If It’s Not Sin . . .

Accept one another, then, just as Christ accepted you, in order to bring praise to God.

Romans 15:7

WENDY AND DON JOINED EIGHT OTHER COUPLES IN THEIR PREMARITAL CLASS. During one session, everyone wrote down a list of their differences. Much to Don and Wendy’s chagrin, their list ran longer than any other couple’s—three full pages! “We were the one couple the counselors didn’t think would survive,” Wendy remembered, “but we knew we would.”

After they got married, their personal differences started to become irritants. “I was always in a hurry,” Wendy said, “and Don was so methodical. I flew by the seat of my pants, and he was so organized. I let things slide, but he had to know every little detail.”

Inevitably, these personality differences created moments of tension—little frustrations that crept up at the grocery store, while sitting around at home, or as they carried out the basic rituals surrounding dinnertime. In the aftermath of one such moment, Wendy found herself praying, “God, what do you want me to do here? Show me what my response is supposed to be.”

The tension had been building and now seemed about to boil over. Wendy felt “really frustrated and angry,” but she had learned enough to ask God for his perspective on all of it. His insight sent Wendy to her knees. She felt suddenly overcome by peace, and God, in his gentle, quiet voice, whispered, “Wendy, if it’s not sin, you can’t demand that it change.”

Wendy realized she could ask her husband to change, but she couldn’t demand that he change or nag the change out of him. If the irritating action or character quality wasn’t sin, she’d have to learn to put up with it—unless Don decided to change it voluntarily.

That quiet conversation with God radically changed Wendy’s attitude toward her husband. “Just because Don is organized and methodical and meticulous and can take his time when I want him to hurry up, well, that’s not sin,” she said. “Yeah, it can be frustrating shopping with him sometimes, but I can’t demand that he become like me. Accepting this really freed up our relationship, and I stopped being such a nag. After all, it was really my problem, not Don’s. Once I accepted this, our marriage started to come together, and everything became easier. We still have our struggles and our moments, but when I hear others talk about their marriages, I think Don and I have an unusually good one.”

In fact, though Wendy and Don were pegged as “least likely to succeed” out of the nine couples taking the premarital class, eighteen years later, they are the only couple still together.

God has used Wendy’s insight to reach out to others as well. She works at a preschool, where a young mom confessed she was about to leave her husband.

“Why?” Wendy asked.

When the woman shared her reason, Wendy responded, “All men are like that. All you’re going to do is leave a man who loves your kid to marry a different man who hates your kid, and eventually he’ll do the same thing. Why in the world would you want to do that?”

Wendy later said she “feels horribly sad for men because women don’t understand them and fault them for not doing things they usually aren’t equipped to do.”

God’s words to Wendy can revolutionize any marriage. The man or woman you’re married to is his or her own person. Some things about him or her may not be to your liking, but if the things that bug you aren’t sin, you have no right to demand that he or she change.

You may wish your husband would be more spontaneous or your wife less gregarious (or vice versa), but those are personality traits, not characteristics of sin.

If you persist in trying to change things that aren’t sin issues, you’re going to make your marriage life miserable. Dr. John Gottman, a leading marriage researcher, pointed out what he calls “one of the most surprising truths about marriage”:

Most marital arguments cannot be resolved. Couples spend year after year trying to change each other’s mind—but it can’t be done. This is because most of their disagreements are rooted in fundamental differences of lifestyle, personality, or values. By fighting over these differences, all they succeed in doing is wasting their time and harming their marriage.^a

If you’ve been working on an issue for ten years or more, and the issue is one of annoyance rather than morality, here’s my how-to advice: let it go. Repeat to yourself, “This will never change.”

If the issue is one of annoyance rather than morality, here’s my how-to advice: let it go.

Instead of trying to resolve these differences, find harmony in accepting them and learning to live with them. Such a response calls us to humility, where we no longer assume that our way is the only way or even the best way.

Different people have different quirks. We married people with different backgrounds, different outlooks, and different personalities from ours. In fact, those very things often attracted us to our spouses in the first place. Even so, at times these backgrounds, outlooks, or personalities may frustrate us, anger us, or inconvenience us, but if it’s not sin, we can’t demand change.