CHAPTER SIX

FIGHTING FAIR

Before I proposed to Lauren and while we were still in the courtship stage, we confronted certain issues over and over again. Eventually it became a cause for concern. I fully admit there were lots of things at that time I did not handle well, and in fact, even today I feel pangs of regret (and have to preach the gospel to myself!). But at the time, I was moved enough by the recurring issues to go speak to one of my mentors, David.

I asked him about these consistent fights that kept coming up, and I told him I didn’t know what to do. I asked him, “Should I marry a woman whom I still get in fights with? Shouldn’t we be beyond this? We’re not even married yet, and already we’re fighting.”

I’ll never forget what David said to me. “Brother, you are going to fight with someone for the rest of your life. Do you want it to be Lauren?”

He was telling me that when you get married, conflict isn’t going anywhere. I mean, I sort of knew that, but I guess I thought it should be easier if you’ve found the right woman. That’s exactly where David pressed. “Matt, is Lauren the one you want to fight with for the rest of your life? Whoever you marry, you’re going to fight with. If it’s not Lauren, it will be somebody else.”

I could have taken his counsel as somewhat discouraging, to be sure. But I found it both encouraging and refreshing. The truth is that none of us have “arrived.” And this side of heaven, none of us ever will. We all are being sanctified, and we will always be in the process of sanctification until the Lord returns and we are caught up into glory. Until then, we may have areas of victory in our lives, places we make improvements and learn to be better at repenting, but the flesh will always be there. We will always be somewhat broken, and we will never be perfect.

We need to remember every day that we are sinners, and to be a sinner means to be essentially self-centered, and to be essentially self-centered means we are destined for conflict in our relationships.

Since the Spirit’s process of sanctification is progressive, we will never be where we should be, but God in his grace will use the circumstances and the relationships in our lives to sharpen us, shape us, and make us more and more who he wants us to be.

One of my favorite books on marriage is by Gary Thomas. The title is Sacred Marriage, and the tagline for the book is this: “What if God designed marriage to make us holy more than to make us happy?” I literally bought the book because of that tagline. It is so gutsy. Some people might look at that subtitle and think, So it’s supposed to make me holy but miserable? Those people probably aren’t thinking, All right, let’s give it a shot. An author would probably sell more marriage books if he promised absolute happiness to readers. But I bought the book because I loved the honesty and authenticity of it. It’s a great book because it does not shy away from the real purpose of marriage, which is to glorify God, and it’s completely truthful about the way God designed marriage to give him glory. An integral part of marriage’s design is the sanctifying work that takes place between two sinners in close proximity, learning to love each other.

The bottom line is this: conflict is going to be a part of your relationship. It’s going to be a part of even the healthiest, most romantic, most passionate relationships. In fact, I have found that the more passion you possess in loving oftentimes translates to more passion in fighting. Passionate personality types tend to do both pretty well.

One of my best friends has an extremely passionate personality, very gregarious, very excitable. And he married a woman who is very similar in that regard. I remember when they started dating, I was thinking, Oh my gosh. What happens if they have children? And sure enough, true to form, after over a decade of marriage, and several kids later, they still love really well and they still fight pretty often.

Maybe you’ll find it oddly comforting to know that conflict is a natural part of being married. It doesn’t mean conflict is always great. It doesn’t mean that a conflict-filled marriage is a good thing that doesn’t need a lot of work. Just because two Christians love Jesus and love each other doesn’t mean all of life is going to be smooth sailing.

Even redeemed sinners who love each other obey God’s Word imperfectly. This is one of the things that makes God’s grace so amazing—his long-suffering patience with us. In this chapter I hope to share some thoughts from the Song of Solomon that may help you reflect God’s long-suffering patience with your spouse.

To begin, we ought to consider the root of our conflicts.

Unmet Expectations

Twenty percent of Solomon’s Song covers conflict. That’s a pretty significant percentage, don’t you think? As I said before, I think the only people who don’t realize that marriage is going to be difficult are engaged people. They’re in a blissful state where it’s hard to think straight about the future. What we see in Song of Solomon 5 helps give us clarity about the marriage relationship and sobers us up a little.

We’ve just glimpsed the joy of their honeymoon night, and it’s not too long after that their first conflict occurred. “I slept, but my heart was awake. A sound! My beloved is knocking. ‘Open to me, my sister, my love, my dove, my perfect one, for my head is wet with dew, my locks with the drops of the night’” (v. 2).

Solomon had been working all day long. We gather this from the reference to his head being “wet with dew.” He’d been working out in the fields, and he was tired and sweaty and ready to come home.

It seems that he came home pretty late, late enough that his wife had already showered and gone to bed: “I had put off my garment; how could I put it on? I had bathed my feet; how could I soil them?” (v. 3).

To set the scene properly, Solomon was coming home after a very long day, and on his way home he probably started thinking about what being home would be like. He thought about his wife and how nice it would be to be with her. She would welcome him, give him a big kiss, have food waiting for him. He was probably even thinking about petting those fawns, right?

