Supporting Your Spouse

One of the fastest ways to reduce trust with your spouse is to badmouth them to others, i.e. friends, associates, co-workers, or, worse, to your parents or other members of your family.

If this gets back to your spouse (which it inevitably will), or even worse, if you do it in front of them, this will reduce and possibly destroy the trust in your relationship.

Another version of this is failing to defend your spouse when another criticizes them. For example, let’s say your parents start to criticize your spouse. You have to, at that point, stick up for your spouse. To not do so is to start down a slippery slope. When you said “I do” you agreed to create a team with that person, and you have to defend that person, even if it’s your parents giving them a bad rap. If you don’t, it will begin to drive a wedge between your spouse and your parents.

You have to think of you and your husband or wife as a team. You are working together to create a good measure of survival for the both of you, your kids, and everyone related to the family.

So how do you work well with members of a team? Well, you have to be supportive and positive. This means to consider, think about, and communicate about that person’s best qualities. You want to build them up and make them feel good about themselves.

This doesn’t mean to lie to them and tell them how great they are at something when they aren’t really. And I’m not talking about fake “self-esteem” where you make someone feel great about themselves without any consideration of actual achievement. What I’m saying is that you are supportive of your spouse and make them feel good about the person they are and about the things that they are good at. Protect and defend them against attack.

And they’ll do the same for you. That’s a real team.

 

 

Comments

[Sarah L]

You know - it is SO refreshing to hear someone else say this. My husband and I never bad-mouth each other, like we hear SO many other couples doing. It is disrespectful and hurtful - this is the person you are supposed to love more than anyone else, why would you talk about them behind their back. I want to surround myself with other couples who love, honor and respect each other. It is refreshing to know they are out there.

[Tina]

My partners friends are allowed to be really disrespectful to me and he just tells me to ignore it. Of course I am getting to the stage where I am wondering how to get out of this relationship. I have lost a lot of respect for him in return. It's really not a very nice situation to be in at all.

[Ed]

I had do idea that my brother in law's respect for me was deteriorating. I have done nothoing wrong to him. I thought everything was normal until one day, I wanted to discuss with him about an issue about my son having problems staying in school in a foreign land. To cut the story short, all I wanted was to analyze the situation and hopefully solve the problem my wife and I are dealing with. My bother in laws started throwing mud at my face oncee, twice, thrice until I really lost it and it got real ugly. My intent was to talk about my son and his problems! He threw irrelevant topics just to ridiclule, disrespect and personally attack me!!!

The words that came out from his nasty mail are the same phrases my wife have told me before. I found out that she had been emailing him each time we had arguments. And of course the story is all One sided. Poor me no chance of defending myself.

I have asked my wife to defend me on what her brother had been accusing me as a lousy husband and a father. His accusations are not true and I strongly did not agree. And one thing, I am a very resposible father by the way!

She chose not to be stuck in the middle!! and to this day, the anger, the pain in my heart, the resentment and unfairness of this makes me depressed, unhappy and angy. I lost my trust!!I want out!!

[Rkwriter01]

With every relationship come disagreements and arguments. No two individual will have the same point of view in all matters. It is important to resolve issues as quickly as possible. Resolution to problems can only be found if there is.. http://howrelationshipswork.blogspot.com/2011/05/communication-key-to-resolving-issues.html