“You always prioritize work over me.”
“You never take my feelings into consideration.”
“Your only concern is your own comfort.”
Here is a universal rule for marriage counselors: don’t allow couples to speak to each other in absolutes. We know that when couples use words like always, never, and only to describe each other’s behavior or to express a complaint, it will not help to resolve their conflict. These words exaggerate and overgeneralize in a way that provokes a spouse to defensiveness. Instead of considering and talking about their spouse’s concern, an accused spouse will be tempted to prove that they are not always guilty of this or that behavior.
So it’s easy to see the wisdom in steering couples away from such language. And yet it’s not easy to actually restrain our word choices, is it? When emotions run high, when we are convinced that we have just the right point to make to gain the upper hand in the argument, when we are boiling over with anger, all of us are prone to run to overgeneralizations to describe our spouse.
Given the pull toward such language, despite knowing its unhelpfulness, it’s important to think beyond just the rule of “don’t use absolutes” and press into the heart of the
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