Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. ~ Victor Frankle
How do you respond to offenses in your marriage?
I grew up on the coast of Maine. I would find it amusing to take friends that had not grown up there out on the rocks. I would run right along while they would timidly step from rock to rock, fearful of falling.
When you are not used to walking on rocks that move or are slippery you have to move cautiously. There can be a real danger of injury. Rushing ahead without regard for the terrain is foolish.
But once my friends got the hang of it they too would run right along with me.
In marriage it is inevitable that things will arise to make us feel offended. If you think about it, an offense is something like those rocks, something that can make you stumble.
The thing is that the rocks will not accommodate a person’s inability to navigate. How silly for one to run along, stumble and then got mad at the rock for not being in the right place.
Feeling offended is your cue that you have encountered an unmet expectation.
What do you do when you feel offended by your spouse?
The offense is the stimulus mentioned by Victor Frankle in the quote above. It is like a rock in your pathway that is placed just so as to make us stumble. Will you keep running ahead and risk injury? Are you going to let it make you stumble?
Or will you pause, take care, and adjust your expectations and thus learn to walk without falling?
Offenses are bound to come our way. Whether they stay a stumbling block or become a stepping stone is your choice. Learn to walk rather than blame the rock.
For us to get real results in the real world, we must be in touch with what is, not what we wish things were or think things should be or are led by others to believe they are. The only thing that is going to be real in the end is what is. ~ Henry Cloud
Ten Random Date (and Micro Date) Ideas to Get Your Creative Juices Flowing:
- Feed birds outside your house
- Go four wheeling
- Go snorkeling
- Go to a petting zoo
- Have a movie marathon of trilogies
- Make ice-cream sundaes together
- Put together a 3-D puzzle
- Sneak away from a party and make out
- Visit a bakery
- Watch Wheel of Fortune and play along
What are you going to put your date calendar this week?
A Little Love Digest:
- Check out these 15 Romantic Winter Dates That Your Wallet Won’t Hate
- “How much of your stress, frustration, disappointment, anger, irritation, pissed-offedness comes from one little thing? Almost all of it comes from your expectations, and when things (inevitably) don’t turn out as we expect, from wishing things were different. We build these expectations in our heads of what other people should do, what our lives should be like, how other drivers should behave … and yet it’s all fantasy. It’s not real.” CLICK HERE TO KEEP READING Toss Your Expectations Into the Ocean by Leo Babauta.
- Dan Gilbert challenges the idea that we’ll be miserable if we don’t get what we want. Our “psychological immune system” lets us feel truly happy even when things don’t go as planned. He shares that, in our ardent, lifelong pursuit of happiness, most of us have the wrong map. In the same way that optical illusions fool our eyes — and fool everyone’s eyes in the same way — Gilbert argues that our brains systematically misjudge what will make us happy. And these quirks in our cognition make humans very poor predictors of our own bliss. In this TED Talk his engaging — and often hilarious — style pokes fun at typical human behavior and invokes pop-culture references everyone can relate to. CLICK HERE TO WATCH The Surprising Science of Happiness
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