But she already bathed, put on her nightie, went to bed, and fell asleep. She officially took the “not tonight” position.

It’s a very typical scene in married life, one that is rehearsed in countless households over many, many days. The essential elements of this moment play out in a million different ways throughout the life of a relationship. It doesn’t have to be about a husband coming home tired and late from work, expecting his wife to have a satisfying welcome waiting. It’s about any time we build up in our minds how our partners should please us or care for us and he or she fails to deliver as we wanted.

Really, all frustration is birthed out of unmet expectations, and so is nearly every conflict.

Look closely at Solomon’s response to his expectations not being met. There’s one thing he did that I think is a correct response to unmet expectations, and there’s another thing he did that I think, especially in the midst of conflict, isn’t always a correct response but is sometimes necessary. He came to the door with expectation about what was going to happen, and she shut him down. Here’s his initial response as told by his wife:

My beloved put his hand to the latch,

and my heart was thrilled within me.

I arose to open to my beloved,

and my hands dripped with myrrh,

my fingers with liquid myrrh,

on the handles of the bolt.

I opened to my beloved,

but my beloved had turned and gone.

My soul failed me when he spoke.

I sought him, but found him not;

I called him, but he gave no answer. (vv. 4–6)

She shut down the sexual rendezvous, and he didn’t get angry. He didn’t react. He didn’t blow up. When he reached out to touch the latch, he communicated something significant, because that action was sort of like a valentine in their culture: a sign that said, “Well, I know you’re turning me down, but I love you anyway.”

His expectations were unmet, and he was frustrated, but he took a moment to say, “I love you.”

As so often happens in our relationships, sometimes we can say the right things, but our hearts are not in the right place. We should trust that Solomon meant this statement, that when he touched the latch for her to hear, he was not feigning love. But it doesn’t mean he wasn’t frustrated. So what did he do next?

He left. He didn’t wash and then get in bed with her. He went for a walk.

Apparently, Solomon wanted to walk off some of his frustration. (We’ll see a little bit of how he dealt with it in the next few verses.)

His wife realized he left, so she bolted out of bed to look for him.

Does any of this sound familiar? Your conflicts in marriage may not play out in exactly this same way, but aren’t they similar? Have you ever been in a fight, ever experienced a frustration so difficult that one of you felt led to leave the marriage bed? Maybe one of you went to sleep on the couch or in the guest room, or maybe you jumped in the car to go for a drive. Then the other spouse got up and went looking.

It’s a very tender moment. Even in tension there can be tenderness. Even in conflict there can be reminders of love. And the important thing to remember in these moments—in quiet conflict or all-out verbal arguments—is how God would have us fight with each other. He knows the fights are going to happen because we’re sinners. But we can learn to fight fair, and we can learn a few things from Solomon and his wife about how to do that. When expectations are not met, by God’s grace we can take control of our minds and put into practice some healthy ways of dealing with our conflict. Here’s one of the first healthy practices:

Respond; Don’t React

One of the rules right out of the gate is that we have to be careful not to react to things that upset us. Reaction shows a serious lack of self-control and maturity. Notice that Solomon didn’t just blow up at his wife and go on about how she didn’t love him or respect him or care about him. None of that happened. Instead, he basically said, “Okay, I get it. I love you.” His heart may still have been full of frustration, but he controlled himself and responded to his wife, rather than reacting to her. Then he took his frustration elsewhere.

I’m not saying this was necessarily the right thing to do, but we’ll discuss that shortly. In the meantime, let’s learn something valuable from Solomon’s example. In conflict, we must be very careful not to get caught up in reacting to the things that bother us. That can quickly get out of control, and suddenly the argument takes on a momentum of its own. In those moments, we become slaves to our emotions and impulses. That’s not a healthy way to talk to anyone, let alone the person with whom we are supposed to be one flesh.

When expectations are unmet, pride often kicks in. We begin to rehearse in our minds and hearts what we deserve, what we are owed, what the other person ought to do for us. The problem with pride is that it will often make you see things that aren’t even there. It has a way of justifying itself and all its demands. Jesus’s mother, Mary, referred to this self-delusion when she said that God “has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts” (Luke 1:51).

Pride distorts reality. When we’re disappointed about unmet expectations, pride pops up like a little internal defense lawyer giving us all the reasons why our spouses deserve judgment and why we are vindicated in our own righteousness.

But if we were being more thoughtful, we might actually begin to advocate in our imaginations for the person who has frustrated us. In Solomon’s situation, perhaps he could have reasoned that his poor wife had been working all day long in the house by herself. As the day grew later and later and it became the wee hours of the night, she probably just became too tired to wait up for him anymore and got in the bed, exhausted.

Then Solomon came, putting on the moves. She wasn’t baiting him or insulting him. She just communicated, “Baby, I’m tired. That’s not code for ‘I hate you.’ I’m just worn out.”

