ACCEPTANCE
The third ingredient of a successful marriage relationship is acceptance. This marks the beginning of joy and peace in life together. This third quality can be the beginning of a meaningful life with your spouse. Fortunately it is not complicated. It is a decision we can and should make. You need to look at your spouse and say, “Honey, there is not one thing about you that needs to change for me to be pleased to be with you for the rest of my life.” Just do it. Now wasn’t that easy. This is the most important issue of blissful life together. You will have reservations about it. Practice unconditional acceptance until you really mean it. I know you’re saying, “But I don’t mean it.” Do it anyway. If you made the commitment to a permanent marriage then you need to enjoy it. This is the beginning of the path to true success in your marriage relationship. Having a wonderful life together requires you to avoid putting pressure on your spouse to try to be someone or something that is not them.
NO PRESSURE TO CHANGE
If you ever hope to see genuine improvement in your spouse, it will not come by putting pressure on them. When you constantly pick at your spouses weaknesses they are actually likely to become worse. Why? We become what we think about or focus on. Focus on failure and you will fail more. Focus on strengths and positive qualities if you want your spouse or you yourself to become a better person. Most people are already well aware of their deficiencies. No one needs to pick at them. What people need is encouragement and motivation to maximize their strengths.
You were initially attracted to each other, in part, because you generally have opposite strengths and weaknesses. You need each other to be a great team by picking each other up in our shortcomings. Your spouse’s weak spots will always cause some irritation but if you focus on them those weaknesses will become worse. If you will choose unconditional acceptance of your spouse you will be able to encourage the development of their strengths. Try it. It will take time, especially if you beat your spouse down for a long while. It may take about as long to build your spouse up as it took you to tear them down. Change your ways and be patient. The result will be worth it.
MY EXPERIENCE OF LEARNING ACCEPTANCE
Let me illustrate. My wife and I were determined to stay married. I really treated her badly in the early years but she hung in there. Remember that she was only 16 and I was 17 when we got married so, like almost all people entering marriage, I had no training or experience in how I should treat her. I didn’t know much about a marriage relationship. No one told me to accept her as is. Most of what I did was an unconscious reaction to the qualities I did not like in my own parents relationship. In particular, I was convinced my mom controlled my dad and I certainly wasn’t going to be told what to do by my wife. Right out of the gate I failed to appreciate her common sense insight. Fortunately, we were both determined that we would stay married.
Over the years I did a lot of damage. I was more at fault than her because I was controlling, unreasonable, ungrateful and possessed all kinds of negative qualities. I had been a heavy drinker and she had many qualities of an enabler…..co-dependent qualities. We could easily have failed early on apart from our commitment to permanence. My expectations of her were very wrong. I did not appreciate her unique gifts and talents. Instead I thought my way was the only way. I basically made her feel bad much of the time by unconsciously projecting rejection rather than acceptance.
I was frustrated with her and she was frustrated with me. By then I was 26 and I was aware that we needed to experience more than permanence in marriage through our determination and growing love. We needed more than toleration of each other. I became desperate and went on a personal retreat. We’d been married nine years. I made up my mind to pray into the night for as long as it took to get some answers. I started telling the Lord about how he needed to straighten her out. You may laugh but I was serious. I decided to pray until I had some kind of a breakthrough. I was praying with another guy who was trying to get the Lord to straighten out his wife.
The two of us were praying together along that same line and it went an hour, two hours, three hours. We’d gotten together after a meeting on this retreat and about 2:30 a.m. we were still praying when finally there was a breakthrough for me. I really felt as if I heard God in my inner being. Here is what I felt the Lord say to me. You won’t be surprised. I honestly heard what seemed like an audible voice say to me “She’s not the problem.” I immediately thought I was in trouble. Just as soon as I heard that I had a suspicion. So I said, “So Lord, what is the problem?” Again I felt I heard him say, just as clearly, “You have not accepted your wife the way I made her. You want her to be someone else.” Perhaps you don’t believe in prayer, but that was my experience and that revelation rocked my world in a very positive way. If you don’t talk to God, talk to someone who knows you well enough and cares enough about you to tell you the truth.
Since I hadn’t accepted my wife for nine long years, it’s taken a long time to try to prove to her that I am choosing to accept her now. It took me a long time after that to truly start accepting her because I had developed such bad habits. I started to think before I said what was in my mind. I started to try to see her positive qualities that had attracted me to her at first. I gradually changed with God’s power, especially since He is the one who said I should accept her as is. That’s the third thing–Acceptance.
AN ILLUSTRATION
Because of my experience, I frequently give unsolicited advice to young couples who are engaged. I tell them that if they are really going to get married here’s what they need to do. You need to look each other in the eyes and you need to tell your fiancé, “There is not one thing about you that has to change at all for me want to be want to be with you the rest of my life.” Does that mean you like everything about them? Not at all! It means you are going to accept them as is. Let me explain why this is so important.
A very common problem, especially among women, is it that they see a guy as a project. A troubled man is a project. When my wife started dating me as a heavy drinker and a very poor student I became her project. She has great compassion for dysfunctional people. In marriage, she would never have been successful in getting me to quit getting drunk. By the way I did have a wake up call when my favorite uncle died young of alcoholism but it had nothing to do with my wife’s expectations.
It’s really common for spouses to try to change each other, usually in ways that would be very healthy. A girl may say something like this “I know our love will be so strong that he will quit getting drinking for me. Or he’ll quit drinking heavy. Or he’ll quit getting drunk.” She doesn’t even know what love is yet since love includes unconditional acceptance. He may even agree not to drink at all because he really cares about her but what she wants to change is who he really is. And so he says to her, “Honey if you marry me, I’ll quit drinking for you.” He quits while their dating, for three months, six months or more. They get married. He becomes employed.
He’s at work one day and the guys say,” We’ve had a great day today. Why don’t we all stop on way home and have a drink?” But he says, “No, I promised the little woman I wouldn’t drink anymore.” And the guys at work say, “Wow, she’s unreasonable and she has you wrapped around her finger, doesn’t she?” So he resists the first time. Then the harassment about being henpecked gets greater at work and he resists. And one day he says, “Look, she doesn’t have me wrapped around her finger and I’ll prove it. I’m stopping and having a drink.” So he stops on the way home and has a drink. Guess what happens when he gets home? She believes he has violated his promise to her. There’s an explosion in the household. They have this huge fight. What’s the problem? She wanted him to change. He tried to but it wasn’t in his heart to change. He was willing to change for her but he couldn’t. The more you push people to change the less capable they become of changing.
You must accept your spouse as they are. When you do, amazing things can happen. Doesn’t it make sense that acceptance would produce better results than rejection. I cannot fully explain the power of acceptance in marriage. It may be that you force yourself to change enough to get along better with your spouse. Or there could be actual incremental change in the process of experiencing full acceptance from your spouse. When we accept others as is, something good happens and relationships improve. We do this better with our children and perhaps our friends, possibly to a fault. Sometimes we engage in the unhealthy practice of making excuse for them and enabling them to continue practicing destructive habits. That resembles co-dependency more than acceptance.
CONCLUSION
Acceptance is the third essential for you and your spouse to experience a meaningful and rewarding relationship. Determination will make it permanent. Love will develop because love happens. But for it to start becoming meaningful you must accept one another as is. This will provide a context for love to continue to strengthen. Determination will become easier to maintain.
Anyone who has the benefit of being unconditionally loved and accepted by another human being is very fortunate. You do not have control over whether that happens for you but it is within your power to choose to give that gift to your spouse. Someone has to go first. It will improve the likelihood that your spouse will one day accept you as is. Go for it. Chapter four is coming so keep reading.