No Trash Talking

Philippians 4:8

⁸ And now, dear brothers and sisters, one final thing. Fix your thoughts on what is true, and honorable, and right, and pure, and lovely, and admirable. Think about things that are excellent and worthy of praise.

Luke 6:31

31 Do to others as you would like them to do to you.

On bible.org a Christian woman posted a blog entry called, “8 easy steps to trash a relationship.” The following is what she wrote:

1. Be Selfish

Everything thing needs to revolve around you. If you find something you like to do that ignores your spouses’ or your significant others feelings and interests, go ahead and do it! Too bad if they don’t like it! You only go around once in life, so grab for all the gusto you can get!

2. Pick at each other

If you know that something you do annoys your spouse, be sure to do it often and intentionally. Be critical of the smallest thing that he or she does. Always get the last word when arguing.

3, Show Disrespect

Call them names in public. Be sure and use the words; “stupid”, “fat”, “weak”, “loser”. Complain about him/her to your friends. Women be sure and straighten him out when he makes a mistake – especially in front of others. Lecture him. Ridicule him. Men be sure she knows your opinions is better than hers. Interrupt her when she speaking.

4. Refuse to meet their emotional needs

Wives totally ignore your husband need for sex and time alone with you. Girlfriends totally ignore your boyfriends need for admiration and support. Husbands never show your wife you love and appreciate her. Husbands make her constantly worry about the finances. Boyfriends, totally ignore your girlfriends need for you to be honest and supportive.

5. Treat others better than him

Ladies since men don’t have many friends this one is on you. Whatever you do be sure and shower those around you with messages of encouragement, cards, and uninterrupted time alone. If you want to trash the relationship never do this for that special person in your life.

6. Men, be a pansy

Retreat into safety and passivity. Refuse to take initiative or responsibility  in making plans or suggestions.

7. Women, act like his mother

Make sure you do everything to make him feel like he is 3 years old. Tell him how to live his life down to the smallest detail. Be sure and say, “I told you so” whenever possible.

8. When you are angry, blow up!

Yell and scream, or quietly say hurtful words; it doesn’t matter. Inflicting emotional pain is the most important thing. Call each other names. Dredge the past up and bring up old hurts. Lose control and verbally destroy them.

I highly recommend these ways if you want to trash any relationship. These are guaranteed to work. Hopefully, you recognize these as childish behaviors. Hopefully you recognize the destructive force of such behaviors. In a relationship, these kinds of behaviors become tempting and sometimes we act them out when there is a chasm between our expectations and the other person’s behavior.

When I counsel a young couple, I sometimes tell the young men that your potential spouse is not your mother. She is not there to wait on you hand and foot. I sometimes tell the young women that your potential spouse is not your dad. You are not his little girl – you are his wife. I share with them, give up such childish thoughts. We enter relationships with some unrealistic expectations. And when the other person doesn’t meet our expectations we begin to assume the worst about them. Every time you focus on the negative, every time you concentrate on their failures and flaws, every time you assume the worst in the other person, you are participating to the demise of the relationship.

In other words you are totally trashing them and the relationship. I don’t think any of us enter into a relationship with the goal of totally trashing the other person and the relationship. I don’t think we enter into a relationship thinking of how terrible we can make the other person’s  life or thinking of how bad we can talk about the other person. We enter into the a relationship with the best intentions. We never intend to hurt them. We never intend to keep records of wrong. We never intend to build emotional walls. We never intend to disrespect them.

We tend to forget that all of us fall short. There is no such thing as the perfect man and there is no such thing as the perfect woman.  There is no such thing as the perfect boyfriend or the perfect girlfriend. No one on earth can meet your expectations. No one on earth is going to behave exactly the way you want them to behave. So if you are looking for the perfect person who can meet all of your emotional needs and meet all of your expectations and fulfill your every fantasy. That person does not exist. A friend of mine was looking for the perfect spouse. He wanted a spouse that would allow him to go whenever he pleases. Come back whenever he pleases. Do whatever he pleased do. I said to him – “dream on” – that kind of relationship doesn’t exist.

So…. How do we handle the chasm, this gulf between our expectations and the other person’s behavior? How do you stay in love when your man or woman who doesn’t meet your expectations and who doesn’t behave the way you think they should behave?

Look at what Paul tells his church in Philippi:

Philippians 4:8 – And now, dear brothers and sisters, one final thing. Fix your thoughts on what is true, and honorable, and right, and pure, and lovely, and admirable. Think about things that are excellent and worthy of praise.

