Tim Arrigo argues that husbands who let their wives' emotions drive their own actions lose control and create dysfunction. True leadership in marriage comes from internal responsibility and self-governance, not from reacting to your partner's emotional state.
If your wife's emotions cause you to break character, cause you to live below reproach and as a suboptimal version of yourself, if other people's behavior controls your emotions, then who is in control of your life? If other people's behavior and other people's emotions are the primary factor in determining the course of your day, in determining your behavior, then who's really in control of your life? So many guys fall into the lie that, you know, I can't be happy unless I'm with somebody else, that my wife's issues, her flaws, are too much to overcome. But here's the problem: dysfunction breeds dysfunction. Doesn't matter if you're a wife or a husband. To be in a dysfunctional relationship, you have to be dysfunctional to some degree. And here you are in a marriage and you find yourself breaking character, doing things that you would normally never do, which causes you to be less of the person that God called you to be. And then you wonder why you feel stuck, why you feel frustrated, why you feel resentful, why you feel like things may never work out the way you want them to. Because you're not really in control of your own life. Somebody else's emotions, somebody else's behaviors, somebody else's thoughts, somebody else's life, somebody else's way of dealing with what they're going through in their life is predetermining the course of your day. And if everything in the outside is determining everything on the inside of you, then are you truly in control? Have you truly mastered the art of self-control? And that's the real question.
