We are human, and we are not going to see eye to eye with other humans. This is often the root of many of our problems in relationships. We are funny, and our wives are mad at us because of it. We said we’re fine when we came home. I didn’t share our day with our wife, and she thinks now we’re going to have a divorce. This causes a big discussion, and eventually the voices get louder, and before we know it, your wife is in the bedroom crying, and you’re sitting at the kitchen table wondering what just happened.
We have many different types of disagreements. Because of these disagreements, we often want to run to the worst possible scenario, which does not help the relationship become stronger but tears the communication ligaments of our relationships. Without these abilities to communicate our relationship, the weekend’s connection starts to atrophy and fade. And before we know it, we are in the throes of roommate syndrome.
How do we handle disagreements? How do we keep our wives happy and content? Is there really any way to please her? The answer to the first one is yes, you can handle disagreements. You actually can strengthen your conflict, intimacy, and have better relationships because of these disagreements.
Can you keep your wife happy and content? The answer is sadly no, you can’t. That is the root of many people’s suffering. You can’t make your wife happy, nor can she make you happy.
Is there any way to please my wife? Again, no, there is no way that you can actually have the power to please your wife. You can perform actions that she may decide to interpret as pleasing, but you have no power over making her feel pleased with your actions. Again, what are you making her pleased about you mean about you?
How do you handle all these disagreements? Well, that’s what we wanna look at today is what does a disagreement actually mean? Can you truly handle a disagreement? And how do you step through the discomfort of a disagreement and reach the goal that you truly want, which is closure and resolution? So, how do we do that? Let’s look at the solutions now.
Accept that she isn’t you.
If only our wives thought like us, there would be no problems, right? Yet do we really want our wives to think exactly like us? Yeah, it may be fun at the beginning because if she thought like you, y’all would have more sex. You would have sex when you wanted to have sex. There’ll be a lot more peace in the family. Except there’d be no soul in that family.
What makes a family so incredible is the two different approaches that a man and a woman create. A wife will look at a problem in one way. A man will look at that exact same problem in a completely different fashion. It is the joining of these two minds that can make or break a relationship.
The biggest point you have to look at and understand, Darren, any type of disagreement is that you have to stay out of the victim mindset. I’ve said it many times that a victim does not earn respect. A victim is not a turn-on to your wife. Can you bravely stand before your wife and have a calm discussion while she’s losing her mind? Can she stand bravely before you while you are losing your mind? So I am able to not be a victim. You also have to have trust that you both have each other‘s backs. Can you actually do that? If you can be awesome, if you can’t, that’s probably where the work needs to be applied to you. Very, very rarely does the work have to be applied to the other party member.
You have to take full responsibility for your thoughts and your actions. They are not reliant upon your wife.
So the very first thing you have to do is accept that your wife is not you. She will not think like you, she will not act like you. She has not had your experiences in life. You have not had her experiences in life either. Therefore, y’all both have completely different experiences to base y’all‘s thoughts and decisions on. How do you take your experience and share it with your wife, and she does the same for you?
The first is except that now she’s not thinking like you. Even if she expects you to read her mind, you cannot expect her to read yours. She will eventually figure out that you can’t read her mind either. She will learn that you, as a man, communicate completely differently from a woman.
She will not have your line of thought
You will not think like she does
As we now know, your thoughts are your thoughts. Your wife’s thoughts are her thoughts. If you’re aware of the model, then you understand what thoughts do. Thoughts create your emotions. Your emotions create your actions. Your actions create your results.
This is why your wife has a completely different set of thoughts. This also explains why she does things completely differently from you. But also understand that women process circumstances from a completely different angle than men do. This is why they want to talk to you as soon as you get home, as opposed to just letting you decompress. It’s not because she is nagging, that’s how she connects. That’s how she feels secure in her relationship, by talking, while men feel secure just by being around each other.
So, understand that your wife is not out to make your life hard. She didn’t wake up in the morning, trying to find some way of getting you riled up. Yeah, we may think that’s what she wants to do, but that’s not the case in reality. She simply approaches problems from a completely different direction than you do.
Don’t run from the discomfort.
Because y’all have two separate life experiences, y’all are gonna have two separate lines of thought. These thoughts can be looked at as how you are interpreting the circumstances that you are discussing at the moment.
That is where the disagreement is actually happening. When you both respect each other, but have a disagreement, you have to come to a consensus on what each person is. This is where you both can get on the same page.
The problem that we have is that many times, you say things like How do I get her to think the same way? Or how do I get her to? I want the problem to be that you don’t like the actual emotional sensation that you have. When you both don’t have the same thoughts, that particular circumstance creates discomfort in the emotional department. Yes, it would be easier if your wife would simply agree with you. That way, you can get past this discomfort; that’s not reality. Except that reality is, you don’t get to make that decision. If you want your relationship to be strong and where you trust each other completely, you have to go through the scary, uncomfortable act of working it out. As with everything, you do not get stronger unless you do the uncomfortable stuff.
Part of that discomfort is that she’s not gonna think as you do, so you have to seek first to understand before you are understood. So you have to ask questions and ask those questions bravely. Expect that she’s going to get upset with some of the questions, but again, face the discomfort and understand where she’s coming from. Why does that particular circumstance upset her as much as it does? Find that answer, and your eyes will be opened.
An example of this is that my wife doesn’t like to go to church. She’ll go from time to time, but she always makes it a point to point out the people who appear to be hoity toity. Those people who have that confidence in themselves to be in a position of leadership in a church as a top person.
