Does your spouse behave as if he/she is a superior partner?

I had cause to advise a lady who was about to get married sometime ago. It was very easy to see that she felt superior to him. How did I know? Through the way she kept criticising and correcting the young man. And it was so clear that he was not enjoying it at all. The lady was alarmed, when I informed her when we were alone together that she would soon lose her man, if care was not taken. To her, she was trying to teach the man good manners but to the man, it was not funny. I made her realise that no man likes a woman that behaves superior to him. No normal woman also likes being seen as the inferior partner in a marriage. I also made her realise that there were many things she did wrong, but for which she ended up blaming her man, due to her superiority complex. It took a long time for her to agree that she had a problem of always thinking that her man was the one that was always wrong. She had the problem of thinking that she was superior to her man, and people who think that they are superior to their spouses always think that they are never wrong. 

You are likely to see many husbands and wives who think that the problem in the marriage is not coming from them but from their spouses. They never see anything wrong with themselves; rather, keep looking at their spouses as the problem. Such people like to always point out things that were not done properly. It is so glaring that such persons will make the marriage tough for their spouses. They will always watch out for areas to correct and areas to point out a fault.

If you are in a marriage and you keep seeing yourself as the superior partner, while your spouse is the inferior partner, you need to take a good and critical look at yourself. The superiority complex of some spouses is doing a lot of harm to their marriage. They need to deliberately become more humble, even if they think they know more than their spouses. They should use their knowledge to make their spouses feel better and not to feel inferior. Throughout my years in school, I discovered that I learnt more from teachers and lecturers who taught us in humility than those who taught in pride. The point I am trying to make here is that correcting a spouse should be done with a spirit of humility, meekness and not out of superiority. Gal 6:1 says, “Brethren, if a man be overtaken in a fault, ye which are spiritual, restore such an one in the spirit of meekness;”

You cannot maintain a healthy relationship, if you feel superior to your partner. Nobody enjoys having somebody who behaves as a superior boss as a spouse. You need to put yourself in the shoes of that person you think is permanently inferior to you in wisdom, knowledge, understanding and in all departments of life. When you do, you will realise that as you would not like it, so does that spouse not like it one bit. Check it if you are always seeing yourself as having done nothing wrong. Check it if you never see any contribution from your spouse as better than your own. Check it if you do not accept correction of any sort from your spouse or from people. Check it if there is nothing wrong with anything you do but everything is wrong with what your spouse does. I pray that God will give all of us the wisdom to make our spouses happy, better and not bitter. Love you.