Humility before resolution

There was a stretch of my marriage where I could not lose an argument. Not because I was right. Because I had decided, before I ever opened my mouth, that I was going to be right. I walked into conversations holding a verdict and spent the whole conversation gathering evidence to support it. I was not talking to my wife. I was building a closing statement.

In a recent season of counseling, a counselor named Lee gave my wife and me four words and asked us to actually use them instead of just nodding along. Humility. Respect. Empathy. Goodwill. HREG, and humility comes first on purpose, because none of the other three work without it. None of the four are feelings. They're choices you make before you say a word, and I learned the hard way that if even one is missing, the other three collapse with it.

Humility

Humility is the willingness to be wrong about something that matters to you. Not the performance of it. I was good at the performance — the 'I hear you, babe' voice while my mind was already three moves ahead planning my rebuttal. Real humility sounds like, 'I might be missing something here,' and it means asking a question you don't already know the answer to.

I was, for a long time, the guy who listened like a lawyer. Patient, quiet, waiting for the gap in her sentence where I could insert the fact that would end the discussion. That is not listening. I know because I did it for years and called it patience.

Respect

Respect is not agreement and it is not affection. It's the decision to treat the other person as a full adult whose experience is real, even when you're convinced their conclusion is wrong. I had a season where contempt crept into how I talked to my wife — the eye roll, the sigh, the tone that said 'here we go again.' Contempt doesn't just lose an argument. It teaches the other person that being honest with you isn't safe. I taught that lesson to someone I loved, and I'm still working to undo it.

Empathy

Empathy is being able to say the other person's position back to them so accurately they'd sign it. I couldn't do this for years. I'd summarize her feelings in a way that was secretly an argument against them. Learning to actually say her case out loud, in good faith, with no 'but' at the end, changed the temperature of the room every time I managed it, because it meant the fight had mostly been coming from me.

Goodwill

Goodwill is assuming the person across from you isn't trying to hurt you. After there's real injury between two people, this is the hardest of the four, because pain trains you to read a motive into everything. I've been on both ends of this — the one assuming the worst, and later, the one whose every word got treated as an attack because of what I'd done. I understood, once I was on the receiving end, exactly how corrosive it is to defend yourself against someone who technically wasn't attacking you, but had every reason not to trust you.

Humility, respect, empathy, goodwill. Take any one away and you're no longer having a conversation. You're running a trial.

What I had to unlearn

HREG isn't a command to tolerate harm, and I want to be careful here because I've seen people twist grace into an excuse to stay in something dangerous. Goodwill toward someone who is actively lying to you or endangering you isn't humility, it's a hazard. These four conditions are for two people who are genuinely trying, and part of growing up is being honest with yourself about whether that's actually the room you're in.

The other thing I had to accept: I cannot install this in anyone else. I can only bring it myself and see what happens. Some seasons it changed everything between my wife and me. Other seasons it clarified, painfully, that I was the only one doing the work. Both of those were information I needed, and I couldn't have gotten either one while I was still trying to win.

These are lessons I lived, generalized and anonymized so I don't expose anyone but me — not a transcript of any session, and not professional guidance. I'm not a counselor or therapist, and nothing here replaces one. If you're in danger, please talk to a qualified professional. Nobody should stay in an unsafe home to preserve a marriage; if you are in danger, contact local emergency services. How we write here.