who used to be standing exactly where you are.

Let me give you an example that might show why this matters so much. One woman whose marriage used to be really troubled told me she used to believe many of the same things you did. Then she realized she needed to do something differently or her kids would end up in a broken home. She explained, “Up until then, I perfectly fit that definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.”