Every person arrives at marriage with a fully developed hard drive, which neither is going to change. It takes at least 15 years of marriage before you discover that is what you are dealing with: a hard drive. No rewiring manual. So if you can’t change it, you have to switch marital strategies in your brain and heart to understand it, adjust, and adapt.
We all enter marriage blissfully thinking, “At last, I’ve hand-picked someone who will understand me, for days without end, and will emotionally nourish me, sigh…oh bliss.” But what we find out somewhere into the marriage, is what God intended it for all along. It was He who hand-picked the idea of marriage, for His purposes, not ours. Marriage is really God’s crash course in learning how to understand and ardently love someone else to mature into godlikeness. It is a steep drive up a long hill to learn to be selfless. It is a graduate course in maturity. It is thoroughly and absolutely all about learning how to cherish another person, through thick and thin… ending with even their old age incontinence. Whew!
The great key to marriage is to constantly look at life through your mate’s point of view. Solves almost all problems. Understanding why the person is responding/acting that way leads to tendernesses galore.
For more on this topic, order Renee’s book, Wise Womanly Ways to Grow Your Marriage—and listen to Kevin Swanson’s interview of Renee on Generations Radio. "Veteran moms-encouragement speaker, Renee Ellison provides some practical, down-to-earth, biblical advice for wives who are married to husbands who are sinners. . . or even difficult, passive, unbelieving husbands. What does it mean to submit in the biblical sense, without giving way to sin?"
