We've talked about these matters. And she has tried to loosen some of the control on things. She is a take charge person who does well directing others. Its hard to use faith or scripture in a conversation with her. We attend cuurch as a family but she is not really a person of faith. She never attended church growing up and only joined because she knew it was very important to me to be married in the church.
My wife has gone through times when she could be rather disrespectful to me, the past. Sometimes, this coincided with pregnancy, post-partum blues, etc. I realize hormones can have an effect on some women's moods, but it seems to amplify some issues that can seem minor at other times that are easy to ignore. I was really busy, taking classes and studying long hours in grad school, and I came home and she had an attitude toward me that made it hard to come home to.
I was putting the dishes in the dish washer, and she didn't like how I did it, nudged me out of the way angrily, and put them in the way she wanted. It was really rude, and after that I thought about how disrespectful she was, and prayed about it, and realized I hadn't consistently been praying about it on the occasions the attitude flared up. It wasn't a constant thing, of course, but happened at different times. We were getting ready to move and she was pregant. This was a difficult time for her.
She was really moody and it seemed like every night conversations turned into a fight. We had a conversation and I said something very benign and she got upset like I'd insulted her. I looked around the apartment a few minutes later and she wasn't there. I looked at our parking space outside and the van was gone. Soon after, she called from a friend's house, an older woman from church she called 'mom'. The woman gave her some good advice, apparently, and I felt okay with her talking with this woman for some emotional support, since my wife was going through a tough time emotionally. I agreed to her staying there and bringing the van home in time to take the kids to school.
That night, I prayed a long list of things. I prayed about how my wife would misinterpret things I said, issues related to submission and I Peter 3, how i believed the way her parents were when she was raised affected how she treated me-- a topic I'd never been able to discuss with her. There were about seven different topics I prayed about. I asked the Lord to speak to her. My wife had gotten a word of knowledge about someone at church and shared it with the person, and it was right on the mark not long before, and that stood out in my mind that she could hear God. So I argued my case why I had faith that it was God's will that my wife change on these issues, that anything I asked according to His will, I would have it, and I believed I would receive. It was one of those times I really sensed I was praying in faith.
But I was still blown away not many days later. My wife was going to this 'life change' study at church. She came home and asked me to sit next to her on the couch. I thought, 'uh-oh, does she want to argue again.' I tried to avoid that. But she seemed really pleasant and not argumentative. I sat down next to her.
Instead of laying into me, she told me I was a good husband and started praising certain things about me. Then, she took me through my prayer list. She said God had spoken to her certtain things about herself. She went through about five of the seven things I had prayed to God to speak to her about. But if I prayed a paragraph for each point, she had a couple of pages on the topic, and what she had learned went a lot deeper than what I had prayed.
The meeting she was at had table leaders who went through a kind of Bible study book with them, before a speaker spoke on the topic. The table leader had asked if any of them had a problem with anger. She thought to herself she didn't. Then she said you might have a problem with anger if you get angry at the way your husband does the dishes. Then she started listening.
For a couple of weeks or maybe a bit longer, I'd see her crying on occasion. I saw her just standing and crying in the living room of the new apartment we moved to soon after this answer to prayer. I asked her why she was crying and she felt bad about an occasion when she treated me unkindly. I talked with her, comforted. She askd me forgiveness, and I forgave it.
Within a few weeks of my prayer, my wife came to me and told me that the Lord spoke to her about the other two points I'd prayed about.
My memory is a bit fuzzy on the list of things I prayed for, but I wrote a post with a title along the lines of 'Amazing answers to prayer' or something along those lines in the Married Couples forum around that tiime. Maybe it was 2011.
After this happened with her, then I realized part of my responsibility as a husband and a fellow believer was to encourage her to treat me with respect, follow Ephesians 5 or I Peter 3. So if I detected something disrespect, I'd point it out. She was more open to it after that than she would have been before.
Since then, our marriage has been better. There have been times, on certain occasions, where she was hard for me to get along with due to respect issues, but it seems less of an issue than before for the most part, and her experience with God gave her a clearer idea of how she is supposed to be as a wife, which is makes it easier for me to talk to her when she's needed to reconsider her attitude. Now, for the most part, she is easy to get along with. I'm not trying to paint her in a negative light. That's a risk of posting about a few incidents like this. She is quite a remarkable person and a remarkable wife.
