Getting on the Same Page as Your Husband

These are big life-changing things. When I asked my husband, can my parents come and live in our house, and they lived with us for four years, right. These really kind of big life changing things. And then there are smaller things: like, do you care what color I paint the living room? right? Your husband may not have a strong opinion. You may not have a strong opinion about that. They’re not necessarily major life decisions. Okay. And financially you guys can decide what that line is. And so usually my husband and I don’t even talk about hundred dollar purchases, probably a three or $400 purchase we might just casually mention. And we certainly do not make four digit purchases without talking to each other. 

So that’s kind of, you know, our scale, at least within money. And so there are these kinds of big decisions and these smaller decisions. So let’s start with the smaller decisions first. Not being on the same page as your husband is another way of saying I disagree with his opinion. He has an opinion. I have an opinion and we do not share the same opinion. And you will have lots of thoughts about that. First, you might have thoughts that he’s wrong. Why does he think this? He’s not thinking clearly, right? You may have thoughts about his opinion. And then you may have thoughts about the fact that you guys don’t have the same opinion. We have nothing in common. We don’t even value the same things. Then you will just make up and project thoughts that you think he has, like, he doesn’t respect me. He doesn’t value me. He doesn’t care what I think. Okay. 

And so often, not being on the same page as our husbands. Not sharing an opinion with them is so painful because of all of the thoughts that we have around it. Not just necessarily not disagreeing on things. It’s what we make, not agreeing on the thing mean in our lives. And then that feels really big and really amplified when they are major life decisions. So let’s choose, you know, painting the living room and, and you want to paint it a lovely light blue and he wants it to be a lovely light green. Okay, and they’re both pretty close. You know, it’s not like someone wants to go maroon and then I have a bat cave. You know, They’re similar shades or color palettes, but you know, he prefers green and you prefer blue.  

And right now, I just want you to imagine that you wanted to do this. You wanted it to paint something in the house and you disagreed about it. What are the first feelings that come up?  Oh, as I’m thinking about it, I feel frustrated. I also feel disappointed. Like I felt sadness pretty quickly in my body where it’s like, oh, we don’t agree. And I think in a way it’s a good thing because I love him and I want us to like the same thing. So it makes me feel so happy when we like the same things. And in my mind, it would be so great if we wanted to paint the living room the same color. And so, I experienced a little bit of sadness about not agreeing. And then my frustration, which is kind of an angry feeling that comes from being like, oh no, who’s going to win. I feel some fight energy. Like I want to defend my choice. For the record, this is a fake example, my husband could care less what I painted the walls and I have always been the one who gets to choose that. 

And every house we buy, we move in and I paint the walls, the exact same color, and all of the walls are the same color. So, this is not an issue for us, but I think it’s just a great example because it’s like, kind of feels important. But we know it’s not life and death that’s important. Okay. It’s this other category of being on the same page. So you’re gonna experience some emotions, probably some, some sort of angry emotion, maybe some sort of, sad emotion. And then you’re going to have a stress response. Okay, because not agreeing will feel like a stress response and so you’re going to have a fight, a flight. A freeze or a fond response.

Okay. A fight response will be, you know, anger. Hey, I want to do this. I should get to do this. You’re not even the one who was going to paint it. I don’t know some sort of like angry fight response. Flight response would be, I don’t know, I don’t want to talk about this and I’m just going to leave and you just leave the house. You just get out of there. You cannot handle talking to him about it, so you leave.  

A freeze response might be you sit there, but you disassociate in your mind so he keeps talking and you are checked out, right. Which again, you’re just protecting yourself from feeling scared, like you’re going to be in a life altering situation, right? Your body’s in a fight or flight state, like, Ooh, big danger. Okay. Now we know, you’re not really in a life threatening situation, but your brain is like, Ooh, this feels really scary. So we’re just going to disassociate and freeze and maybe that dangerous thing won’t notice us, okay, that’s the point of a freeze state.