If you want to stay in love – focus on the best in the other person. Fix your thought on what is true, honorable, right, pure, lovely, and admirable.

Every negative quality in the other person, every failure that person has, every flaw that person has is an opportunity to love them.

Remember Jeffery Dalhmer? For those of you who don’t him, he was also known as the Milwaukee Cannibal, was an American serial killer and sex offender, who committed the rape, murder and dismemberment of 17 men and boys between 1978 and 1991, with many of his later murders also involving necrophilia (sexual attraction to corpses), cannibalism and the permanent preservation of body parts—typically all or part of the skeletal structure. He was one messed up man. When they interviewed his mother, do you know what she said about him?  “Deep down he was a good boy.” Why did she say that? She still loved him despite his heinous crimes.

If you want to stay in love you are always looking at the good, the true, the honorable, the right, the pure, lovely , and admirable in the other person. You focus on the best in the other person. In his book, One Thing to Know, (this is a leadership book) by Marcus Buckingham, they discovered the one thing that makes a relationship successful. They studied couples who has been happily married for 10+  years. They thought they would discover that each person had a deep understanding of the other person. They thought  these couples would understand each other’s strengths and weaknesses. They thought they wouldn’t have high expectations of their spouse because they knew each other so well. They expected to find that they had realistic expectations of each other. What they discovered in these happily married couples is that they had a very unrealistic view of each other. When they tested each spouse, each spouse rated the other spouse higher than themselves.

Their discovery was a spouse’s positive illusion created an upward spiral of love. To put it in common terms – love is a bit blind. This love led to trust. Trust led to intimacy. Intimacy led to a stronger relationship.

To help us understand this, if you have ever fallen in love (even if it was from a distance) or have ever dated someone for a while, and people start pointing the faults and weaknesses of that other person you fell in love with – What do you do?  You defend their faults. You focus on the good, the right, the pure, the honorable.  Even Mrs. Dahlmer didn’t focus on her son’s fault after he was convicted of his sickening crimes against others.  She looked beyond his faults. She looked beyond his failures. Her love for him let her see beyond his guilt.

Paul is telling us if we focus on the true, and honorable, and right, and pure, and lovely, and admirable because it creates a positive illusion about the person we are in love with. I am not talking about being delusional. If there is something seriously wrong in the relationship,  it needs to be addressed.

Because you focus on the right, true, honorable, pure, and lovely, you see their faults as an opportunity to make love happen. You see their failures as an opportunity to make love happen. You see the other short comings as an opportunity to make love happen.

I know this works because this is what I shared with a couple who was near divorce a few years ago. The wife in this relationship focused on his faults, his shortcomings, his failures,  and everything else that was negative about him. The husband, meanwhile, respectfully gave her space, and moved out of the house. I sat down with the wife of this relationship and explained to her what kind of husband I was in the first 5 years of our marriage. This particular couple is now working on their happily ever after relationship.

Paul goes on to say think about things that are worthy of praise. Think about things that are excellent.

If you want to stay in love, THINK. Think about what you want to be remembered for in your relationship. Think about what you want the relationship to look like. Think about how you want to be loved and love the other person like that. Think about what is right, true, right pure, and admirable.

Luke also gives us a glimpse of what it takes to stay in love. It is so simple it is brilliant. It is so profound it is difficult for many to do.

31 Do to others as you would like them to do to you. (Luke 6)

You if you want to stay in love, you need to ask this question, “How do you want to be loved in the relationship?”  Then love your spouse or that special other person like that! If your spouse hurts you, love them the way you would want to be loved after you have hurt them. If your spouse disappoints you, love them the way you want to be loved after you have disappointed them.

Newspaper columnist and minister George Crane tells of a wife who came into his office full of hatred toward her husband. “I do not only want to get rid of him, I want to get even. Before I divorce him, I want to hurt him as much as he has me.”

Dr. Crane suggested an ingenious plan “Go home and act as if you really love your husband. Tell him how much he means to you. Praise him for every decent trait. Go out of your way to be as kind, considerate, and generous as possible. Spare no efforts to please him, to enjoy him. Make him believe you love him. After you’ve convinced him of your undying love and that you cannot live without him, then drop the bomb. Tell him that you’re getting a divorce. That will really hurt him.” With revenge in her eyes, she smiled and exclaimed, “Beautiful, beautiful. Will he ever be surprised!” And she did it with enthusiasm. Acting “as if.” For two months she showed love, kindness, listening, giving, reinforcing, sharing. When she didn’t return, Crane called. “Are you ready now to go through with the divorce?”

“Divorce?” she exclaimed. “Never!  I discovered I really do love him.”