It is an undeniable fact of life that you can’t put two people in the same room without one of them eventually getting in the way of the other.
In marriage, multiply this by ten.
Too many marriage books see this as a problem. I believe it has a divine purpose.
Being annoyed by your spouse can actually be a healthy thing to work through, provided you do it in the right way.
Family Irritations
In C.S. Lewis’ classic book The Screwtape Letters, Screwtape, the mentor demon, writes to his protégé Wormwood,
When two humans have lived together for many years, it usually happens that each has tones of voice and expressions of face which are almost unendurably irritating to the other.”
Our enemy’s goal is to take a natural occurrence and use it to create marital dysfunction.
At the moment, I can’t honestly pinpoint a single tone or facial expression of Lisa’s that is “unendurably irritating” to me, though I do remember a time when I asked her to stop hitting the passenger side car window with her fingernails as she pointed something out. Lisa’s an extrovert, which means she hasn’t seen something fully until everyone in the car has seen it too, even the driver who, ostensibly, should be keeping his eyes on the road. I’d hear that familiar, “click, click, click,” and then Lisa saying, “Honey, you have to see this!”
Why should fingernails clicking on the window bug me?
Couldn’t tell you, but, honestly, for a time, they did.
“Really?” Lisa said when I told her about it, “That annoys you? Okay, I won’t do it anymore.”
Turns out that was like asking a snow man in Seattle not to melt when it rains. Lisa reverted back to the practice that same day. We talked about this months later, with the kids in the car.
“Dad,”
Kelsey asked me, “Didn’t you say that it bugs you when Mom does that all the time?”
“Yes, I did.”
“But she still does it.”
“Yes, she does.”
“So, doesn’t it still bug you?”
“No, it doesn’t.”
“How come?”
“I realized it was never going to stop, and I decided not to let it bug me.”
Kelsey paused, then said, “I think you’re a very tolerant person.”
I like to live in the real world, and the fact is, in the real world, some things in marriage and family life that annoy us aren’t ever going to change. They just aren’t. The problem is that these morally neutral issues can become a spiritual battlefield, and that’s what I determined wouldn’t happen in my marriage.
Lisa has had many more annoying things to deal with, believe me. I tend to leave one of the chairs in the family room facing the television after I get up. Lisa likes it to face in (the room looks much nicer that way). I recently found out that Lisa actually prays for me whenever she turns the chair in.
“I realized it wasn’t going to stop,” she explained, “so I could either use the moment to think bad thoughts about you or pray and thank God for you and ask Him to bless you. If something happened to you, I think I might even miss seeing the chair not turned.”
In Lewis’ book, Screwtape makes it clear to Wormwood that he needed to sow the seeds of dissension by making sure that one family member (in this case, a son) assume that the other family member (the mom) is fully aware of how annoying a certain habit is. Even better, he should make sure the son thinks that the mother is doing it to be annoying.
“If you know your job,” Screwtape insists, “he will not notice the immense improbability of the assumption.”
Well, in my case Lisa knew the fingernails on the window were annoying to me, but I also knew she wasn’t doing it to be annoying. She just really can’t help herself. In her case, I didn’t actually know I was bugging Lisa, and I try to do better about turning the chair back in, but I’m sure she’d be able to tell you I’ve been less than one hundred percent faithful.
Yet both of us are determined that we are not going to let little things like this attack our marriage. Even better, Lisa is determined to use a potential annoyance to serve our marriage.
The Real Issue
Some spouses may indeed create a facial expression or a tone of voice in a deliberate attempt to annoy you. But never assume that’s the case. Instead, be on the lookout for how much spiritual warfare is launched in a home over innocuous, unintentional, even silly habits. There are plenty of things worth fighting about in marriage, so let’s save the battles for things that really matter.
Sometimes, the problem isn’t what annoys us; the problem is that we let ourselves become annoyed. That’s the spiritual challenge we need to face.
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