I had a conversation with a couple that kept fighting about who was refilling, or not refilling, the water jug in the fridge—the filtered, good stuff, right?
Every so often, they would come in and just say, “This is still happening! I can’t believe you’re not doing it. I can’t believe you’re not doing it.”
It just kept being this big thing.
They brought this up at the very beginning, so it’s been going on for I don’t know how long.
Finally, I just said, “You know, you could just get a separate water container and have two.
Like we have ‘his’ or ‘her’ sinks, right?
We have ‘his’ or ‘her’ side of the bed.
Why not have ‘his or hers’ water jugs in the fridge?”
Then, you each have your own and you feel free to refill it as often or as infrequently as you would like.
There’s no problem.
You’re always going to find water in there, and if there’s no water, then you know you didn’t refill your water, and you don’t need to be mad at anybody else.
Sometimes, seeing a simple solution is hard to do.
It’s hard to see the forest for the trees, right?
The same thing happens here.
Sometimes, seeing the simplest solution is just one step away.
They came back a week later and said, “It’s been so peaceful.
It’s been so calm.
We have not been arguing at all.
This was the best idea under the sun.
I can’t believe we didn’t do this years ago.”
All I could do was giggle.
Feel free to apply that into your marriage and into your life as you will.
It might just sometimes make sense to get two of those things if you’re going to do it.
Let me know what you’re going to get a second of.
Fixing Marriage is DEAD? WRONG!
If things at home aren’t right, nothing else is right.
Everything else is off.
Coming home sucks.
Engaging with friends and family is painful because you feel like you are constantly dodging questions about what’s new or how things are at home, right?
Hobbies?
They’re not fun anymore.
You’re not enjoying yourself anywhere, really.
It’s like there’s this ever-present cloud that’s following you around everywhere you go.
Whatever is going on at work has a tinge of negativity because you have nobody to celebrate with afterwards, right?
You end up eating like crap, you feel like crap, you sleep like crap.
Like I said, everything else is off.
So, yeah, that’s why people still come and they decide, ever so consciously, to put up a fight and work to improve their marriage.
I don’t know who you’ve been talking to, but this is what I’m being told.
Sometimes people push back and like to inform me, “This doesn’t matter anyway,” right?
That people don’t care anymore.
Kind of gotten hopelessly apathetic about their marriages—that they just don’t care.
And that’s not at all my experience.
It’s not at all what happens.
I believe, and I see it happening, that people want to improve their relationships.
They want to do it bad enough because they keep reaching out and asking for help.
Couples tell me that they’ve been thinking about it for months, years.
Sometimes they tell me that they want to fix it because they know…
NOT LISTENING in MARRIAGE BE Like
We need to talk about this.
Let’s talk about what listening doesn’t mean.
Because a lot of us think that we’re listening when we’re really not.
Here’s an example:
Imagine this.
Your husband comes to you and says, “I’m so hurt that you were so late,” and your response immediately being, “But I wasn’t late.
I was only two minutes behind.”
Guess what?
That’s not listening.
That’s defending yourself instead of hearing what he’s actually saying, right?
Listening isn’t about proving that you’re right.
It’s about understanding how your partner feels.
Or let’s flip it:
Your wife says, “You’re yelling at me,” and you respond with, “No, I’m not yelling.”
That’s also not listening.
Because in that moment, it doesn’t matter whether you think that you’re yelling.
What matters is, she feels like you are, and that should be enough.
Listening means pausing before you respond.
It means asking why.
Why does this matter to them?
It means saying, “I hear you.
I didn’t realize that it felt that way to you.
Tell me more.”
Because the goal isn’t to win the argument.
It’s to actually understand one another.
Have you ever been guilty of this?
I know I have.
Is there a “raised hand” emoji?
Drop that in the comments and join the “Let’s get better at listening to our spouses” club.
