My Husbands Talking

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I kind of feel like there are two separate topics running here…🤨
 
Oh…what an awful secular way to look at a marriage, defensively. Wrong-headed.

The pain with respect to mortification is the bending of our own impatience, self-focus, and defects.
 
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Edward_H said:
“…That joke, that witty remark held on the tip of your tongue; the cheerful smile for those who annoy you; that silence when you’re unjustly accused; your friendly conversation with people whom you find boring and tactless; the daily effort to overlook one irritating detail or another in the persons who live with you… this, with perseverance, is indeed solid interior mortification.”

St Josemaria
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It doesn’t sound like St. Josemaria was primarily talking about marriage.
Edward_H said:
Oh…what an awful secular way to look at a marriage, defensively. Wrong-headed.
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What part of what I said was secular?

Also, with all due respect, aren’t you a divorced guy?
 
Happily married 33 years to my first bride. And even more so, once I began to more deeply understand that love in marriage demands a constant spirit of mortification, a happy one too.

The more we seek the greatest good of our spouse, the utter happiness of our spouse - even though it may cause us to have to push against our impatience, our annoyance, our self-focus, our comfort…the happier we are, if it’s done for God.
 
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Edward_H said:
Happily married 33 years. And even more so, once I began to more deeply understand that love in marriage demands a constant spirit of mortification, a happy one too.
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Sorry, I must have been thinking of somebody else!

Married almost 20 years. I find that we do much better when I stopped doing the silently-sacrificing-and-seething thing (which my husband never noticed anyway). We get much better results from me speaking up and calmly explaining my needs and my reasoning before I’m mad.
 
Edward_H said:
The more we seek the greatest good of our spouse, the utter happiness of our spouse - even though it may cause us to have to push against our impatience, our annoyance, our self-focus, our comfort…the happier we are, if it’s done for God.
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That’s begging the question, isn’t it?

How do we know that our spouse’s greatest good doesn’t involve communicating with them?
 
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Maybe so…the sacrificing has to be done with the right intention: love of God. It’s never easy, but it gets sweeter, makes daily prayer more lively and warm, like a family chat.

The “50/50” balance approach tends to have highs and lows.
 
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Of course, but we need to be less “scorecard focused”…examining ourselves instead: do I focus too much on my spouse’s defects, do I offer up the annoyance, do I give annoyances a supernatural intention, do I give in to “interior complaint” too frequently, do I mortify my critical spirit frequently. Do I take this to prayer, do I confess it?

It’s our own defects that make us unhappy, and cause us to focus on someone else’s!
 
Edward_H said:
It’s our own defects that make us unhappy, and cause us to focus on someone else’s!
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If somebody punched me in the face, I’d feel unhappy about that, and it wouldn’t be because of a character defect on my part.
 
Make a recording of one particularly bad day, and play it back to him. He may think and talk in stream of consciousness style, not realizing that the Energizer Bunny is envious. His wife, not so much.
 
momof2angells said:
We do have breaks every now and again but when he’s ready to chat he does get offended if I don’t give him undivided attention, even if I’m in the middle of cooking or other activity.
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Going back to the OP, I think it would be fair to point out to him, “Babe, I can give partial attention to you now or full attention later. What do you prefer?”
 
Interesting leap of comparisons! So odd. The world has become “black belt” at taking offense. Incredible.
 
I’m incredibly offended, but I have yet to decided what for. I will get back to you all on that. Please hold. 🤣
 
Or maybe better…“Honey…I love how you explain things…you’re so passionate about these topics…”
 
Here’s another possibility:

Husband (bless his heart) has a sort of conversational disability where, when he’s got a thought all cued up to go, he literally cannot stop himself from saying it, even if the course of the conversation changed 20 seconds ago or I started talking. This means that it’s very likely that I am going to get interrupted/the subject is going to get changed/etc.

One way to think of this is that husband is (cognitively speaking) operating a conversational 18-wheeler or freight train and needs substantial braking distance.
 
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The monuments to annoyances some
people seem to need to build.

Not my style…when one’s prayer life is more continuous throughout the day one rarely lets oneself “give in to” such critical spirit. The smile in our soul will cause our spouse to want to ask questions or just smile back.

Different approach.

Enough of this topic.
 
My husband occasionally has to tell us all to shush while he’s driving/concentrating on work/taxes/whatever.

That’s not a moral failing on his part–he just needs to concentrate on what he’s doing.
 
I’m pleasantly surprised it took 25+ posts before a thread on the Internet got heated :poop:

Anyway, I don’t see anything wrong with what Xantippe is saying, especially if the husband is getting annoyed about ‘being interrupted’ when he’s already talkative to a fault. The word “soapboxing” comes to mind and it can be both a highly obnoxious and an arrogant habit if it develops enough. Most people have met at least once such person either at work or in school.

Not saying he’s an all around bad guy or anything but in a mature marriage you can and should be allowed to bring this stuff up. Just be merciful when you do otherwise it is almost guaranteed to turn into a spat.
 
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