Jim arrived at home, bounced up the stairs two at a time and burst into the kitchen with great excitement to greet his wife, Mary. Sweeping her off her feet, he declared he had a wonderful surprise in store for her. Covering her eyes, he led her out to the front porch and, pulling his hands away, proclaimed, “Well, there she is. She’s a real beauty, isn’t she?” There sat, gleaming in the late afternoon sun, what he thought was their dream car. His wife stared for a moment at the car then looked back at him, her eyes narrowing, and said, “How could you buy that car without me—how dare you come prancing in and tell me you bought a car!” With that, she whirled around and marched back inside, slamming the door behind her.
Dumbfounded and angry, he went after her demanding to know what he did wrong, “ I bought that car only after I knew it had everything on it that you wanted and that it was a great price. So, what’s your problem?” Her retort, with tears streaming down her cheeks, was not what he expected: “You know that we don’t make decisions that big without agreeing to them in the first place. How could you go behind my back like that?” He was taken aback. He had thought that, since it involved cars, he was ultimately responsible for the decision but only after thorough input from his wife about what she wanted. They had even talked about the price range. He believed that he had been completely faithful to that commitment. So being accused of going behind her back seemed, to him, to be a reprehensible accusation. The result was that they both felt deeply betrayed.
There is great irony in such a conflict.
Neither of them was wrong but both of them were mistaken. The undeniable pain this couple endured over this incident could have been avoided had they only examined, at the beginning of their marriage, their differences in decision-making preferences. Like many couples, they had simply been unaware that there were any differences of significance in their decision-making rules. They implicitly assumed they were on the same page. Their ignorance, however, did not lead to bliss but to disillusionment and a profound sense of injustice.
That’s what happens when each partner’s presumed rules of engagement (usually carried over from their respective homes of origin) are never openly discussed. Needless to say, it’s far better to discuss them sooner in your marriage than to collide over them later.
There are of course decision-making responsibilities involved in every relationship. Generally speaking, they tend to fall into one of the following areas: Decisions you make alone without any necessary input from your partner, decisions you make only after you know what your partner wants and, finally, decisions you make only by consensus with your partner—that is, only when you both formally agree to make a particular decision.
I usually recommend to the couples I work with (and if I have the opportunity, couples with whom I’m doing pre-marriage counseling) to conduct a relatively simple exercise. Each is asked to sit down together and make a list of the decisions they anticipate they will make over the course of their marriage, from the mundane, everyday type to the major relationship-shaping decisions.
More, specifically, these might include the following kinds of decisions:
- The household responsibilities you each take
- The place you live
- The home and neighborhood you live in
- What church you attend and other spiritual life decisions (as well as what you teach your children),
- The friends you have and how much time you spend with them
- How often you visit other family members and relatives,
- The amount of money you spend and what priorities you give to your spending
- The items you buy with any “extra” money (even so-called “pocket change”)
- The kinds of purchases, large and small, you make
- The way you spend your free time and leisure activities you engage in (e.g., golf, video or computer games, movies, fishing, window shopping, Starbucks visits, etc.),
- The vacations you go on (how long and how expensive?)
- The kind of cars you drive
- The budget
- Who is responsible for the bills and paperwork
- The way you raise your children—including decisions on discipline, recreation, and assignment of responsibilities around the house,
- The amount of time allocated for enjoying solitude, alone time together and time with the children
Next steps
Once a general list of decisions is agreed upon (30-40 or so are common) then make a copy for each of you. Working individually from this list, determine what category into which you think each decision should fall—is it a decision you or your partner make alone, one that you or your partner make only after input from the other, or is it one that the two of you make together?
When you’re done distributing the various types of decisions into these categories then share them with your partner. You might be surprised (as Jim and Mary would have been with theirs) by some of your preference differences. Once these differences are identified, you now have the opportunity to talk through them, which will help you be confident that you are of one mind concerning the process for every decision you make. Remember, there are no “right answers” to which category a decision falls. It entirely depends on the preferences of the couple and how they negotiate them.
How much better it is to avoid all the unpleasantries of encountering a problem you never anticipated! Nasty surprises are never the best way to facilitate a relationship.
When Jim and Mary discovered that unwittingly, they had been operating from different playbooks, they were, at last, able to understand that they were not trying to hurt each other. Each spouses’ thoughts and actions mattered to the other after all.
And that’s the point—we all want to believe that our feelings, our opinions and preferences, our thoughts—in short, our lives—mean something to someone else. However, when they don’t, arguments arise and we can easily become discouraged.
All along, God’s message to each of us has been intended to address this longing. He tells us in His Word that we matter so much to Him that He provided His only Son to die in our place. He paid a debt He did not owe for us, His children, who had a debt we could not pay. There is no greater statement that we matter than that.
Knowing this, it then becomes our decision to enter into a redemptive relationship with Him. That stands as the first and foremost decision of them all!
