Marital abuse occurs on a sliding scale. What I share below is not to minimize the situations someone may be facing such as physical abuse or emotional abuse. 

I'm sharing what I learned in hopes that it helps some husbands and wives understand the impact they have on their partners, even when they would never describe their actions as "abusive." 

Vanessa and I are honest, caring, sincere, devoted partners. We love each other more today than the day we got married.

Like other couples, even in the best marriages, we argue and fight now and then. Each of us can be stubborn, and convinced the way we see things is the right way.

As a result, a minor disagreement, or difficulty seeing the other's point of view, can lead a "discussion" into a downward spiral.

Partners in marriage. Partners in business.

February of 2015 was a big turning point in our lives.

Vanessa was earning more in her Young Living business, than I was as a Senior Director at Life Time Fitness. We saw this as the perfect opportunity to do what we'd always wanted to do: work together in a health and fitness business we could call our own.

I resigned from Life Time. We became business partners.

Vanessa is the CEO, I'm the COO of Healthy Living How To.

We commute from the bedroom to our home office, with a stop along the way to fill up our coffee cups.

Spending all day, everyday together, and trying to agree on decisions about the business, we ran into some challenges.

When you disagree with people at work, you go home and forget about it. You talk about it with your spouse, and then the next day, you go back to work with your mind clear.

Or if you get in an argument with your spouse at home, you go to work, and it can give you time to let your emotions settle down. When you get home, you can have a civil conversation.

When you live and work with the same person, that doesn't happen.

I saw that I had a lot to do with our arguments.

I'm a big believer in taking responsibility for anything and everything going on in your life. No VKTM virus here. So I started reading.

Unfortunately, I didn't read Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus until we'd been working together for a year and a half.

After reading it, I believe that Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus should be a college requisite class. 

I did read a lot of marriage books throughout this period, though. I felt like many of the books were written just for me.

It was as though the authors were using their words to hit me between the eyes.

What is marital abuse?

One of the books that's had a lasting impact on me is Love Busters by Willard F. Harley.

According to Harley,

Marital abuse is a deliberate effort of one spouse to cause the other to be unhappy.

Yikes! That is a scary definition.

I'll come back to some personal examples in a moment.

Harley explains that we have two parts to our personality, as it relates to relationships:

The Giver: The part of someone's personality that is concerned only about the happiness of others.The Taker: The part of someone's personality that is concerned only about his or her own happiness.

The Giver does things for others to make them happy, even if it leaves himself or herself unhappy. The Taker does things for himself or herself, even it it leaves others unhappy.

If someone feels as though they're always giving and never getting, that's the Taker speaking.

The Taker justifies bad behavior. In an argument, the Taker prevents you from seeing the other person's perspective. To the Taker, his or her perspective doesn't matter. That Taker is only interested in his or her happiness, nobody else's.

In positive, happy, intimate relationships, both spouses see things through the Giver's eyes. They both give to each other, and they enjoy doing so because their individual needs are met by the other.

In a thriving relationship, the voice of the Giver is loud: "Do whatever you can to ...