When pride kicks in, the imaginative reactions of a husband may consist of things such as the following:

“Doesn’t she know how hard I’ve worked?”

“Is it too much to ask for her to have a little fun when I come home?”

“She must not be attracted to me.”

The more frustrated we are, the more we can allow anger to shape our reactions. One telltale sign you’ve entered that stage of conflict is if you begin listing all your strengths and all your spouse’s weaknesses. (By the way, rehearsing all your spouse’s failures like this puts you in company with Satan, the great accuser.)

When pride rears up in our hearts, we move so effortlessly into reaction mode. We need to learn how to respond without reacting. There is a difference.

Solomon responded with an “I love you,” and then he took a time-out. His wife responded not with fuming and fussing but by trailing after him. Despite the fact that they didn’t avoid conflict, they handled it reasonably well—not perfectly, but well. Let’s see now how things progressed.

The watchmen found me

as they went about in the city;

they beat me, they bruised me,

they took away my veil,

those watchmen of the walls. (5:7)

A physical beating was not actually delivered to the queen by the watchmen. In any era, it’s never a good idea to beat up the queen, right? She was using poetic imagery.

Basically, she communicated that she’d been running around, looking for the king everywhere, and everyone she asked about him had no idea where he was. So every time they said, “We haven’t seen him. Isn’t he with you?” it bruised her soul. She felt emotionally beat up. She was torn up about hurting his feelings. She was worried because he left. She wore herself out with fatigue and anxiety searching for him.

She pleaded with the people she ran into: “I adjure you, O daughters of Jerusalem, if you find my beloved, that you tell him I am sick with love” (v. 8).

This was an important stage in their conflict. Something was broken up. The standoff gave way to healthier responses. Something happened to our queen’s heart that I think is rather profound. She went from being unresponsive and cold toward the advances of her husband to running through the castle looking for him, professing that she was sick with love. “I need to find him. I need to grab him. I need him.”

When we learn to respond to each other rather than react, we will move much more quickly in our conflict toward resolution and reconciliation. Reactions only stoke the fires of conflict; responses, particularly godly ones, help us snuff out the conflict.

Going to God

Next, we find out what Solomon was doing. He said, “I love you,” in his understated way, then took a walk. Who knows where he went? Maybe he went to the kitchen; maybe he watched SportsCenter in the west wing of the castle. We don’t really know yet. One thing we do know is that he didn’t change his wife’s heart. Her heart was changed by God.

Now let me tell you why this truth is important: way too many men and even more women want to use commonsense arguments or manipulation to change the way their spouses feel about or respond toward them. This is absolutely devastating in the end. In our conflicts, we start throwing jabs and we wound each other deeply, or we play some kind of manipulation game in order to get our spouses to do what we want.

Some marriage books are predicated on that latter approach. While they are meant to be helpful, they are full of what they might call “best practices”—general rules that work only if both spouses are healthy emotionally and spiritually. But if they’re not, the best practices can’t work.

What I often see in marriages is that men and women become frustrated because they read these books and learn ways to manipulate their spouse in order to make their spouse indebted to them. So a husband will read one and come away thinking, Okay, if I do the dishes and vacuum the floor, she’ll be responsive to me. I’ve even been at marriage conferences where speakers said, “You know what my wife thinks is sexy? Vacuuming. If I vacuum, she’s all over me like a hyena.” Then all the husbands go home and vacuum. When their wives are unresponsive, husbands become more frustrated because their system of creating indebtedness didn’t work.

Likewise, women are told that if they do certain things for their husbands, they will get the husbands they want. There is literally a book out there dedicated to changing your husband’s behavior rather than you developing holistically as a couple. When the principles fail to deliver an improved husband, it just leads to more frustration.

My criticism of this kind of “best practices” stuff is that it doesn’t address the heart. It doesn’t use the Bible’s only means of getting below the surface of behavior modification. It’s always predicated on the idea that we are the ones who need our spouses to measure up to our standards, not that we have our own lack of measuring up to deal with.

The Scriptures show husbands that they’ve been called by God to love their wives like Christ loved the church. That means we love them regardless of their response to our efforts to change them. And the same grace-centeredness is needed for the wives who want their husbands to change.

Getting our hearts into this way of thinking is the hardest thing in marriage by far because all of us tend to love in order to get something in return. (You can tell when it’s not really love you’re giving if you begin to withhold it because you don’t think the response is good enough.) Jesus calls us to a more selfless way, the way of the cross. His way calls us to love purely because it’s the right thing to do, because it honors him and glorifies his Father. Jesus emptied himself in order to love imperfect responders. That’s real love.

Men, have you figured out that you cannot be romantic enough? You cannot be sweet enough. You cannot help out around the house enough. You cannot make enough money and buy enough stuff to make your wife a sexual dynamo in the bedroom. Heart change isn’t brought about through leverage like that. In the end, only the Holy Spirit can change your wife’s heart. So we love, we encourage, and repeatedly we turn our wife over to Christ because he can change her heart. He can move in her. He can do things that we can’t.

