Attitude Determines Your Marital Altitude
“It was my husband’s birthday and I was preparing the house for his arrival from home,” she began. 
“The presents were bought and had reservations at a great restaurant,” she continued. When her husband arrived home, he asked her to come into the living room; he had a question for her.
“Are you having an affair?” he asked calmly. “Of course not!” she quickly shot back. “Please don’t lie to me,” he responded. She knew. She knew he’d somehow find out. After her face turned red and her eyes swelled with tears, she admitted she had indeed been carrying on an affair. Crying and with an overwhelming sense of guilt and shame, she ran out of the house, got in her car and began to drive around.
The affair, Darlene shared with me over lunch, began innocently with exchanging texts. Then it graduated to much more. Darlene’s husband had always worked long hours. Very long. She began to resent that. Throughout their course of marriage, she’d had 5 miscarriages. It was tough. She became bitter. And over the years, that bitterness grew until it took over her heart and nothing he did was good enough and everything he did was all wrong.
“I never should have allowed those negative thoughts to grow,” Darlene said thinking in retrospect. Her comment reminded me of a piece of advice shred with me recently during an interview. “Never keep inviting negative thoughts to dinner or eventually they’ll get fat!” Darlene expounded on that thought, “Negative thoughts run through our mind all day. Weird thoughts. Uncharacteristic thoughts. Thoughts I’m ashamed of repeating,” she said. “The key is never allowing them to stay. You can’t control them running through your mind, but you can control how much you feed them.”
After driving around for some time, Darelen finally returned home. She immediately began packing her bags. Her husband asked if she was leaving because she wanted to leave or because she felt as though she had to, “If you want to stay, I will forgive you,” he said as tears continued to pour down Darlene’s face. “If you had an affair, that’s because our marriage was broken. And if our marriage was broken, that means I had something to do with it. So if you want to stay, stay.” He forgave her and looked for a pathway forward addressing what was lacking in their relationship.
All of a sudden, everything that once bothered her about him, no longer mattered. Rather than being upset about his working long hours, she began to appreciate the reason he works such long hours is to provide for her and their four children. “It comes down to those thoughts,” she surmised. “I never should have let them in. I never should have fed them. If I could do it again, I’d shut them down from the very beginning.”
I’ve said this so many times I hope I don’t sound like a broken record but happiness -especially, in marriage- is always a choice. It is a daily choice, a weekly choice, a monthly choice and a moment-by-moment decision. Our thoughts control our attitude and our attitude will always determine the greatness of our marriage.
Question: How do you keep negative thoughts from planting seeds that could grow in your mind and heart? Do you have the desire and will to choose happiness for your life and your marriage today?
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Fawn Weaver
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