Dare 27: Eliminate the poison of unrealistic expectations in your home. Think of one area where your spouse has told you you’re expecting too much and tell them your sorry for being so hard on them about it. Promise them you’ll seek to understand and assure them of your unconditional love.
Funny how I haven’t been blogging and skipped a couple of days doing the dare, and then today, when I start back, God paces just what I need to hear. Today’s dare is about encouraging your spouse. I know Cory and I both went into our marriage with higher expectations than what we should have had. I’m sure that is one of the biggest mistakes made by newly engaged/married couples. I know I made promises to Cory that I haven’t kept. A lot of marriages make promises that aren’t kept.
The book says that if a wife expects her husband to always be on time, clean up after himself, and UNDERSTAND ALL her needs, she will be constantly disappointed. I know a lot of time for me, I put Cory at such an in-human high standard that he is destined to fail in my eyes. Especially when I want him to read my mind. The truth is that I should understand that he is human, which means, he will forget things, sometimes he will be thoughtless. That way, when he is the opposite of those things, I can responsible in a loving and kind way.
If we don’t allow our spouses to be human, divorce WILL happen. Today’s dare says that is why we must encourage them rather than putting harmful expectations for them. One thing I hear from other couples who are struggling, and the thing I fight with is back to that selfish thing. I must focus more on my personal responsibility and improving myself rather than one demanding more from Cory. This is tough. I have felt like it is my responsibility to tell Cory what he needs to do better. What he needs to do to make me feel loved, but it isn’t about that. It is about changing myself. Only God can change your spouse – and the truth is, I really love Cory for who he is and how he is! The Bible has a verse about this that says “take the log out of your own eye, before pointing out the speck in your brothers.” I’m sure there are days where Cory feels like he has to walk on egg shells around me.
The most common response to something like this is saying that the problem is not yourself but your spouse. If that is the way we feel, then we might as well stop the dare, and stop working on our marriages now. What I think is is important and critical to the future of our marriage, and what I feel I must say he needs to improve on, can cause an attitude where few people will respond totally objectively, but rather critically. When we dated, I would bend over backwards for him, and ignore his minor imperfections, and wasn’t that when we were happiest? Sometimes my goal-oriented personality puts high demands on Cory – but truthfully I need to just make Cory happy. The Bible says, “Encourage one another and build up one another….”
So my goal today is really to quit making excuses for why I don’t respond to Cory in ways that I should be. It will be tough for me, because there is still a lot to overcome, but the truth is that I’m scarring his personality by not responding sometimes in the way he needs to me. He needs that respect from me. This is going to be harder than I thought, because I expect so much from Cory – but really isn’t he perfect just the way he is? There are several areas I can improve with this….one, I expect him to think of doing little special things for me all the time, two I expect him to make me feel important and more loved – and third…well, I think those are big enough for me to overcome!!!
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