Marriage Series: Discussions and Decisions After Your First Argument – What was the Difference
Many people planning to marry or are recently married always have a first argument, and soon they recognize that arguments are an inevitable ingredient in marriage. Some people even “celebrate” the event, because it means “We really are married!” This assumption is not only true, but also a turning point. That first argument can be a pleasant recognition of the barriers to achieving marital success, but it can also be a harbinger of future suffering and even possibly an eventual divorce.
In short, the first argument (or the first few arguments) should be taken very seriously.
In our book, The Road to Marital Success is Unpaved: Seven Skills for Making Marriage Work, we describe the dangers involved in the handling of arguments. We point out that a successful marriage hinges on how disagreements are handled. We describe three elements to handling arguments well:
- following rules
- identifying the difference between the spouses that led to the argument, and
- having the evidence-based (i.e., researched) seven skills spouses need in order to have a consistent pattern of resolving disagreements well.
Control Issue. This blog focuses on the differences underlying various disagreements. Disagreements are the efforts by both spouses to control the marriage, because of differences between the spouses.
Let’s take a very simple example. The husband walks into the bathroom and finds the wife’s towel on the floor, an open tube of toothpaste on the sink and/or a robe on the doorknob, etc. He yells at his wife, “Can’t you pick up after yourself? I am not your servant.” She yells back, “I’m in a hurry.” He yells, “Are you telling me that you are in a hurry every day?” She responds, “Don’t be so damned sarcastic.” He is boiling because the bathroom is just an example in his mind of how his wife never seems to pick up after herself. She is boiling because she is sick of him nagging her. He is trying to control her to make her pick up after herself. She is trying to control him to allow her to continue to be lackadaisical about how neat to keep the house.
The issue can be this minor, or it can be substantially more serious. For example, the issue might be how the husband behaves with other women, or how often the wife is out with girlfriends and not home with him.
Our point is that arguments are generally about control, even in wonderfully successful marriages.
In successful marriages, spouses focus not on the symptoms but on the causes. They focus on the difference between them that led to the argument. In our “easy” example, the difference is how tidy the house is: the husband likes a tidy house, and the wife likes the freedom to have a house be at least somewhat untidy. The husband wants to control the wife to be the spouse that he wants her to be and visa versa, the wife is doing the same. This is the challenge of marriage.
In a marriage heading for trouble, the focus stays on trying (unsuccessfully) to control each other, which inevitably increases bad feelings about one another.
Those failures and bad feelings will likely grow into very negative judgments about one another. Those negative judgments will slowly grow to dominate the marriage, and may even lead to a divorce. In a successful marriage, spouses identify the underlying difference(s) between them and problem solve. For example, the wife might say, “It is pretty clear that we are different about how tidy our house should be. If we are going to live together, and stay married, we need to come up with a solution that works for both of us. Let’s plan a time to do that.”
Conclusion. It is not over yet. This is where the rules and skills come in that are necessary for the problem-solving, in order to get to solutions that work- for both spouses. Our point in this blog is simply, whenever there is a disagreement, to start the discussion and decision-making process, whether your disagreement is petty or deadly serious. At the time of the argument, spouses should back away from the surface issue and identify the difference(s) between the spouses that need to be bridged with a solution. In this way, both spouses get to “control” the marriage to make it successful for both of them.
Please read the other blogs in this Series to understand the importance of the rules and to get an understanding of the skills involved. If you strive to really understand these rules and skills, in order to improve your marriage, it will be worth spending the $20 to buy our book.
