Curbing Your Criticism

Curbing Your Criticism

Most important of all, continue to show deep love for each other, for love covers a multitude of sins.

1 Peter 4:8

Consider the following couple we recently saw in our counseling office:

The husband: “Tina just doesn’t get it. While I’m working my tail off to close a deal at work, she thinks I just go out for long lunches and talk on the phone all day—and then doesn’t understand why I might be tired when I get home. Meanwhile, she’s watching the tube and taking the kids to the park—then complaining about how tough her day was. You do the math.”

The wife: “Ron has no idea how much work keeping track of two toddlers is. He thinks I’m out with my girlfriends when I take the kids to a park or that I’m home eating chocolates when I’m actually doing the laundry or preparing dinner. I mean, he thinks I have it so easy and that I’m so lazy. Truth is, I miss having a career, but we both decided we didn’t want our kids in day care. Ron never seems to remember that.”

Can you feel the tension in this relationship? It’s palpable. In social situations (whether it be in a counseling office or at a restaurant with a friend) it’s often all too easy to tell loving couples from warring ones. Almost everyone has been at a party where one half of a couple has taken a public jab at the other. Perhaps it was along the lines of, “I keep wishing John would get out of his recliner, turn off the television, and help me out in the yard like he promised!” Most would agree that it’s a bad idea to use the cover of an audience to say something you might not say in private. Couples who can’t contain their anger in public are in serious trouble.

Loving couples, on the other hand, use every opportunity to boost each other in front of other people and to cast each other in the best light—much as they did in their dating days, when they wanted their friends and family to appreciate and like their new love. They say things like, “She has a heart of gold. I still can’t get over how she gives herself to others,” or “He is one of the most patient men I’ve ever known.” Loving couples—those that go the distance—praise one another in private and in public.

Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain—and most fools do.

—Dale Carnegie