Mutual Intellectual Respect

Imagine you are assembling a piece of furniture and your spouse suggests an idea. In your logical mind, their suggestion makes no sense, so you sigh, roll your eyes, and say: 'Honey, you don't understand this, just let me do it.' Without realizing it, you just injected a little dose of poison into your marriage.

We call this intellectual contempt, and it is one of the most silent and lethal love killers in existence. It happens when, subtly, we make our partner feel that their ideas are naive, irrelevant, or simply inferior to our own.

The apostle Paul gives us a radical antidote in Philippians 2:3, asking us to, in humility, value others above yourselves. This does not mean pretending your partner is a quantum physics genius if they aren't, but recognizing that their distinct mental design has immense value that you lack.