Week 8 - Pride in Marriage

This week was definitely a lesson that I needed to hear. I really needed to talk about pride. There have been so many times that my husband and I have let pride get in the way of us trying to make peace.

In a talk by Elder Benson "Beware of Pride", he says, 

“The proud cannot accept the authority of God giving direction to their lives. They pit their perceptions of truth against God’s great knowledge, their abilities against his mighty works.” 

I never thought of pride in that way before. I always thought of it as being conceited, arrogant, or thinking you were better than someone else. I didn’t realize that when you are prideful you are also pitting yourself against God. I thought that this was such a valuable truth to learn. Elder Benson also touched on something else that I though was important 

“The proud make every man their adversary by pitting their intellects, opinions, works, wealth, talents, or any other worldly measuring device against others.” 

In other words, not only are you pitting yourself against God when you are prideful, but a lot of people pit themselves against each other. Pride is such a terrible quality and if we recognize that we are being prideful we need to take a step back and figure out what kind of relationship we want to have with the people in our lives, because pride will ruin all of them.

In my marriage I have noticed that pride is one of those things that can make an argument turn into a fight in under 3 seconds. We are both experts on the silent treatment, however as we get older and we are married longer we have found ways to turn our fights back around and both calm down so that we can actually have a good conversation. I believe that every marriage, no matter how much you love each other, will suffer from pride. However, I also believe that the way you handle it says a lot about you and your spouse. If you can learn to recognize when you are being prideful then you can also learn how to stop it so that it doesn’t ruin your relationship.

Here are some things that are considered elements of pride:

• Ignore spouse, or give spouse the "cold shoulder"
• Impatient with impatience
• Caught up in who' right and who's wrong
• Blaming, defensiveness
• Attack, counterattack
• Scorekeeping, with intentions of noting who is winning or losing
• Refusal to apologize first
• Holding the other hostage by refusing to forgive
• Proving superiority by bringing up spouse’s faults
• Holding grudges
• The " silent treatment"
• Sharing spouse's weaknesses with others
• Intentionally trying to create jealousies in spouse
• Get others to create an alliance with you against your spouse
• Putting words in spouse's mouth to manipulate
• Displaying an attitude of entitlement in the marriage
• Stubbornness or unwillingness to change
• Selfishness, thinking only of your needs
• Unwillingness to learn from spouse
• Fault finding
• Withholding love and affection

In every relationship, some of these things are going to happen because we are only human. We all need to take a good look at ourselves and if we see any of these qualities then we need to take a step back and make some changes. It's not going to be easy. Some days you are going to fall, but if you keep pushing yourself to be better then it will be easier for your spouse to do the same thing.