The same is true for women. You can give all the sex that your man wants. You can cook him all his favorite meals. You can keep the house extra clean. You can give him time alone in his man cave or whatever. And God can use all those things, but none of them performed to bring about change will work to change your man’s heart. Only God can do that.

That is what happened with Solomon and his queen. Her heart was transformed and stirred up toward her husband when just a little while ago it wasn’t at all. She was indifferent because she was tired. But then she became sick with love. God did that. Now notice the resulting appraisal: “My beloved is radiant and ruddy, distinguished among ten thousand” (v. 10).

This was a woman who twenty minutes before was saying, “Don’t touch me. I’m not in the mood.” Now she’s going on about how hot he is:

His head is the finest gold;

his locks are wavy,

black as a raven.

His eyes are like doves

beside streams of water,

bathed in milk,

sitting beside a full pool.

His cheeks are like beds of spices,

mounds of sweet-smelling herbs.

His lips are lilies,

dripping liquid myrrh.

His arms are rods of gold,

set with jewels.

His body is polished ivory,

bedecked with sapphires.

His legs are alabaster columns,

set on bases of gold.

His appearance is like Lebanon,

choice as the cedars.

His mouth is most sweet,

and he is altogether desirable.

This is my beloved and this is my friend,

O daughters of Jerusalem.
(vv. 11–16)

Something definitely changed. She went from “I’ve got a headache” to “I want your body.” Something shifted in her heart. And it wasn’t Solomon who brought it about, because he wasn’t even there. No, God moved. God worked in the deep parts of her heart. God restirred her affections for her husband. The Lord prompted her toward love, and she responded. He readied both of them to work toward resolution and reconciliation.

Look at the start of the sixth chapter: “Where has your beloved gone, O most beautiful among women? Where has your beloved turned, that we may seek him with you?” (6:1). Somehow the queen figured out where Solomon went: “My beloved has gone down to his garden to the beds of spices, to graze in the gardens and to gather lilies. I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine; he grazes among the lilies” (vv. 2–3).

He went to the garden. If I had to guess, I think he was probably wrestling with his frustration. He probably knew his frustration wasn’t valid. So he sat alone, working through, processing, and praying.

This is a fairly typical male trait. Wives, you may think that in times of conflict, your husband is “shutting down,” and this means he’s not as engaged, not as invested in the relationship as you. Men tend to process things a little differently than women, though. Women tend to be more verbal in their processing, able to access multiple thoughts and feelings simultaneously and express them fairly quickly. Men need a little more stewing.

Women, if your man isn’t talking straightaway, it doesn’t necessarily mean he’s not thinking about you and the problem and working through it. Men tend to process more internally. It’s likely that Solomon was doing just that. He didn’t want to react in a poor way, so he gave her a sign that he loved her and then stole away for a bit to be alone and work through his frustrations.

Getting away from the conflict can be an unhealthy thing if it’s simply about avoidance. You can’t ignore problems away. The conflict will still be there. Sometimes, it may be healthy to take a break, catch your breath, and process outside the heat of an argument or the immediacy of the frustration. And it’s always good to get alone with God, to ask him to help you see what you ought to see about yourself and help you give the grace to your spouse that you ought to give. Not because he or she deserves it, of course, but because it is needed. And because God deserves it.

Talking Well

Solomon’s wife found him in the garden. After they each had time to process their frustrations and feelings about the other, and they experienced a working of God in their hearts and minds, they were ready to work through their conflict in a healthy way. They may still have had the fight ahead of them, but they were prepared to fight fair.

My first few years of marriage were full of soul-shriveling conflict. One of the ways God led me out of that conflict (or maybe into it in a way that led to health and healing) was through the teachings of Tommy Nelson on this very chapter of the Song. Here are some “nevers” I learned from the principles of conflict that Tommy laid out in his books and sermons. These are not “best practices” in the sense that if you put them into practice, you are guaranteed positive responses. They are instead “gospel practices”—ways to show grace in how you talk through conflict with your spouse. These “nevers” have less to do with getting something from your spouse and more to do with what is the right way to speak to him or her regardless of his or her response.

Here are ten “nevers” of communication, especially as it pertains to conflict:1

1. Never respond to your mate rashly.

This has a lot do with thoughtfulness and maturity in responding, especially to charges or accusations. It is about moving from reaction mode to responding mode. Lashing out in anger is a sign of a lack of self-control. There will be times when you need to just take a deep breath when something stings you, lest you say something back that’s completely irrational and hurtful. Maybe you need to count to ten or find another way to think and process before responding, but never speak rashly. Proverbs 29:11 says, “A fool gives full vent to his spirit, but a wise man quietly holds it back.” Slow down, breathe, and think through what you’re saying. Never speak rashly.

