3 Ways to tell YOU ARE IN THE WRONG
INTRO: these rules are for you. You can give them to your spouse (not while in an argument), but if you try and use them while in the middle of an argument, you will just make your spouse more rabid.
1) You think your spouse doesn’t care.
When our thinking gets distorted we take things out of proportion. We want to ascribe more malicious intent that will justify our anger. Our anger is probably nothing to do with our spouse. Something else is going on in our lives that we don’t want to take responsibility for. We can’t seem to see, that our spouses mistake is nothing more than an error of maybe even stupidity.
Malicious it isn’t. Freud said, ‘The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.’ If your spouse didn’t care, they wouldn’t be arguing with you.
2) You use some event older than a month, and can range as far back as the Stone Age, that exemplifies your spouses bad character.
When you use history to validate a point, it means the point isn’t valid enough. It doesn’t mean he is right, it just means you are more overstressed than this error warrants, so you have to add previous grievances to make you feel better.
3) You think if the clouds would part & G-d told your spouse they were wrong, that it would actually help.
It wouldn’t, that’s why it isn’t going to happen.
Marriage isn’t about right and wrong, it’s about trying to understand what makes each other happy and how each of you think. Again, it doesn’t mean she is right, it does mean you don’t understand her well enough to appreciate why she would make that mistake (assuming it is a mistake).
If you notice couples who can finish each others sentences, it’s because they figured this out. Something you haven’t done yet. Don’t get annoyed with your spouse, understand them.