If the differences between you and your husband have you stuck in a state of anger, resentment, and frustration, here are Are there things you and your spouse do not see eye to eye on? Do you have different ways of doing things that cause friction? You may find yourself thinking, "Who are you?" or "How did we ever get married?" Those pesky differences can steal our serenity, can't they? 

We are led to believe that healthy relationships are those shared between entirely like minds, but that is simply not the case. Sure, in the honeymoon phase of new love, those differences are seen through rose-colored glasses. I can remember thinking my husband's quirks were cute while we were dating. Then I married him, and now having lived with him over half my life, the cuteness has worn off. 

Let me give you some differences between my husband and me. I get up in arms when things upset me. My husband rarely shares my same feelings about the issue. He is calm, cool, and collected almost all of the time, but I want him to jump in the middle of my feelings with me and be just as furious. It used to cause me to get so frustrated with him. I felt like he didn't care. 

When our kids were young, he always wanted them to clean up the toys they were playing with before moving on to the next thing. It used to drive me crazy. I didn't care if they had toys all over the yard and house as long as they were having fun. I knew, at the end of the day, we would clean it all up. This drove him crazy. 

Here's is a story I heard a marriage therapist share in training I was involved in. And let me tell you, this is an extreme example of dealing with annoyances. A wife was frustrated with her husband, always dropping his underwear on the floor and not putting them in the basket. Finally, she had enough and took a hammer and nailed all his underwear to the floor. Now I initially thought it was hilarious. Haven't you ever wanted to do something so extreme in your anger and frustration? I could relate. But the story turned tragic when I heard that their inability to resolve their differences healthily caused them to eventually divorce. I'm sure it wasn't just the underwear thing, but if you can't work through the little annoyances, you probably won't work through the significant issues either. The tragedy was that their perpetual problem couldn't be accepted and instead overtook the relationship's serenity. 

In his book After the Honey-Moon, Dan Wile said, When choosing a long-term partner…you will inevitably be choosing a particular set of unsolvable problems that you'll be grappling with for the next ten, twenty, or fifty years. Maybe you didn't want to hear that, but it is true. According to John Gottman in his book The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work, 69% of marital problems are perpetual, meaning they can't be resolved. However, they can be managed. The pesky differences between couples are the source of many of these perpetual problems. 

There is a choice we have to make. Either allow our differences to cause an all-out war or learn a new way of coping with them. 

In this episode, I will give your 3 ways to manage these perpetual annoyances.

Complete show notes can be found at http://reviveyourmidlfemarriage.com/15