And if you asked her about times she's asked the Lord to pray about me when she had difficulties getting along with me, she'd have a story to tell, too.
Something I have found that helps with conflict in marriage, with us, is if we really humble ourselves before the Lord, and ask him to send point out our sins, give us unity, and help us to love one another, and then we confess our sins to one another. I can think of two times we had real difficulty getting along, where we were really irritating each other. Or she'd be negative, and I didn't want to be around her or talk to her because of it, which made the cycle worse, or whatever the reason was. After these times, it was like we started over with a clean slate with each other, without that build up of negativity. It's a lot better to just deal with issues regularly when they are really small and pray together regularly.
As far as marriage counseling goes, that could be good. It depends on the counselor you get. My wife and I went to a pastor once to talk through an issue. Many years before, before the seven specific answered prayers mentioned before, she seemed from my perspective to be rather hard to get along with, getting overly upset about small things. She asked some Christian neighbors to give us some advice, a married couple who are older than us. The wife listened to her and was a little bit blunt rebuking my wife for her attitude toward me. When they left, my wife cried and spent many hours in prayer that night. She thought the woman was too harsh. It didn't seeem that harsh to me, no harsher than I'd heard my wife speak to others at times. She felt like the Lord had spoken to her that night, but it did not seem that different from what the other wife said. But this wasn't a professional counselor. Some pastors get a bit of counseling training.
A lot of people, it seems men more than woman, just don't like the wild card of introducing some counselor into the marriage. I heard a man say he took his wife to a counselor, a secular psychologist or psychiatrist, and she said they did not need to be together. I can see why he felt betrayed, especially if he paid for that to save his marriage. But I see why. She was constantly yelling at him. He seemed like a nice, calm guy. But he'd cheated on her, probably multiple times, and she was bitter. But she didn't behave normally even around other people toward him.
There is also the danger of getting a marriage counselor with a left-wing social agenda, or whatever agenda you don't believe in. It would be awful for a Christian man to pay to go to a marriage counselor with his wife, and she turns out to be someone with a very different world view, for example contradicing what the BIble teaches about roles of husbands and wives in Ephesians, Colossians, and I Peter. If you got someone who was a really radical feminist who thought that problems in marriage were caused by men being afraid of female power, who thought that all men were potential rapists and should view themselves as such, that would be awful. Then if the wife wanted to follow the counselor while the husband wanted to fire her after the first meeting, that's worse. If you do go to a counselor, try to do some research about his or her philosophy about marriage beforehand.
The title 'Christian counselor' doesn't guarantee what they believe. There was a Christian marriage counseling show on the radio that I caught a few bits and pieces of while driving around many years ago. On the few occasions I heard it, the counselors would advice the woman who called in to separate from her husband and live apart from him. I think one example was the man talking down to his wife, either outright insulting her or pointing out her flaws. I didn't get the context, but it did concern me that I could tune in for the program briefly and it seemed like every time, the advice was get out of the house. The thing that really bothered me was how unprofessional it was to advise this based on one side of the story, over the radio at that. People going through marriage problems seeking sympathy may remember some one off comment from two years ago that isn't characteristic of the way they are treated in the marriage.
Then you have people on the Internet recommending divorce or separation based on the fact another party won't go to marriage counseling. Some individuals have reasons not to like marriage counseling besides not wanting to work on their marriage. We have no record of the prophets, Jesus, or the apostles saying, "Thou shalt go to marriage counseling." One of my professors, a psychologist, noticed that collectivist cultures have such a tiny presence of clinical psychologists and related counseling fields. When you live in a house with your dad, your uncle, and their families in a collectivist culture, and they give you unsolicited or solicited advice about your marriage or other life issues, you may not feel the need to pay a counselor. But if you live in a city where you are isolated from other people, you may feel that need.
On the other hand, a trained counselor may be valuable in helping a couple learn to communicate without blaming each other and other useful skills. But marriage counseling may be part of one set of solutions to marriage problems and not THE solution.