When your spouse starts to irritate you

Some years ago, a couple (highly placed professionals) decided to enrol in our marriage school, known as Institute For Marriage And Family Intimacy Studies.

Like some others who also enrolled, we discovered that they enrolled in order to find solutions to their marital conflicts before they would get out of hand. The one-on-one meeting my wife and I had with them and their responses to certain questions during classes could not really make us understand the root cause of their deep-seated marital conflicts.

A question the wife answered finally gave us a clue. The wife had been getting irritated with her husband for a long time, so much so that little things that did not matter turned out to be major sources of disdain and conflict.

The woman had always admired slim-looking men, which probably was one of the major reasons she married him. But a few years into their marriage, the man started putting on some weight and a little potbelly, while his wife remained slim, even after having four children. His looks became a source of irritation to her and any little thing made her flare-up. It was like the more the man’s potbelly increased, the more irritated the wife became. Her irritation for his potbelly and looks kept giving birth to many other forms of irritations. From our studies, we have found out that whenever things get to this level, a belch that was mistakenly done during mealtime could get the irritated spouse almost crazy, not to talk of farting in the bedroom.

It was in a class I was handling one day that I got a clue to what was almost breaking their marriage. I think on that day, people were talking about changes that had taken place in their spouses’ lives. They didn’t like the physical and behavioural changes, but they found a way of enjoying or getting amused with what they could not change.

Personally, I do not believe that marriage should be endured. I believe that we should constantly grow the quality of our marriages to a level, whereby non-life threatening physical and behavioural changes in our spouses should be enjoyed or at worst, amuse us. I felt the negative energy released by the woman I am writing about here when she spoke about her husband who was sitting beside her. I could see that her initial irritation against her husband had given birth to so many other irritations that she possibly could not lay hands on any serious reason why she could not live at peace with him.

Some days ago, a man told me that his wife had moved out of their matrimonial home, abandoning him and the children. She had no reasonable cause for the action she took, aside from the fact that she had started getting irritated with him many years ago. The point I am driving home here is that as a spouse, whenever you notice that you have started getting irritated with your partner over minor issues and getting angry with him or her easily, it is better to examine yourself. From my knowledge as a marriage counsellor, I have discovered that the fault is more with the ‘quarreler’ than with the ‘quarrelee.’

At a stage in my own marriage, whenever I found myself correcting my wife in a non-loving manner once, twice or thrice, I began to search myself to see wetin dey pepper me for my body. I then dealt with the issue before it started giving birth to other issues. Let us learn to check ourselves sometimes. Love you.