A House Divided

CORE PRACTICE #75: Practice thinking about an issue on which you disagree from your spouse’s point of view.

They must not slander anyone and must avoid quarreling. Instead, they should be gentle and show true humility to everyone. —Titus 3:2

TONY

You’ve probably heard about the volatile relationship between our sixteenth president, Abraham Lincoln, and his wife, Mary Todd. In fact, their differences were stark: He was a backwoods lawyer and politician; she, a refined Southern aristocrat. Both were ambitious, though Mary seemed to have factored that aspiration into her decision to marry the tall, gangly lawyer. About four years after their marriage, Abraham introduced her to a colleague during a party at their house. After greeting the man, Mary said about her husband, “He is to be President of the United States some day; if I had not thought so I never would have married him, for you can see he is not pretty.”^a Before you’re too hard on Mary, consider what Abraham told the wife of a friend about eighteen months before they wed: “It would just kill me to marry Mary Todd.”^b

Their relationship remained unsettled after their marriage. When they got into an argument, Mary would sometimes scream and throw things. Most often, her husband just walked away. (No doubt he was grateful that, as a circuit-riding lawyer, he had to travel to try cases about six months out of the year.) In their years together, Mary soothed herself by shopping and then tried to keep her purchases secret from her frugal husband. In one three-month period, she bought three hundred pairs of gloves.

Interestingly, there is evidence that Abraham was proud of his wife and that Mary Todd idolized her husband. Yet it seems they never mastered the art of considering things from the other’s perspective. Nor did either learn how to converse effectively. Abraham apparently said little at home, and Mary spoke quite a lot but said little to build up her husband or their marriage. Sadly, they appear to have lived in a house divided.

While I’m not sure it would have helped the Lincolns, I like the word picture that Erwin Lutzer, pastor of Chicago’s Moody Church, provides to help other spouses in unhappy marriages consider the source of their frustration. “Put a pencil in a glass of water and it will appear crooked. In the same way, our perceptions of others, and especially our perception of ourselves, is always skewed. . . . Anger, pride, and selfishness cause us to see everyone else (particularly our marriage partner) as bent.”^c

According to the apostle Paul, the antidote to having a distorted view of someone else is to be gentle and humble in our approach to that person. In a marriage, that means acknowledging and accepting our spouse’s unique makeup—even when we’re as different as the humble Abe Lincoln and his aristocratic wife.

Adventure Application: As you go about your daily tasks at home, do you find that you get irritated over the same type of issues with your spouse? If so, talk about what may drive your differences in those areas.