Did "wives submit to your husbands in everything" deter you from marriage?

[Xantippe]

In a very good marriage this may well be your experience. I think I have a pretty good marriage, yet we’ve run into issue where just discussing doesn’t bring us to consensus. But what about all the marriages that aren’t so good? If we look at the divorce rate there are plenty of troubled marriage. **Maybe they are troubled because they can’t reach consensus and yet have to work together as one? **If they don’t have a method for carrying on when they can’t agree then what can we expect but a fractured marriage?

Some thoughts:

1. It is going to cause a lot of bad feelings if one person (be it the husband or wife) always gets their way. So, it could conceivably happen that, even if a marriage is apparently harmonious, that the compliant spouse is deeply resentful and is collecting a big pile of grievances. That situation is also a path to divorce, just as much as conflict is.
2. A lot of times, when there is a seemingly insoluble problem, it really isn’t. If it isn’t a genuine emergency with stuff on fire, there’s little harm in waiting and thinking. (And if it is a genuine emergency, like one spouse wants the kids to be able to have sleepovers at Grandpa Sexoffender’s house, I think it is totally kosher to just not cooperate with that plan. Yes, it may take a toll on the marriage to just say “the kids are not going to stay overnight with your parents!”, but so would the kids being molested.)

Fortunately, most of the time, arguments are not actually very dire or urgent, even if they seem dire and urgent at the time. A lot of times, that’s an illusion. Here are some trouble-shooting ideas.

–Are we hungry or thirsty? If so, eat and drink. First have lunch or dinner, then fight.
–Are we tired? Is it late? If so, go to bed. Brilliant ideas rarely result from spousal arguments started late at night.
–Do we need to resolve this now? Let’s talk about it tomorrow/next week/next month and see how we feel then.
–Are there options we have not considered? There are rarely only two choices. Gather more options and put them on the table.
–Can we split the difference?
–Can we do a coin flip (if it’s just a question of preference)?
–Can we take turns?
–Can we consult a third party (priest, psychologist, etc.)?
–Are we doing a monthly budget with mutual agreement? We ought to be having that meeting and making a lot of decisions in a single sitting, rather than dealing with a hundred things later in the month when the money is already all spent.
–Is this situation fair? Does it put an unreasonable burden on one spouse? Is there a gross discrepancy in the amount of discretionary spending and free time that one spouse gets compared to the other? (Nothing is ever going to be 50/50, but it isn’t right to have 80/20 or 90/10 as the expected situation if both spouses are able-bodied.)
–Is there enough fun in our lives? Is one spouse getting nearly all the fun?

1. There are some very good books out there: John Gottman, Five Love Languages and Boundaries in Marriage. I also really like the book Don’t Shoot the Dog (which is about positive reinforcement generally). I’m currently reading the book “How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids,” which is funny, scary, and contains a lot of insight.
2. There are a lot of different ways to understand being submissive. At this point in my life, I understand it as making an effort to be pleasant and understanding, and to make an effort to use the trouble-shooting list and the books I’ve mentioned.

Again, very paradoxically, I’m actually much pleasanter and more laid back now that I don’t believe that being a good wife means living like Jeannie in I Dream of Jeannie. (In fact, Capt. Nelson’s life with Jeannie is, now that I’ve watched a few clips, pretty darn stressful for him.)