2. Never touch your mate out of temper or frustration, ever.

There are no ifs, ands, or buts to this. Physical abuse of any kind—even a slap—is totally off-limits always, forever, end of story. If you find yourself struggling with this, you should see a trained counselor without delay.

3. Never seek to shame your spouse in public (or in private for that matter).

This sin is as huge as it is common. Have you ever been at a table when this happened? Doesn’t it create a stifling spirit of awkwardness? Never publicly embarrass your mate. It’s obviously a handy way to humiliate her, to “put her in her place,” but it’s so damaging to the soul. The humiliation and the shame don’t dissipate easily, if ever. Public shaming also wins you no allies; most people in these settings tend to immediately sympathize with the humiliated person. So if you want to kill the mood of a social engagement, shame your spouse, and lose friends, go right ahead and embarrass your spouse. But if you want to do the right thing, hold your tongue. The desire to criticize and knock your spouse down to size in the presence of others comes from hell.

4. Never fight in front of your kids (or use them as leverage in a disagreement).

I come from a home that had some massive issues, so I’ve had a lot to work through. But by God’s grace, in seventeen years of being with Lauren, we’ve never yelled at each other. Oh, we’ve had plenty of those “Don’t ever do that again” kind of moments—an unbelievable amount of those. But we don’t scream at each other.

This is extra important in moments when we’re together as a family and some kind of conflict arises between Lauren and me. It usually takes place in the car and has something to do with getting lost. My wife has an uncanny sense of direction. She’s like a human GPS device. Me? I am what the experts call “directionally challenged.” And people who give me directions often make me mad because they’ll say things such as, “Go east on 35.” And I’m thinking, Go east? Do I have a compass? Am I Davy Crockett? Seriously. Why not say, “Take a left”? That’s easy.

Getting lost is one of my most frustrating experiences. Sometimes we’ll all be in the car, I won’t know where I’m going, and Lauren will make fun of me or laugh at my poor sense of direction. I get irritated. I may become sarcastic in response. And our kids know. They know I shouldn’t talk to Mom like that. It’s an important lesson for all of us. They are learning from Lauren and me how mature and healthy couples handle conflict. And if we’re always yelling at each other, losing our tempers, freaking out about unmet expectations, guess what they think is normal?

I promise you this: You are teaching your children how to fight. In your home right now, you are teaching your daughters how to treat their husbands and you are teaching your sons how to treat their wives. They’re soaking it all up. They’re taking from your home their expectation of “normal family life.”

Be careful how you handle conflict in front of your kids. And never use them in any way to win an argument.

5. Never mention your spouse’s parents or any other family member.

This is the part of a fight when things can get really crazy. Because, as I said, we bring our ideas of normalcy into our home lives with our spouses. And we end up with a lot of expectations that cause us to do a lot of measuring.

In my house growing up, you might just put your dirty towel on the floor, and Mom would eventually come by and pick it up. Pretty sweet deal. Then she washed and folded it and put it back in the cabinet. When I married Lauren, I left my towels lying around. I thought that was normal. And she would be like, “Are you serious?”

I came from a family background with one set of routines and expectations, and Lauren came from another. I expected her to adjust to my expectations, not really thinking that I ought to adjust to hers, because in her mind, it wasn’t really about the towel but about respect.

If married couples don’t handle these differences in expectations well, conflicts can become all-out assaults on entire families! Like, “Your family is a bunch of idiotic cavemen to live that way!” Or, “Your family is a bunch of uptight neat freaks to live that way!” It can turn into a barrage of insults on each other’s families, which is extremely destructive.

It happens in conflicts when you tell your wife she is just like her mother, when that is not a good thing to be. Or when you blame your husband’s flaws on his parents’ failure to bring him up right. These are very sensitive places to jab, and we typically jab there when we really want to hurt our spouses. So don’t do that.

Keep the issue on the issue. You don’t need to bring anyone else into the equation.

6. Never dig up the past; try to stay on topic.

Similar to the problem with bringing up somebody’s family or upbringing is this issue of going back over past wrongs and failings. First Corinthians 13:5 says that love “keeps no record of wrongs” (NIV). It has been my experience in marriage, though, that sometimes love jots some stuff down on a napkin. There may not be an official ledger of offenses, but there’s a mental list. It’s brought out at key times, especially in the middle of conflict. So the argument stops being about just that argument and starts becoming about all the things.

The first two years of marriage for Lauren and me were very difficult. I thought she was a hypocrite in some areas of her life, and she thought I was a hypocrite in some areas of my life. And, really, who isn’t? But we were both clueless and thought ourselves to be pretty holy, pretty put together. One of the things Lauren used to feel was that I didn’t listen very well.

