Managing Anger in Marriage

Managing Anger in Marriage

He who is slow to anger is better than the mighty, and he who rules his [own] spirit than he who takes a city.
Proverbs 16:32 (Amp.)

An angry wife. An angry husband. An angry marriage! Is it common? Most of the anger we experience in life concerns relationships, so why should the marriage relationship be excluded?

It isn’t. Marriage probably generates in couples more anger than they will experience in any other relationship. Perhaps you have already experienced this in your engagement.

When two people live together constantly with vulnerability and closeness, the potential for hurt and misunderstanding is enormous. Learning to function in harmony without one overriding the other takes delicate skill and extended practice.

Anger and love can exist in the same relationship. When anger is always smoldering, however, it tends to diminish the quality of love. In time, resentment gains a foothold.

Resentment is an eroding disease that feeds on lingering anger for its lifeblood. Resentment eats away at the relationship until the love is dead.

Worse, if resentment continues, it eventually can produce hate—and hate separates. It drives the other person away. No couple planning to be married wants this to happen.

Anger is a normal part of close relationships. Whenever two people begin a relationship, part of what attracts them are their similarities and another part of what attracts them are their differences.

Opposites do attract, but not for long. It does not take much time for differences to lead to disagreements.
Disagreements may involve the emotions of fear, hurt and frustration.

• Fear that our relationship is threatened and that we will never be understood.

• Hurt about what has been said to us and about us, or how it has been said.

• Frustration that we have had a similar disagreement before and this is the same song, twenty-second verse.

Disagreements often involve anger and lead to conflict. At that point we have a choice.

We can choose to spend our anger-energy by dumping on our spouse, showing our victim where, once again, he or she is clearly wrong and we are right.

We can also choose to throw up our hands in futility and stomp out of the room. By that act we communicate one of two things.

Either the other person is not worth taking the time to work out the issue, or communication between the two of us is impossible. Both choices lead to feelings of hopelessness and helplessness and set us up for more failure in the future.

We can, however, choose another option. We can acknowledge our fear, hurt or frustration and choose to invest our anger-energy by seizing this opportunity to better understand our loved one.

One of the most practical ways is to remember that love “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things” (1 Cor. 13:7, NKJV), and to develop the habit of working through our differences.

This takes time and involves listening, asking questions, listening, asking more questions, and finally reaching understanding.

Do not be quick in spirit to be angry or vexed, for anger and vexation lodge in the bosom of fools (Eccles. 7:9, Amp.).

The beginning of strife is as when water first trickles [from a crack in a dam]; therefore stop contention before it becomes worse and quarreling breaks out (Prov. 17:14, Amp.).

Good sense makes man restrain his anger, and it is his glory to overlook a transgression or an offense (Prov. 19:11, Amp.).
Cease from anger and forsake wrath; fret not yourself—it tends only to evil-doing (Ps. 37:8, Amp.).

When angry, do not sin; do not ever let your wrath (your exasperation, your fury or indignation) last until the sun goes down (Eph. 4:26, Amp.).