Earn the Respect of Your Spouse…Today
Chances are, if you feel like your spouse doesn’t respect you, you probably know the exact reason for their lack of respect. In a marriage, no one jumps out of the box disrespecting or lacking respect for a person to whom they willingly committed the rest of their lives to share.
But if it’s lost, usually through stress and miscommunication, the good news is that you can get it back quickly. But it’s going to take some work on your part, because it takes much self-assessment before you can get other people to reassess your value.
Let’s say your spouse doesn’t believe the things that you say. Either you have lied more often than not, forgotten more often than not, or refrained from listening more often than not. In all three instances, you have to repair your ability to listen, to learn and to honor. Even if you have to write things down, put them in your Blackberry, or post reminders for you to do the things you know you should, the idea is creating a body of work that your spouse can honor as efforts for improving.
You can’t reverse history, but its easy to create a new one.
It works for money, too. Money breaks up more marriages then a few, and its usually due to having too much of it, or too little. How do you resolve that? Work together to give it away, or work together to make more of it. In either case, together is the key word when it comes to money.
Finally, there are a few key words to communicate to your spouse that you want and deserve their respect. Usually, these words are along the lines of “I understand,” “I see,” and “I’m glad you said that, because I was thinking…” The moment you use “I” in the vein of “we,” it works to your advantage.
Even if your spouse is overly sensitive, has a bad temper or is naturally withdrawn, these tips can generally get you on their good side in the short term, and in their mind in the long term. After all, if they weren’t pulling to have respect for you, they likely wouldn’t be around.