She would say, “When I’m trying tell you what I think the Lord’s doing in my heart, I feel like you’re not listening to me.” I would be honest with her and say, “You know, I’m really not. I do kind of tune you out. It’s hard for me to hear some of these things because I know the issues we have, I know what we’re trying to work through, and honestly I feel like you’re hypocritical at times.” That was one of our issues early on.

Years later—and I remember the day—we were sitting out on our back porch, drinking coffee, and she was talking me through the book she was reading called The Wounded Heart. She told me how it was ministering to her and resonating with her. I was listening, but it was such a beautiful fall morning—birds chirping, sun shining, the scent of coffee in the air—that I sort of half listened and half took in the atmosphere. She picked up that I wasn’t totally paying attention.

Later she went to get her hair done, and when she came home, I could tell she was upset with me. The conflict was brewing. I was thinking, What did I do? I hung up my towel and everything. Why is she mad? I had no idea. But as we were talking about this thing and it became more tense, Lauren said, “Do you still feel like I’m a hypocrite and that I’m not honest and open with you?”

I said, “What are you talking about?”

She said, “I was trying to tell you about what I was reading in this book and what the Lord was teaching me, and I just felt like you weren’t even there. So you still think I’m a hypocrite about these things?”

And then I knew what she was talking about. I said, “Baby, you can’t pull a file from six years ago!”

She was still smarting from my hurtful words that long ago and was bringing them up again. And I didn’t feel that way about her at all. I didn’t think that. But by withholding my focus from her that morning, I had brought that stuff back up for her, and so she brought it back up with me.

Sometimes we make a conflict deeper than it ought to be when we get historical. We may have said we forgave our spouses, but the proof that we actually haven’t is when we start going back through the record of wrongs, listing them as ammunition against our spouses in any current conflict. And usually the reason we do that is because it gives us power in the argument. The more charges we can file, the greater our case. But thinking that way makes conflict not about resolution but retribution. And this leads us to our next principle:

7. Never try to win.

I had a counselor tell me in premarital counseling, “Do you want to be right, or do you want to be happy?” Two months into marriage, I found the fatal flaw in his reasoning. What if being right makes me happy?

For a lot of people, what makes them happy is being right, winning, no matter the emotional cost to their spouse. They want their spouse humiliated, whipped, chastised, properly penitent. It’s so easy to slip into winning mode, and you can usually tell you’re there if you’ve moved from responding to reacting.

In too many marital conflicts, we work too hard at winning the argument and too little at winning the heart. You can express your feelings and thoughts, even share criticisms and complaints, but the end goal of marital conflict should be care for your spouse’s soul, not trying to rack up the most points. Seeking to win is not love.

8. Never yell, use put-downs, or verbally defame your spouse.

These sins are connected to the sin of rashness mentioned earlier. The Bible reminds us over and over about the devastating power of the tongue. Here is one example: “So also the tongue is a small member, yet it boasts of great things. How great a forest is set ablaze by such a small fire!” (James 3:5).

Women tend to be more vocal; they’re very relational, so words are unbelievably powerful to them. You can hurt a woman with words very easily, often without even trying. When you couple harsh words with a raised voice or put-downs and insults, the wounds you create in your wife may last the rest of her life. Read that last phrase again: the wounds … may last the rest of her life.

It’s true for men too. I’ve never sat down with a guy who, if I pushed and prodded and tried to find it, couldn’t tell me something harsh that was said to him when he was an adolescent, something that every once in a while comes back up and haunts him.

Words are powerful, and the way we say them—tone, volume, posture—only adds to their destructive strength. The childhood taunt “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never harm me” is garbage. The damage that yelling and demeaning can do endures long after the conflict in which it occurred. Lore Ferguson wrote:

I grew up in a home with a good amount of yelling. Excuses for it were common, as well as prefaces or follow-ups. What I learned early on is there are levels of yelling, there is also tone of voice, there is not enough coffee, too much Irish in our bloodline, and too short a fuse. I learned yelling was the expected response and apologies came later, if at all. And I learned, most of all, that what is yelling to me, was not the universal decibel level of yelling.

Everyone has their own barometer of what constitutes yelling and when it is appropriate.

Because I’m a sinner and we’re not in the new earth yet, I still find myself sensitive to the tones of voices around me, to how words are phrased and flung, and what excuses are given for anger. I am rarely offended, but if you yell at me, I’ll be looking for the nearest closet. Fear of man is alive and well in this soul on this issue.…

The longer it’s been since I lived in a home with yelling, the more I realize yelling or raising your voice in anger is not functional, not ever. If you are a parent, there is no excuse for yelling at your child. Ever. If you are a child, there is no excuse for yelling at your parent. Ever. If you are a friend, you should never yell at another friend.2

And if you are married, you should never yell at your spouse in anger. Ever.

I know that seems really difficult for some of you to do. You were not raised in an environment where anger was handled in more healthy ways. Yelling seems normal. Or maybe it feels like part of your personality. You see yourself as passionate, emotional, and fiery. Raising your voice comes naturally.

