Your Most Important Marital Asset

Your Most Important Marital Asset

All of you should be of one mind. Sympathize with each other. Love each other as brothers and sisters. Be tenderhearted, and keep a humble attitude.

1 Peter 3:8

“Isn’t that the truth?” Leslie said as we sat quietly in our car waiting for the light to turn. She was referring to the bumper sticker on the car ahead of us. It read: “Misery is an option.”

And it is. If you are miserable today, you can probably point to a set of circumstances that made you so. You may be justified in your miserable feelings. But, at the risk of sounding brash, you’d still be wrong. Your circumstances didn’t cause you nearly as much misery as the attitude you chose in response to them.

W. C. Fields once said, “Attitude is more important than the past, than education, than money, than circumstances, than what people do or say. It is more important than appearance, giftedness, or skill.”^a And pastor Chuck Swindoll echoed those thoughts when he wrote, “The longer I live the more I realize the impact of attitude on life.” He goes on to say, “The remarkable thing is we have a choice every day regarding the attitude we will embrace for that day. We cannot change our past . . . we cannot change the fact that people will act in a certain way. We cannot change the inevitable.” He then makes this remarkable statement: “The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude.”^b

Happy couples don’t have a certain set of circumstances; they have a certain set of attitudes. It’s tempting, no doubt, to complain about our circumstances—or our partners—when they aren’t what we want, but our complaining only makes matters worse. No one has ever heard a couple say, “We hit a real turning point in our relationship once we learned to complain and blame each other.” It’s absurd. Your destiny as a couple is determined not by your complaining but by your decision as two individuals to rise above whatever it is you are tempted to complain about, even if it is each other.

What is one situation or circumstance in your lives that might benefit from an attitude adjustment today? How can you give one another the gift of an uncomplaining disposition?

He who has so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own dispositions, will waste his life in fruitless efforts.

—Samuel Johnson

^a 57

^b 58