10/08/2026
What will other people think?
My children have been some of my biggest teachers in life because they have forced me to look at things from perspectives different from my own. They have helped me unlearn some things I thought were simply right and wrong.
I remember one lesson my daughter taught me when she was younger. At our church, the youth would occasionally go away for weekend trips, so they only needed to pack one or two outfits. My daughter had this particular bag she always wanted to use. I thought it looked awful. To make matters worse, it didn't have a zipper. We had plenty of other perfectly decent bags at home, so naturally, I wanted her to choose one of those.
One day, I asked her, what if you're talking to YPK (who was the Youth Pastor) and your bag falls over and everything spills out? your underwear, pads, everything! I thought I had made a very compelling argument. She looked at me calmly and said, that's okay, Mommy. YPK knows I wear underwear. It's not a big deal.
I WAS SPEECHLESS and a little annoyed.
Here I was making something a huge deal that, to her, wasn't a big deal at all. She was comfortable. She wasn't doing anything wrong and nobody was being harmed. I was simply uncomfortable with how I imagined the situation might look. She has also reminded me more than once, mummy, you always tell me I shouldn't care what people think, but when you say that, it makes me think you're caring about what people think.
Touché.
That was a good lesson and I wonder, how often we create unnecessary tension in our marriages because we mistake our preferences for principles?
We want our spouse to dress a certain way, do things a certain way, respond a certain way, organize things a certain way or behave in a way that makes us feel comfortable when other people are watching. At times, without realizing it, we aren't protecting the marriage, we're protecting our image.
When we turn every preference into a principle, our spouse can begin to feel like they are constantly being corrected. They may start to feel that they can't simply be themselves without being judged, fixed or reminded that they are doing it "wrong."
That isn't the kind of freedom I want in my marriage. There are things worth standing firm on: honesty, fidelity, respect, safety, integrity and living according to our values. Those things matter. But then there are things that simply come down to, I wouldn't do it that way.
Loving our spouse means having the maturity to say, I wouldn't do it that way, but it doesn't have to be my way. We are not creating another version of ourselves in marriage. We are learning how to love another person without constantly trying to make them more like us.
If my spouse isn't hurting anyone, violating our values or compromising our marriage, maybe I don't need to correct everything that makes me uncomfortable. It's important to ponder on whether I am protecting my marriage or protecting myself from what other people might think.
My faith matters to me. I want my choices to be pleasing to God. But I don't want to live my marriage based on the opinions of other people especially when those opinions have nothing to do with morality, character or the health of our relationship. At the end of the day, I have to live with my spouse, not with everybody else.
One of the ways we can strengthen our marriages is by learning what is worth addressing and what is simply worth letting go.
What do you need to stop treating as a problem simply because your spouse does it differently from you?
