Looking for the Good in Your Spouse

It is so easy to pick out the faults of our spouse, but it is so detrimental to our relationships to do that. It causes us to make a habit of looking for the bad characteristics, when we should be looking for the good characteristics. In H. Wallace Goddard’s book, Drawing Heaven into Your Marriage, he talks about charity in marriage and how important it is to see the good in your spouse.

He quotes Wendy Watson who says, “the best-kept secret in many marriages is the strengths spouses see in each other .... An interesting fact about commending your spouse is that the more you do it, the more you see in him or her to commend."

I actually have experienced this quote that she shared! When my husband and I were first married, I always wanted to do cute little things to surprise him and let him know how much I love him! I had an idea to make a jar filled with slips of paper that had good qualities on them. I came up with so many that I wrote down on a sheet of notebook paper first. After I started putting his “good qualities” into a jar, I realized I didn’t have enough to completely fill up the jar. I figured that over the next couple of days, I would be able to come up with more. I became so aware of amazing unique qualities that my husband has, that it was probably obnoxious! He would say something, or do something, and I would realize that it was a good quality that I could write down!

Making that list about my husband, was probably one of the best things I could have done for our marriage. Even though we weren’t in any kind of marital trouble at that time, it was still a fun activity for me to do, and I think it can be an anchor for me whenever I could possibly start to fall into the trap of only noticing the faults that my husband has. Treating our spouses like gold and seeing the best in them, can help us to be quicker to forgive them as well. Goddard says, “… we can be like Jesus, seeing beyond the burden of sin to a soul struggling to be better. We can, with Jesus, say, ‘I forgive you of mistakes, shortcomings, and humanness. I welcome you into the fellowship of my love.’”

                                                        

This is a picture of one of the times I wrote out a list of everything that I loved about my husband, and why he was the best!