Competition in Your Marriage

The competitive atmosphere can be as simple as who will change the next diaper, comfort your scared toddler at 2:00 a.m., manage a sibling conflict or pick up a sick child from school or daycare?

A Competitive Mindset

Sometimes I feel like I am doing all the work and my husband has all the fun. Did I mention I was an only child, accustomed to getting my own way? Yeah, you could say marriage rocked my world and motherhood hit me even harder. 

With a competition mindset, life is a cycle of sacrificing my passions for the mundane. My prayers had me wondering what was wrong with me. Why wasn’t I enjoying the gifts of marriage and motherhood? I knew other wives and moms who felt the opposite. Why wasn’t I experiencing the same? 

Shifting Your Mindset

God answered my prayerful cries with a powerful mindset shift. He gently spoke the truth to me through his word in the second half of Luke 6:45. God tells us, “for out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks.” (English Standard Version) 

This realization jarred me because I didn’t want my attitude to seep into my actions. It was as if my life was laid out before me and I saw the consequence for the first time: my thought-life was a weapon for my marriage, or against it. 

That week I shared with a sister in Christ about my outlook and confessed my sin of comparison. She encouraged me to speak the truth over my marriage. She told me to say, “It’s an honor to be my husband’s wife.” 

The words tasted fake but I said them anyway. I said them because I believed that God would take care of burying the truth deep into my heart. 

I trusted God’s faithfulness to change my mind as I did the dishes, changed the diaper, got up in the middle of the night, and in other situations where I felt I was getting the short end of the stick. I spoke the truth out loud. 

My husband and I aren’t against one another. God made us ONE. I’m not in a competition. We were on the same team. 

Changing Your Competitive Mindset

After three months, I began to believe this truth. I felt privileged to be married to my husband. He truly is God’s gift to me. 

My heart leapt when he was able to spend time doing what he loved. I didn’t feel that knee-jerk reaction to compare anymore! Life stopped being a sliding scale where when one person gets, the other lacks.

Try celebrating your husband and all the ways God is blessing him. Don’t stop until God shifts your heart as he did mine, even if it takes a few months. When you do, Satan will have one less weapon against you and your marriage, and you’ll be equipped to fight back!

Wife Step: If you tend to compare yourself with your husband and feel you’re getting the dregs, take two minutes to write down the answers to these two questions: 1. How can you celebrate your husband? 2. Who is one sister in Christ to whom you can confess your attitude and ask for prayer?​

Lana Leigh Wilkens, author of Knee-Jerk Mom, helps women discover their authentic family values and challenges them to ask the right questions so they can decide with confidence, not comparison. Connect with her at kneejerkmom.com