After many, many years of discussing this, she dropped a piece of detail that opened so many doors to why she is so against particular people in churches. Especially people who appear to have money in churches. It all boils down to her mom’s ex-husband and the fact that he was a downright asshole. He was the youth leader of the church where my wife’s mom met this guy.
I had heard stories for the past 30 years as to how much of a son of a bitch this man was, so I understood why she didn’t like Gary. Yet when I found out that he was the youth minister, that little connecting piece was crucial. So keep asking questions and seek understanding when you come to that point. A lot of the conflict in your life with your wife will not be as bad.
What is the end goal?
When you and your wife are having a disagreement, it is easy to fall into a line of thinking that is equivalent to life or death. But if you can get past the fear of your relationship possibly dying because it’s not, you can look at what the end goal is. What does it mean to win this discussion? Why is winning this? To your wife? What is the end goal of having this argument?
If you can state what the end goal is, you can talk about that with your wife.
Why do you wanna have a discussion about spending? What are her goals in having this discussion? Find out what each other‘s goals are, and it can help you both find a solution. Therefore, it is helpful to have a goal in mind. Would you rather be right or happy?
Talking is always the key.
One of the big issues you will hear people talk about when they are in a disagreement is that you aren’t listening. Yet you’re sitting there saying you have heard everything your wife said. And we’ve often heard that there is a difference between hearing and listening. So what are the differences? The main problem is that it’s not actually listening, it’s understanding.
This is why talking is so important in a relationship. This is also why when talking and communication stops, the marriage and relationship fall apart. We have to keep the discussion going, but also stay out of victimhood while doing so. This can be tough in many ways unless you’re present in mind.
So don’t avoid the tough discussions. Lean into them, have those hard discussions, ask questions, and seek to understand that your wife isn’t out to make you mad. She’s doing what she needs to do, so she feels good about herself. Also, you’re doing what you’re doing so that you feel better.
With that keystone in mind, you know why discussions are important. So that you can come to a resolution that both of you accept.
Do you have to be right?
So many times, we fight and argue so that we can prove ourselves right. It’s one of many reasons why people have such heated Internet arguments online. They want to feel they are correct. So they won’t back down. They’re going to voice their point every single time they’re gonna hammer that home until the other side gives up and proves that they are right.
Don’t bring this line of thinking home. There is a comment saying, “ Do you want to be right or happy?” So, do you have to be right? What if you just let that discussion slide?
Especially when you have those internal fights with your wife. You know the ones, the ones where you are just giving your wife every possible logical verbal beatdown you could muster. The type of verbal haranguing where you feel just absolutely satisfied. Those are about making us feel right. Yet there is a huge drawback to having those arguments and ensuring that you win. The results are that you start showing your wife less respect in real life. And one of the better solutions is to let her win in those mental arguments. It sounds weird. I get it, but it works. You show your wife more love. Let her win, and you just say you’re right.
What are you interpreting her words to mean?
Another question you wanna ask yourself when y’all are having conflicting arguments is, what are you taking her argument to mean about you? Not what she is saying, but what she is saying, I think you’re wrong about in particular? Because this is what we are actually reacting to. When our wife says we’re wrong many times, we’re taking that to heart. We are ineffectual husbands or ineffectual dads or just not good men at all. We make it mean that we are not loved. These are the stories we tell ourselves and that we do not feel good about.
This is where the fight for life and death actually comes from. It’s not that if we are wrong, we’re going to die, but we feel that our wife not agreeing with us means something disastrous to us. So our wife corrects us on how we are bothering our children. We want to fight back because we want to feel like we’re doing a good job being a parent.
She’s actually reacting to how your parenting style makes her feel, too. If you’re roughhousing with the kids, she voices that she doesn’t like it when you do that. That’s because she is afraid she will be judged as a poor mother because she let her child get hurt. Now there’s more to that; there are levels of respect and things like that that also come into play, but when we boil it down to the base, what are we making the circumstance mean about us, and can we change that? The answer to that is yes, and that’s changing your model.
Be ready to step back and breathe.
One of the best ways to handle disagreements, arguments, and verbal fights, though, is when the circumstance becomes so dire that you can stop stepping away from each other and let the emotions die down. Working off of emotions always causes more problems than when y’all are able to think clearly. Working off of emotional states will always cause people to make the wrong choices.
So, to keep away from making decisions under emotional influence. Unless you want to actually destroy your relationship, just let the emotional temperature simmer down.
You do this by calling a halt, saying whoa, hold up, what you’re wanting to do, your intentions. I wanna stop here before we say something. We do not mean. Let’s come back in 30 minutes and see if we can have a talk then. And then you go into another room and cool off for 30 minutes or an hour, however long it takes, but the key is to resolve the problem then, because if you just let it cool off and decide it’s fine. It’s not worth discussing; you’re just going to add Scale upon Scale until it’s really hard to actually get to the root of the problem because of all the extra thoughts and defenses that you put up to keep from having to address the real problem with the marriage.
So have those hard talks. Have challenging, scary discussions. Approach the problem with curiosity as opposed to fear, anger, resentment, and hurt. Understand where your wife is coming from, and she will be more inclined to understand where you are coming from. When you can understand, she will feel her, and when she understands, you will feel her, and when y’all both feel her, you will both work towards a solution that will allow your relationship to become stronger and better.