But it’s never right. The right thing to do in conflict is not “what comes naturally” but what God would have us do according to his Word. The right thing to do is to put aside the “natural” man and put on the Spirit.

9. Never withhold physical intimacy or use sex to manipulate.

Let’s be honest: I think this is almost 95 percent of the time a wife’s issue. I don’t know that I’ve ever even heard of a relationship where the husband withheld sex to get his wife to act a certain way. I’m sure it’s happened, but I’ve never heard of it.

Most of the time, this manipulative tactic is employed by a wife, in sort of a carrot-and-stick arrangement. It’s fine for sex to feel like a “treat.” But it’s not fine to withhold the treats to get your spouse to surrender in conflict. It’s a sinful way to resolve an argument, to be sure.

10. Never put off seeking resolution.

This comes right out of Ephesians 4:26, but it needs some explanation.

I’m not naive about the nature of some conflict, and I know that there are going to be some nights where you can’t solve everything before bedtime. But there is something you can do to work toward peace in the meantime.

The day grows long, the evening sets in, and the conflict is still there. It doesn’t look solvable. But as much as you are able, as soon as you are able, make an effort to take at least part of the responsibility for the conflict, no matter how small that part may be. Likely you’re in the conflict because you think you’re in the right. You both think that. So what can you do to own part of it? You’re still convinced your spouse needs to own the lion’s share, but you can take some of it, right?

Try to bring some semblance of peace to the home before you go to sleep. Extend an olive branch of some kind. If you don’t do this and decide to go to bed sour, the Devil has a larger playground in your home, and overnight, the root of bitterness sets in deeper.

Let’s say your spouse is 99.9 percent to blame for the conflict. (I know, most of you are thinking, I don’t have any problem imagining that.) Let’s say she did something wrong and didn’t even apologize for it. But you blew up about it. You yelled; you compared her to her mother; you got out the laundry list of her past sins. She messed up, and it’s her fault. But you responded poorly. Now you’re both lying in bed. You’re facing those walls, backs to each other. It’s eerily quiet and cold in the room.

What if you decided to roll over, tap her on the shoulder, and say, “Honey, I apologize for blowing up.” It’s a great way to show grace, especially if you think you’re the one who’s been the most wronged.

This is critical to all healthy conflict in marriage—refusing to shift the blame and accepting whatever responsibility you can. It is the way of the gospel.

Paul Tripp said, “[Y]our biggest problem is not the imperfection of your spouse.”3

No, the biggest problem in most of our marriages is us. And really, the only person we can control is us. We can’t change our spouses. (Have you figured that out yet?) Only God can do that. So the only thoughts, actions, and words we can control are our own. Let’s ask ourselves, then, what we can do to take responsibility in the midst of conflict. By owning our part, we can stop the escalation of conflict.

Don’t let the sun go down on your anger.

ListenING Well

Now that we’ve covered some principles of talking well during conflict, I want to share principles with you for listening well. These are things to pray for more discipline in because the flesh’s impulse will be to spring back into defensiveness and accusation in the midst of an argument. But love listens, and here are seven ways how:

1. Show that you are listening with your nonverbals.

Don’t have your back turned; don’t look all over the room; don’t roll your eyes. Look at your spouse. Look him in the eyes. Show him with your face that you’re paying attention and focusing.

2. Don’t use logic to overpower feelings.

Here’s what happens: A woman will say, “I just feel like, I just feel like, I just feel like …” and the man immediately starts thinking of all the reasons why she is not supposed to feel that way. He doesn’t even wait for her to finish speaking; he just looks at her mouth, thinking, Here’s why you’re wrong.

So now she feels disrespected and not heard to add to her other feelings.

3. Don’t debate.

It’s hard not to argue when you’re in an argument, of course, but one internal fight you can wage with yourself is learning what to respond to and what not to. When your spouse is saying particularly hurtful, invalid, or just angry, vindictive things, it’s all right sometimes not to respond. I don’t mean employ the silent treatment. You should talk. But don’t feel the need to respond to every single point. Don’t treat it like a debate. Don’t argue. I think there are times when you have to let it go even if what’s being said is wrong. For the sake of forgiveness, sometimes you may want to ask yourself, as Paul did, “Why not rather suffer wrong?” (1 Cor. 6:7).

4. Don’t interrupt.

This should make obvious sense. If you’re interrupting, you’re not listening. Don’t listen only to be listening for an opportunity to jump in. Listen to actually listen, and this means adopting a spirit of patience.

5. Don’t leave prematurely.

This one is tough. We’ve seen in our biblical text that Solomon walked away. I would say there are certainly times when it’s all right to take a break, to get some space and process and pray. Sometimes if a conflict is escalating too quickly and the venom is flying and it doesn’t look like anything productive is going to come out of it, the best thing to do is take a breather.

But in the middle of conflict, when someone is sharing his heart with you, one of the worst things you can do is walk out. It shows a disinterest in the relationship. Walking out on someone who is pouring out his feelings—especially feelings of hurt—is akin to slapping him in the face.

