A Whale Of A Lesson

A Whale of a Lesson

God blesses those who work for peace, for they will be called the children of God.

Matthew 5:9

Writer Amy Sutherland learned an important relationship lesson in a very unlikely place. She wrote about it for the New York Times in an article called, “What Shamu Taught Me About a Happy Marriage.”

Sutherland begins by explaining that after twelve years of marriage, she had become dismayed that her husband Scott still exhibited several irritating habits. Sound familiar? “These minor annoyances are not the stuff of separation and divorce,” she writes, “but in sum they began to dull my love for Scott. . . . So, like many wives before me, I ignored a library of advice books and set about improving him. By nagging, of course, which only made his behavior worse.” She goes on to describe how in response to this “improvement” her husband would drive faster instead of slower; shave less frequently, not more; and leave his smelly workout clothes on the bedroom floor longer than ever.

The breakthrough came for Amy while researching a book. She attended a school in California for exotic animal trainers where she saw them teach animals to do things you might never expect them to do: elephants to paint, hyenas to turn a pirouette. And that’s when it clicked. She wasn’t seeing the nagging from her husband’s point of view. She wasn’t thinking how it would feel to be nagged.

If she were in her husband’s shoes, she would be far more motivated to improve her behaviors if she were rewarded for the good than if she were punished for the bad. “After all,” she reasoned, “you don’t get a sea lion to balance a ball on the end of its nose by nagging.” Back in her home state of Maine, she began thanking Scott if he threw one dirty shirt into the hamper. “If he threw in two,” she says, “I’d kiss him. Meanwhile, I would step over any soiled clothes on the floor without one sharp word, though I did sometimes kick them under the bed. But as he basked in my appreciation, the piles became smaller.”

You get the point. In those pesky marital matters that can become big sources of conflict but that really are small, when we focus on the positive, the negatives seem to take care of themselves. See if you can shift your focus from correction to appreciation and enjoy the results of this change in your marriage!

I always prefer to believe the best of everybody. It saves so much trouble.

—Rudyard Kipling