Tomorrow I might be able to listen. In the mean time I have a question for you all. How do you deal with untrue accusations, even if they are not all that important? Wife sent me a text in the afternoon and said I had left the A/C on. I said, it must have been from the night before because I didn't turn the A/C on when I came home for lunch. She said that she had turned it off when she left in the morning. My inclination as a very literal person is to get the story straight. In the past I probably would have insisted on truth no matter how trivial and inflamed my wife more than likely. I ignored it because in the end what possible good could come from me pursuing truth on something as silly as that? Have any of you encountered this regularly? Does it bother you?

YES and YES. Not exactly the same but definitely similar.

I hope this is the kind of behavior that will be more likely simply not to become an issue if the other spouse gets on board--they will be hopefully actively trying to NOT love bust then. BUT I am still trying to sort out what is a reasonable complaint and what should be avoided for the sake of trying not to love bust. I certainly want my spouse to have right to make a complaint b/c I know its important. But how often does this need to be? Should uncertain things be brought up? And surely they should believe you if you say something? Like when you said that had not turned on the AC or a conversion along those lines that occured btwn my DH and me today.

Used to bother me a lot. Noe I realize my marriage is better served by a philosophy of "everyone's entitled to their opinions, even if wrong." Avoid trying to straighten your wife out like this. It's a lovebank withdrawal. She can still fall in love with you even if she holds opinions about you that you believe are mistaken. You may worry that her belief that you left the ac on is a lovebank withdrawal, but you will lose out worse trying to fix it. Respect her and respect this as a simple difference of opinion. Otherwise you will make her feel extremely unimportant.

No, Jessica, your spouse is entitled to their own beliefs and should not have to believe something just because you say it.

I started saying, "Thanks! I didn't know that."

It's truthful, it's kind, and it lets the other person feel heard.

Great clip on complaining.
Radio clip on how to complain

That or, "you may be right."

You are not saying they are, you are not saying they aren't. You are simply saying something to let it go.

How to DEAL with it internally is another matter. At some point, you have to be honest about how this little love buster impacts you.

The question is, do you believe she cares? (Not a DJ, I'm asking your opinion, your belief, we both know she could feel differently than you think/believe she does.) Is the cost of being honest worth the benefit you might get out of it. I.E. do you prefer being right, or married?

Yeah, you want both, but sometimes you can't have that.

Hi Hilltopper!

I don't make it around much anymore, work has exploded and I'm content to sleep a few hours and eat a meal or two a day lately, but I had to send the forum link to a friend dealing with an affair tonight and noticed you posting.

A book that I was forced to read for work that has helped me in my marriage was Crucial Confrontations/Crucial Conversations. There are two, and to me they promote a communication of keeping the conversation safe, learning to recognize when the other person is no longer 'safe' and communicating, and promote almost POJA throughout. They in no way replace Dr Harley's books or work, but they helped me be able to utilize POJA/PORH better with DH because of how I communicated. Some people, like my boss, just have this naturally. Me, not so much.

Good Luck!

Good call here. I like that model and will begin using it immediately.

See that is the key. I don't think she really cares and her Love Bank is the same as it was before she thought I left the A/C on. She has repeatedly said over the last 10 years of marriage, "You always have to be right." I used to respond, "Well honey there is truth and there is untruth. There is right and there is wrong." Major love buster. It is as if to say, "Well I'm sorry you want to believe in something that is false, you are a fool for doing so." No wonder she didn't like me back then. We had a similar discussion about weight loss last night. Sure there are a myriad of things that contribute to a successful weight loss journey, but for the most part it is in creating a calorie deficit. 3500 calories = 1 lb of fat and she wanted to know how many calories between now and our vacation she needed to burn with her BMI to lose X number of lbs. She did not see it the way I saw it. I'm smarter now than I used to be, so I shut my mouth on it till a little later in dinner when she got around to asking me to show her on my phone. Ding, ding, ding! It made perfect sense to her and so we created a chart that lasts 28 days to measure our progress. Difference is it was on her terms and it was done without being a know it all, condescending, lecturing jerk.

This is kind of like picking and choosing your battles. Whereas we can't control our emotions and reactions to certain things, we CAN control how we respond to them with our brains. My heart told me to immediately point out an untruth, but my brain knew that keeping the conversation safe meant to take the high road. In addition my brain told me that there was no benefit in choosing to fight this battle whatsoever and that my wife's love bank and mine would both fall had I pursued it.

One thing my wife and I noticed after we got committed to not trying to straighten each other out, was that our children tried to do that to each other (and to us) all the time.

So now one of the things we are constantly saying is "Hey, don't try to straighten your brother out." And we hear hysterical cries from little guys of "S said .... " and we patiently reply "Just say 'Okay, S,'" and slowly but surely we are turning the hysteria off and raising kids who might be really nice and respectful adults some day.

It's really something to me when I see my own bad behavior executed by my child. Magnified, and done in a six year old way.

Teaching them serves as a reminder to me that it's okay if other people are "wrong" (i.e., remember something different from me) from time to time.

Threadjack: you sound like a man who's read the Hacker's Diet.

Learning to have a respectful conversation is an amazing process. You are right, there is truth, and there is untruth. But it's just amazing to sit and talk with someone who believes something completely different about truth, and put the conversation into a mode of "I want to understand what you believe, and why, and I want to be able to explain it, in my own words, from your point of view."

Part of the key is what Dr. Harley has in his article on religious differences / respectful persuasion on this site: willingness to be persuaded. That's hard to do when you are convinced you are right, but giving your wife the opportunity to persuade you opens incredible doors by showing immense respect.

Keep it up!

And you'll have one lucky wife. I'd love for my husband to learn this

So true, so true. Part of the reason that my wife always told me that I make her feel stupid is because guess what? I DID! Who in their right mind would want to spend time with someone that would consistently make them feel stupid? I know I wouldn't and neither would my wife. If my wife asks me how something works I'd love to tell her, but providing unsolicited commentary on something she might say that I believe to be false in an effort to educate or belittle her is a big giant No No!

Hill,

Have you ever gone back and reread your thread and seen how far you've grown?

From an outsider it's educational.

Yes I did that awhile back. Not sure why my thread has traction, probably because we had my wife Tgrace posting for a good 4-5 months and it was heated!

You're figuring this out.

Prisca used to complain that I would talk circles around her. I honestly had no idea what she meant. She meant this! I haven't heard this complaint in a while, so I hope that that means I'm doing better.


I love Dr. Harley's "no unsolicited advice" policy. It's goof for all of life!

So is spellcheck...oops, that was unsolicited

Yes there are too many parallels between Markos/Prisca and Hilltopper/Tgrace aren't there? She frequently would tell me that I would present arguments as, "Well I'm sorry, but the facts are just the facts." It was as if to say, "Well I'm sorry you feel that way, but you'll have to stop feeling that way immediately because I've figured it all out myself for you so you don't have to." Ugggh, gross behavior.