You and your spouse think differently, and that’s ok.
We all assume that everyone else on the planet should think like we do. We are right, after all, right? Actually, no, we are not right. You are not and neither am I. I’m sorry to be the one to tell you that. You do have your very own perspective on life and so does your spouse. Are you ready for a pretty funny story to illustrate this point?

Tami and I got married on April 20, 1985. This was well over 30 years ago. Almost one month before we got married, we closed escrow on a 950 square foot home that we bought together. This was a cute little two-bedroom home with a small yard on a corner lot. It was adorable. We even had our very own two-car garage! We could not have been more excited to start our lives together. Even though we chose not to live together until after the wedding, we did enjoy setting up our home together prior to being married.

Tami and I would frequently meet at our house after a long day at our jobs to clean things up, hang shelves, dream about home improvement projects, set up our kitchen, and more. It was so fun and felt like all of our dreams for our future together were coming true one home project at a time.

One particular night, we were working in our new kitchen. It was a very small kitchen with little counter space and just a few cabinets, so planning out where everything needed to go seemed pretty important. I was lining the cabinets to the right of the stove while Tami was on a step-stool lining some shelves above the kitchen sink.

After I finished with the cabinet I was working on, I started to move the few pots and pans we already owned out of the box we had packed them in and into the cabinet I had just lined. Tami looked down at my progress and said, “What are you doing?” I answered plainly, “I’m putting the pots and pans away.” “They don’t go there!” she said. I can only imagine the look on my face in that moment because I was completely baffled.

As she came down off of the step-stool, she showed me where the pots and pans should go. Her idea of where they should go (on the left side of the stove) seemed very odd to me and my idea of where they should go seemed very odd to her. So who was right? Of course, I was. And so was she. But in all honestly, neither of us was right. Does this make sense? Nope, not yet.

Here is what we discovered. In the house that Tami grew up in, the pots and pans were on the left side of the stove. Therefore, that seemed like the most convenient and obvious location to her. In the house I grew up in, the pots and pans were on the right side of the stove. This arrangement certainly made the most sense to me.

After we figured this all out and laughed a bit about it, we realized that this was simply a matter of perspective and preference, not right and wrong. And, we figured out this little jewel of insight before we were even married! The fact that we all have individual perspectives and preferences is a very important thing to remind yourself of. This issue of preference will come up again later in this book and it will certainly come up in your marriage many times.

So, our story about setting up our kitchen serves as a very simple example, but the point remains that most of what you and your spouse will argue about will not be matters of right and wrong (or matters of inherent morality), but differences of perspective, preference, and opinion. In fact, research on this subject shows us that more than 90% of what most couples argue about is over matters of personal preference. Once you realize this truth, you will also realize that you don’t have to fight so hard for things that are only a matter of your own preferences. Our individual preferences and opinions make us who we are and add flavor to our lives and our marriages, but are they really worth fighting over? We certainly don’t think so.