[#Life] MarriageSample

Choose Your Fights

When my wife and I were on the edge of a little fight, she said this: “We do not have the time or the energy to fight about this." And if you think about it, there are times when fighting is a waste of time, but we do not stop to realize it until it is too late and we have been fighting for an hour. 

“We do not have the time”: we are busy right now, I am supposed to pick the kids up from school, I have food in the oven, I was about to take a shower. 

“We do not have the energy”: we are both tired, we woke up early, it is late, we should be sleeping right now. 

It is OK to fight and even necessary in some cases. But it should lead to us solving things, not bickering over something with zero results.

We need to learn to fight fair. My wife and I are both human and we will see things differently and have fights and disagreements. However, there are a few things that we can learn to apply to our marriage in order to fight fair which can be applicable to you and your spouse as well. 

We need to make sure our fights deserve being fought over. Some things are insignificant and we should learn to let go and let God take control of it all! 

When you consider something to be so important that you feel the need to fight with your spouse over it, learn to fight fair. Let me give you three applications in fighting fair:

· Timing and tone are crucial. Ask yourself: is this the best time to say what I want to say? Unsolicited advice is usually the worst kind. Do not have serious conversations when you are tired or hungry. 

· Try to talk about the issue outside of the issue because it is not as emotionally charged then. For instance, when one person is always on time, and the other one is never on time, sometimes that is God’s way of working on both of them at the same time. But when someone is late, right as they come through the door is not the best time to have it out with your spouse over punctuality.

· Try to solve the problem and not the person. There are some things we have to get over. If our spouse talks a lot, we need to learn to get over it. If one is an extrovert and the other one an introvert, then at a party one is going to have to stay a little bit later than they prefer, and the other one leave a little bit earlier. It's about compromising. Be more like Jesus when He said to the Father, "Not my will but yours be done," (Luke 22:42).

Thought of the Day

Fighting is not always a bad thing if we learn how to fight fair, and find out when something is worth fighting about.