In the healing for our marriage that followed the 18 days, a confronting thought came to me.  “What’s it like to be married to me?”

I realized I’d spent all this time prior to the break concerned about Jana’s heart, her character and how she wasn’t meeting my needs, expectations, or frankly, my demands.  I thought, wouldn’t we have a great marriage if she’d just change a little?

Jerk.  I know.  I really operated from that mindset.

Then, I flipped it around.  The question rattled around my head and I started considering my own level of selfishness, the attitudes of my heart, my own issues and what I was bringing to the relationship.  I realized I could only control my own thoughts and actions.  I couldn’t control her.  I realized I needed to work on my own heart and character, and spend more time considering how I could love her well and meet her needs, best I could.

Tim Keller sums this thought up well, in his book, The Meaning of Marriage:

The alternative to this truce-marriage is to determine to see your own selfishness as a fundamental problem and to treat it more seriously than you do your spouse’s.  Why?  Only you have complete access to your own selfishness, and only you have complete responsibility for it.  So each spouse should take the Bible seriously, should make a commitment to “give yourself up.”  You should stop making excuses for selfishness, you should begin to root it out as it’s revealed to you, and you should do so regardless of what your spouse is doing.  If two spouses each say, “I’m going to treat my self-centeredness as the main problem in the marriage,” you have the prospect of a truly great marriage.