You will need discernment in knowing when taking a time-out is appropriate and when it would be counterproductive, but abruptly getting up and walking out on somebody as she’s talking is almost never the right thing to do.

6. Don’t speak negatively or complain about your spouse to your friends.

This is similar to our point about not embarrassing your spouse publicly. She may not be in the room, but in a way that’s worse because she isn’t there to defend herself or give her side. This is a selfish ploy to amass supporters against your spouse; when in marital conflict, the healthy action is seeking to win the support of your spouse.

It’s all right to seek counsel and advice from a trusted Christian friend, but this is obviously not the same thing as complaining. I think if you do talk to a friend about your conflict with your spouse, you should focus on which parts of the conflict you can own.

7. Avoid uninviting or distant body language.

Posture, position, gestures: all of these and more communicate whether we’re receiving what is being said and considering it, or whether we are already closed off against it, planning to defend and deflect.

ForgivING

Let’s return to our text now and see how Solomon and his wife worked toward resolution and reconciliation.

The queen found her king in the garden. Things were tender between them. She had a change of heart, but there was probably still residual tension because they hadn’t talked it out yet. And taking the conversational initiative, like a godly husband, this is what Solomon led with:

You are beautiful as Tirzah, my love,

lovely as Jerusalem,

awesome as an army with banners.

Turn away your eyes from me,

for they overwhelm me—

Your hair is like a flock of goats

leaping down the slopes of Gilead.

Your teeth are like a flock of ewes

that have come up from the washing;

all of them bear twins;

not one among them has lost its young.

Your cheeks are like halves of a pomegranate

behind your veil.

There are sixty queens and eighty concubines,

and virgins without number.

My dove, my perfect one, is the only one,

the only one of her mother,

pure to her who bore her.

The young women saw her and called her blessed;

the queens and concubines also, and they praised her.

“Who is this who looks down like the dawn,

beautiful as the moon, bright as the sun,

awesome as an army with banners?” (6:4–10)

Solomon had plenty of time to think and process and pray for God’s help. His wife found him in the garden, and while she might have been bracing herself for a real blast of anger and frustration, God worked in both of their hearts. Solomon didn’t let her have it. Instead, he praised her in the joy and pleasure of their newlywed bliss.

You can tell that in the middle of all this conflict, real forgiveness happened.

Now consider her response in verses 11 and 12:

I went down to the nut orchard

to look at the blossoms of the valley,

to see whether the vines had budded,

whether the pomegranates were in bloom.

Before I was aware, my desire set me

among the chariots of my kinsman, a prince.

And Solomon came back again with a reference to dancing.

Here’s the primary thing I want you to see: Not only was forgiveness exchanged between them, but they met each other in the embrace of reconciliation, which restirred the romance between them. They didn’t reach a stalemate or an uneasy peace. They really forgave each other. They set their grievances aside. Their conflict was handed up to heaven, not swept under the rug. And all the sorrow, shame, difficulty, and pain they both endured turned into dancing.

Conflict is going to be one of those things that define what happens in our marriages. There’s no way around it. But how we handle it will reveal our own sin and our own insecurity more than anything else. It will be sanctifying.

You know, for a long time I felt really suckered into this Christianity thing. Because the message I heard was that Jesus loved me, and if I’d come to him, he’d fill me with joy. But nobody told me the second I gave my life to him, he would start tilling up the very deep places of my heart, revealing the darkest, nastiest things. Nor was I told about the stuff that would come to the surface so that I could deal with it and find my way to joy, through the cross. No one really preached that message.

I didn’t know that God disciplines all those he calls sons and that he scourges those he loves. No one ever pointed me to Psalm 51:8: “Let the bones that you have broken rejoice.” God crushes bones? No one ever showed me the end of Moses’s story where God took him up on the mountain and showed him the Promised Land and said, “You don’t get to go in. I’m going to kill you up here on the mountain.” Never heard that one in Sunday school.

Likewise, Christian marriage gets elevated to this worldly notion of a struggle-free, conflict-free, happily-ever-after fairy tale because, you know, we love Jesus. But that’s absurd. And unbiblical. And then Christians get married and go skipping naively into their lives together, and the 18-wheeler runs over them. And then they don’t even feel like they can tell anybody that an 18-wheeler rolled over them, because they’re supposed to be happy and problem-free with Jesus.

But that’s not how God wants marriage to work in this fallen world. No, he uses marriage to take two sinners into places of deeper honesty with each other and deeper trust of him. Marriage is going to dig up some really dark things in people’s hearts.

Walking according to the Spirit, though, we can learn to love each other well, take responsibility for our sins, and forgive as we’ve been forgiven. We learn to serve and sacrifice and submit in such a way that marriage becomes the real, deep, lasting joy it is meant to be as it glorifies Jesus Christ.