The Day I Almost Yelled At My Husband (How the Law of Acceleration in Marriage helps to keep your emotions in check)

The speed of my feet was no match for the flood of thoughts rushing through my mind. I walked quickly up and down the residential hills of our community.

“How dare he do that? After I opened my heart and our home so his parents could be comfortable, how could he be so thoughtless?”

Keith and I were in our early years of marriage and it had only been a few months since his parents moved in with us. When we extended the invitation, I made one very important request. Please, no junk food in the house.

Ten years prior, I’d spent six months slowly losing 25-pounds and had maintained the loss. One of the bedrocks of my weight-loss success was not keeping junk food in the house.

A few months into our new living arrangement, I woke up to the aroma of freshly baked pies and just about hit the roof.

The smell had been wafting through the air-conditioning vent of our bedroom for hours. After not being able to sleep because my sweets-loving body wouldn’t allow it, I finally got out of bed and went in the kitchen.

To my dismay, Keith’s Mom was happily making homemade pies – lots of them.

I could feel the anger rising inside of me.

I returned to our bedroom, anger directed at Keith, “This isn’t right. It’s not right. I’ve done everything I can to make them comfortable…” I was upset with him because I’d asked him to address the issue on an earlier occasion and he didn’t.

I knew if I stuck around for even two more minutes, I would be embarking upon the first argument ever with my loving husband. So I bolted.

I threw on my tennis shoes and decided to walk until all the angry voices in my head quieted down. For the first hour, those voices got louder and louder.

“You have every right to be mad!” one voice said. “You should call Keith and give him a piece of your mind!” another one jabbed.

What was going on at that moment was an example of what I like to refer to as the Law of Acceleration in Marriage.

In 2010, Toyota drivers began reporting incidents of their cars accelerating while they were pressing on the brakes. One Toyota owner shared his story with a local paper. For thirty miles, he swerved in and out of traffic, pounding on his brakes, at one point narrowly missing a big rig.

A police officer responding to the driver’s 9-1-1 call pulled up beside him and instructed him to hold down the brakes with his full might while engaging the emergency brake. Finally, the car came to a halt.

What Toyota drivers were experiencing is what so often happens to us when our spouse hurts, disappoints, or makes us sad. Rather than sticking with the original emotion—that place of vulnerability—we allow the voices in our head to cause us to accelerate. When we zoom ahead, we go from being hurt to angry, from disappointed to frustrated, and from sad to mad.

The day of the “junk food incident,” I knew if I didn’t get out of the house—right then, right there—I was going to lose control. So I kept walking.

I was gone for six hours (only stopping twice, once to leave a message for Keith letting him know where I’d gone and once at a diner to get something to eat). By the time I returned home, I’d completely silenced the voices and was able to share my hurt from a place of vulnerability.

We talked about it. I expressed why I was hurt. He expressed his difficulty in trying to make me happy while wanting his folks to feel comfortable in their new place.

Keith saw my side and I saw his. We decided not to say anything to his folks so they could continue feeling comfortable in their new home. Instead, we designated a “junk-food cabinet” and I simply stayed out of it.

In reading this, you might think I lost this battle. But I can assure you the outcome was completely worth the loss. The moment I returned from my walk, Keith’s eyes met mine, he pulled me into his arms, embraced me, and told me he was sorry.

In that moment, I understood firsthand the law of acceleration in marriage and how to put the brakes on my thoughts to ensure we could communicate heart-to-heart rather than head-to-head.

Until Monday…make it a great day!

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Fawn Weaver

Founder at Happy Wives Club

Fawn Weaver is the USA Today and New York Times bestselling author of Happy Wives Club: One Woman's Worldwide Search for the Secrets of a Great Marriage, adopting the same name as the Club she founded in 2010. The Happy Wives Club community has grown to include more than 1 million women in over 110 countries around the world. She’s an investor in real estate, tech sector and lifestyle brands. When she’s not writing or working, she's happily doting over her husband of twelve years, Keith (and sometimes manages to do all three simultaneously).