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TAKING OUT THE TRASH

Confess your trespasses to one another,

and pray for one another.

—JAMES 5:16

Every home accumulates trash, so we must take it out often. Failure to do so stinks up the entire home. Sin is like trash, and every home has it too. Repentance and forgiveness are how a couple takes their trash out.

If you are married, you will have conflict. You cannot avoid it because marriage is an unconditional commitment to an imperfect person.

1 sinner + 1 sinner ≠ 0 conflict

You will sin against your spouse, and your spouse will sin against you. Couples who claim to never fight are either lying or living completely passionless, independent, parallel lives, so emotionally distant that hurting each other is virtually impossible. You will fight. The question is, will you fight well to the glory of God and the good of your marriage?

Dr. John Gottman has become world renowned for his work observing the ways couples respond to each other. Over the course of sixteen years on various occasions, he observed forty-nine married couples in an apartment-laboratory and recorded everything from their facial expressions to their heart rates in order to investigate what triggers might suggest a propensity for divorce. He said, “In 91 percent of the cases where I predicted that a couple’s marriage would eventually fail or succeed, time has proven me right.”1

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Echoing the apocalyptic language of the Bible, he said that when conflict arises, there are “four horsemen” who are certain to multiply relational pain and result in marital death.2 This is especially true when a discussion begins with a “harsh startup” where tempers are flaring and the tone is more contemptuous, because the beginning of a conflict sets it in a direction toward war or peace.

Horseman number one is criticism. A complaint is simply pointing out something in your spouse that you find annoying, displeasing, or frustrating. Unlike a complaint, a criticism goes deeper to attack someone’s character or personality. Simply, a complaint attacks the problem, whereas a criticism attacks the person.

Horseman number two is contempt. Contempt is showing disgust for your spouse with such things as name-calling, mocking, condescending humor, belittling, demeaning, and body language (rolling your eyes, huffing, glaring, and sneering). Contempt grows over time if conflicts are not resolved, and we come to despise our spouses because our unresolved and unforgiven troubles stack our negative thoughts into a mountain of disgust. Contempt can also include belligerence, which is an aggressive action marked by provoking our spouses to harm us, or threatening to harm them in some way. Contempt invariably leads to more conflict and pushes a couple further from reconciliation.

Horseman number three is defensiveness. Defensiveness occurs when the guilty person refuses to apologize or back down from the conflict. Instead, the guilty person excuses his or her behavior and even blames the other spouse in an effort to be the morally superior one who presides over the conflict as judge. Defensiveness results in a standoff between enemies rather than a truce between allies.

Horseman number four is stonewalling. Stonewalling is when we stop working for oneness and settle for two lonely, parallel lives. This can include separate financial lives, social lives, spiritual lives, and even separate bedrooms. Acts of stonewalling include tuning out to ignore your spouse, turning your back and walking away from a conversation, and simply disengaging emotionally and verbally by checking out, surfing the Internet, turning up the television, or just plain ignoring your spouse. Husbands do fully 85 percent of stonewalling.

When the four horsemen—criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling— take up ongoing residence in a marriage, statistically it will end in divorce. Are any of these four horsemen riding around your home, slashing your marriage to pieces? What can be done about it beyond just learning to coexist, trying not to upset your spouse, or accepting that your