Or you might go into a fawning state, which is like, I just love you. I’ll just make your favorite dinner. Don’t worry about it. Like you become, you start placating him so that he’s not dangerous. And again, to your brain, your brain’s like, Ooh, he disagrees, this is dangerous. Let’s make sure that that predator is happy and I’ll just fall all over him whatever he wants. Okay. So sometimes all of this happens very quickly and automatically. Sometimes we don’t have the presence of mind to slow it down in the moment and just notice, oh, we just have a different opinion about this. It’s not a big deal.  

And if you can stay calm, if you can stay out of a fight or flight state, then you can begin to problem solve it. You can check in with yourself. Do I really care about the walls? You can sit and brainstorm some compromises. Oh, maybe this room can be green and maybe that room can be blue. Maybe we can do paint a six by six, you know, box of each one and live with it for a little while. And we can both look at it to see because maybe, maybe I would like the green. But you can’t do that. You can’t do the really good high level problem solving if you’re in a stress state. And so one week’s notice that we have a different opinion than our husband. We can also just talk to ourselves in our minds. Hey, this is okay, he’s allowed to have different opinions. We are different humans.  

And him having a different opinion does not mean that he doesn’t love me or he doesn’t support me, or we don’t have a good marriage or good relationship. Right again, your brain tends to make these big stories around something like the wall color paint. If you are calm in addition to problem-solving, you might be curious about miscommunication. Sometimes the reason that, on the outside, it looks like we have a different opinion is because we haven’t shared enough information or there’s misinformation. Now, I feel like I’m an example of the walls that’s pretty straight forward. 

But I was coaching someone recently who wanted to homeschool the kids and her husband was not on board with homeschooling the kids. And we calmed her down and I coached her and said, well, you know, what do you think could help? And she said, well, he really likes videos. Maybe I could find a YouTube video of somebody who I respected that was talking about homeschooling. We could watch it together.  

And this is what it sounds like when you are calm. We’re not angry. We’re not trying to trick that guy. We’re not trying to manipulate him. She said it in such an open way. Like, you know, what he likes videos maybe we could watch together and then talk about it. Right. She didn’t sound panicked.  

And I think this is so important because we want to be linked arms with this guy. This is your person. You love this guy, you respect this guy. You may not respect everything about him but you want to be on the same page with him because you love him. You’re trying to build a life together. But it is also okay that you have different opinions. We don’t mind that we have different opinions when we go to a restaurant, right? When you go to a restaurant and you order different things. We don’t think, oh my goodness I don’t know if we’re compatible he didn’t order the same thing as me.  

So there’s something about ordering at restaurants where your brain thinks that it’s safe to have different opinions, but then for some reason, certain things in our lives and I just want to show you that it’s kind of arbitrary, right? Like the wall paint and we’re like, oh no, if we can’t agree on wall paint, something’s really wrong.  And sometimes these smaller opportunities, these smaller  differences of opinions can be an opportunity for you to just let it go and give him the thing he wants. And I don’t mean like being a doormat where we go, oh, whatever you want, honey, anything you want? I’m a good wife. I do whatever you want. 

Not like that. That’s weird. But maybe you look at the blue and the green and you go, you know what? I just actually don’t care that much. He seems in the green, I’m totally willing to do this. You might find that in you. But you will only discover that and it will only feel good if you are calm and it’s because you will have the presence of mind to not make it mean anything horrible about him or you, or your relationship that you have a difference of opinion here. You just note that you have a different opinion and then you just decide how you want to move forward. 

Maybe problem solving, maybe compromise, maybe you letting it go, maybe someone needs more information. So I think there are a lot of these smaller things. And I just, one of my favorite things to tell my brain is this is a low stakes situation brain. Like, this is not a salvation issue. This is not a life or death issue. Like let’s just pick something and move on. Because I have my job; I work 25 hours a week. Because I homeschooled these six kids and because I really do not like being busy, I do not like being rushed. 

It’s not busy. It’s rushed. Because I have a very full life, but it’s very intentional and I like to have time to pray and I like to have time to walk. And so because of that, I have to be very intentional about my energy and so I just now do not want to waste a lot of emotional energy on things that don’t matter. So I’ll try to take a 20 or 30 year view on something like 20 or 30 years from now. Am I going to care about this? N,o then just pick and go; just pick and go. And I’m not a doormat and I do not let people take advantage of me. It comes from a place of really choosing, oh, I just want. to conserve my mental energy and I actually just don’t care. I’m happy to paint the walls green.  

