How often do your hear a man put their wife down in front of their mates? Or the woman put her man down in front of her friends? It’s not good for a marriage to do that.
Whether we like it or not, the comments other people make can affect our self esteem. A friend recently was very upset and hurt by a comment made by a family member. He tossed it off as a throw away comment and expected other people to laugh. She wasn’t laughing. The comment deeply hurt her. And it’s the sort of throw away comment with a sting, I’ve heard many times in marriages. It’s something we need to be extremely careful about not doing in our marriages.
Instead of putting our partner down and making jokes at their expense we need to be encouraging and building up their self esteem. After all, isn’t that what we’d like our spouse to do for us?
Does your spouse make you doubt yourself? Do you make your spouse doubt themselves? It’s so easy for doubts to creep in.
Have you ever been in the situation where you thought you’ve done something or put something somewhere but then suddenly your spouse or someone else tells you, you haven’t? Or you’re sure you told them something and they insist you haven’t. You can start to doubt yourself. Did I? Didn’t I?
When I was a teenager, I remember reading a Victoria Holt book, I can’t remember the name but possibly Kirkland Revels, and it was about a woman and someone was trying to make her doubt herself and in the end try and make her doubt her sanity. Now maybe we don’t take it to that extreme, but we can certainly hurt feelings, we can make our spouse feel inadequate and unloved by careless words, sarcasm, ridicule and negative comments. All of them are detrimental to marriage. So let’s replace them, with encouragement, praise and positive re-enforcement.
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