A Happy and Good Marriage – Sunday, February 19,1984
Marriages would be more successful if each would try to make his partner happy, rather than good.
But making our spouses good is a great temptation. We don’t live with anyone very long before we see their faults. We trip over their inefficiencies and sloppiness, suffer for their moments of selfishness. We’re stung by outbursts of anger, things they left undone. It doesn’t take a genius to see how they could improve our lives—if they would only change.
So, we make our lists, create improvement programs and remind our partners frequently of their faults. Others may nag, but we gently suggest, and see ourselves as virtuous all the while. After all, our efforts are only for their good.
Well, there is nothing that does less good in marriage than vowing to change the other. Marriage ought to be a sanctuary from a painful world, a place to soothe our feelings and gain the strength to run another day. But it can’t be if one partner is trying to remake the other. Then, instead, there is a discomfort, a feeling that home is a briar patch full of thorns where one does not quite measure up.
Worse, the improvement programs we design for someone else rarely work. Growth is self-initiated. It is an inner striving to be more. We can’t make someone kind or thoughtful. Fat people don’t lose weight because someone else tells them to. We can no more mold someone than tell a flower when to bloom.
We ought to give up the futile idea of making our partners good and concentrate on making them happy. That starts by accepting our helpmate, faults and all, with unconditional love. It means noticing the thousand good things our loved one does every day and offering praise for them. No one lives with a perfect person. So let us not be surprised that we don’t. For every change we’d make in our partners, they could list a change they’d make in us.
So, when we feel the urge to make somebody good, we can start with ourselves. When we want to make somebody happy, we can look to our partners. Ironically, if we make them happy, we’ll go a long way toward making them good.
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February 19, 1984
Broadcast Number 2,844