So those are the smaller things. I think there are a lot of those. And I really just want you to check in with yourself. Like, am I making any example of us having different opinions be a big deal? And why don’t I do that when we pick different things at a restaurant, just be curious there, because you just might be expending a lot of energy on small things that don’t matter. Okay, but let’s talk about this other category of thing, which often feels much bigger. 

Are we buying a car? We’re buying a house? Are we moving to another city? Are you leaving your job? Are we having another baby? Right? These kind of like bigger deals. I want to suggest that you always get on the same page with your husband before making one of these decisions. I don’t know that that’s always possible in everybody’s life, but this is definitely where I would lean into head of the household. He has the final word and I respect what he says.  

And that’s how we run our marriage and I think he has only polled the head of household card two times in our marriage. And I really only remember one of them. I think it’s, twice and he told me it was twice. And I can Begley remember that it was twice. But I really only remember the first time, which was, I really wanted to buy a house.  

And he just had a bad feeling about it and just said, no. Because normally we talk about things and he has really good reasons. And then I came around or he came around, right? Whatever we’re talking about. And this one, I was just very, very sure that I wanted to buy this house and it was a perfect house for us and it was the perfect time. And he said, no. And I said, okay. I mean, I cried afterwards, but I said, okay, I trust you. And he was totally right. We ended up leaving. I mean, this was a house in Boise and we ended up moving up north. Shortly after that. So it was not too long after that, that we really felt called to move to Northern Idaho. 

Dang it guys that can not remember that second time, but I feel like it came up again. But anyway, pretty rare in our 14 years of marriage, that it has come up where I feel very strongly about something and he comes down and just says, no,  

Most of the time. All the other times. We keep praying and we keep talking until we get on the same page, but I really believe that those big life decisions, those deep desires of our hearts, and sometimes having a car for your family is a deep desire of your heart. I remember when we went from, you know, a regular car to a minivan. And we were going from two to three kids and I really wanted this and it felt like it was right for our family at the right time. And we prayed about it. And so sometimes even those things that might seem like material things, God is saying “yep, It’s time. Here’s this new chapter for your family.  

House, car, boat, big physical thing, big purchase. But you can pray about it and here’s what I tell women. I really genuinely believe, and this isn’t in the catechism, so, this is just my thoughts about it. I genuinely believe that our, our deep desires that come from the Lord. He will not give one spouse a deep desire that he does not give the other spouse. And so if you have a deep desire, and your spouse does not, you. guys disagree. I highly recommend praying to the Lord, please change my heart or his. And that is, a prayer that I have made many times where my husband and I don’t agree, and I want to be on the same page with him because I want to have a biblical marriage and I want to follow him. And I will just say, Lord, I know that you do not sow division in our marriage. You do not create confusion. 

So if we want something different, please send on the holy spirit and move one of our hearts, but you really have to be open to the fact that it may be your heart that gets moved. And you might ask, well, Sterling if God gave you a deep desire in your heart, why would it then not come true? But I find that it’s one of two things: either the timing is just off, like he will fulfill that desire, but it’s just not now, it’s later and you just don’t get to see that or your desire was for the thing under the thing. 

So my desire for this house in Boise was, it was a little bit further out of the city. It was more in the farmlands and I had this deep desire for my mom and her husband so we wanted to build a tiny house on that property so they could live with us, but not in our own house. And it had room for a pool. But if you think about it, if you think about, well Serling, why do you want your parents to live with you and why do you want a pool? 

And underneath that is having making memories. And having flexibility, I’m really loving our home because we had six small children and it’s hard for us to go places. So we have often chosen to create fun experiences in our home because it’s especially then it was really difficult to put six, very young children in the car and go do something. So my deep desire was to spend, to make memories with my family and to have freedom.  

