Here is an uncomfortable truth about marriage: even when you win an argument, you often lose something bigger.
Ellen White described a pattern she saw often, and it still shows up today: "The husband wants his way, and the wife wants her way, and neither is willing to yield. Such a condition of things can bring only the greatest unhappiness. Both husband and wife should be willing to yield his or her way or opinion" (The Adventist Home, p. 118). She was not describing dramatic conflict. She was describing something much more ordinary, two people who love each other, both convinced they are right, both unwilling to bend.
The Problem With Keeping Score
Marriage is not a debate to be won. It is not a courtroom where one person needs to be proven right and the other wrong. But it is easy to slip into treating it that way, especially over small things. Whose way of loading the dishwasher is correct. Whose spending habit is the problem. Whose family is harder to deal with.
The instinct to defend your position is natural. But a marriage where both people are constantly defending their own ground rarely feels peaceful, even when nobody is yelling.
Serving Instead of Winning
The alternative is not losing, it is serving. That means sometimes choosing your spouse's preference over your own, not because you are wrong, but because their happiness matters to you more than being right. This is mutual, not one-sided. Both people willing to yield, this is what actually creates safety in a relationship, knowing your spouse is not trying to defeat you. Philippians 2:3-4 puts the same idea in broader terms: valuing others above yourselves, not looking only to your own interests but also to the interests of others.
Where This Starts
Wedding planning is full of small decisions that can turn into tiny battles, the seating chart, the color scheme, whether to invite that one cousin. Practice the muscle of yielding now, on the small stuff. Ask yourself, in this specific decision, does it matter more that I am right, or that we are okay?
Questions to Talk Through Together
- What is a recent disagreement where one of us "won," and how did it actually feel afterward?
- Is there a current wedding planning decision we're both dug into? What would it look like for one of us to yield first?
- How do we want to handle it when we both feel strongly and neither wants to give in?
You are not opponents. You never were.
Part four of our Married Life series. Catch up with What You Say About Your Spouse When They're Not in the Room, or continue to The Person Who Can Hurt You Most Is Also the One Who Can Heal You Most.