And in the end where we live now in Northern Idaho, I have both of those things. And so God did fill the deep desire of my heart. It just didn’t come in the package that I thought it would. So ultimately, our frustration with our husbands usually shows us our lack of surrender to the Lord. And I coach a lot of women on, you know, husband things and anytime this comes up for a major decision, I will say, please, pray this prayer, holy spirit, change my heart or change his, because I know that you do not create a spirit of division in our marriage.  

Now sometimes, you are married to a person who just goes out and buys a car without asking you. And you can have all the feelings about that and you can feel hurt and you can process that with the Lord. And you may go through when you’re ready. An exercise of forgiveness. Like Lord, I forgive my husband for making a major life decision without, you know, involving me, but usually that’s done. And you can say to him later, Hey, I would appreciate it. 

If you did not make, you know, for us, it would be a four digit purchase or for you, it might be a five digit purchase or a six digit purse purchase. You guys might have a level. But the biggest pain that comes from not being on the same page as your husband are the thoughts that you then begin to have about yourself, your husband and your marriage.  

When my husband said no to the, you know, farmish, Boise house. I could have thought he doesn’t love me. He doesn’t care what I want. Right. I could have thought we had a bad relationship. We don’t value the same things. Now it’s interesting, I think a lot of you know, that I have some challenging parts of my marriage. This is not one of them. We are very good at making decisions together. We in general really want the same things. And so I didn’t think those things about the house. I probably thought he doesn’t get it. He doesn’t see the vision.  

But I know that he wants me to love the house that we’re in. I know that he wants me to have what I want. And when it comes to houses and how we raised the kids. And I know he also really values freedom, and he also really values having a fun place for our kids at our homes so we don’t have to go as many places.  

And so I could have made that experience so much more painful by telling myself a bunch of things about me or him or our marriage. And some of the things you might tell yourself are, you know, I’m not sticking up for myself. I don’t know. How to advocate for what I want. Nobody listens to me. What I want doesn’t matter, you know, you could, you, could be really mean to yourself, to.  

And so I just want you to check yourself that when you are not on the same page as your husband, are you still showing up respectfully? Because we are always called to show up respectfully to our husbands. And listen, none of us are doing that a hundred percent of the time, but it should be the goal. You shouldn’t indulge in finger wagging and lecturing and belittling him. Do not let a difference of opinion allow a bunch of lies to come into your mind. And don’t make it mean that he doesn’t love you or that you have a bad relationship or you don’t have the same values, all right. Remember you don’t do that about eating different things at a restaurant.  

Now let’s say that he comes home, he spends $1,200 on a flat screen TV. And you’re just not that into TVs. Okay.  It is technically true that he values the entertainment of a TV more than you do, but we don’t then extrapolate it to mean that you guys don’t have the same family values. You probably do that’s why you picked him. Be careful, just be careful about how you are using not being on the same page as an excuse to believe lies. So discord.

Even just in yourself. To beat yourself up to be at up your husband or to think poorly of your marriage. Let’s not do that. And if one of the things that you guys disagree about is school. I want you to come check out my new school program. It’s a 30 day audio series about Catholics cultivating peace back to school. And I talk about relationships and I talk about, even the purpose of school. Because the only reason that you want your schooling plan is because you’re telling yourself a story. Well, if they go to this school, then this is what’s going to happen. 

And then I will give myself permission to feel something. That’s why you think your version of school is better? And I just help you explore that and figure out what you really want and is there a way to get what you want and be on the same page as your husband. And maybe you just need to pray that prayer and see if one of you kind of wiggles on your position for right now. I also talk a great deal about how temporary school decisions are for most of us. We can make a school decision and completely change our minds. It’s not a big deal. It’s only if you are on the waitlist of a very competitive school where, if you lose your spot, you lose your spot. 

Other than that, pretty much all forms of school we can kind of dip in and out of. So, if you’re interested in that, go check it out catholicmomcalm.com/slash school. And For one more week until August 15th, it’s half off. So it’s only $15, go grab it. It will bring you peace about whatever schooling decision you’ve made and maybe a little more peace with your husband as well.  

All right. My friends, I’m praying for you. Please pray for me. Thank you so much for listening and have a blessed day.