There is another consideration which is very important for the family: One must not be selfish. If you are married, you must live like a married person. You should not live like a bachelor. First Corinthians 7 says that a person marries to please the other person (vv. 33-34). Selfishness is probably one of the chief causes of family problems.
I remember a pastor in America who conducted the marriage of more than 750 couples during his lifetime. In every wedding he would advise the newlyweds to take note of one thing—not to be selfish. After they were married, they had to love each other and not be selfish. When the pastor was old, he wrote to all the couples asking how they were doing. All of them replied that they were able to have a happy family life because they took his advice about not being selfish. This is very unusual in America. At least twenty-five percent of American marriages end up in divorce today. But these seven hundred or more couples had lived happily with each other.
We must see that selfishness is a big problem. We must learn to feel what the other person feels. We must learn to feel his pain, his joy, his dislikes, his problems, and his inclinations. A person cannot be a good husband or a good wife if he or she is subjective. Those who are subjective are selfish. In fact, self-love is the most subjective thing.
A basic condition for marriage is self-sacrifice. Sacrifice means learning to please the other person. If you want to please the other person, you must be objective, not subjective. It is not a matter of your likes and dislikes, but of the other party’s likes and dislikes. Learn to discover what the other party likes. Learn to understand him and his views. Learn to stand on his side, and learn to understand him and yourself from his perspective. Learn to sacrifice your own feelings, your own opinions, and your own views as much as possible. Try to understand and know the other side. Pursue self-sacrifice and love. If you do this, you will have fewer problems in the family.
Many married men think that they are the center of the universe. They think that the whole universe revolves around them. When they marry a girl, they receive her into the family for their own welfare and benefit. Those who think this way surely bring problems to their family. A wife may also think that she is the center of the universe and that everyone exists for her sake. She may think that everyone is for her happiness, and that when she found a husband, she actually found a slave. For her, everyone else is peripheral and she is the center. She marries a husband only for the purpose of achieving her goal. Such a marriage will surely fail. It serves nothing but self-interest. Brothers and sisters, your family will have problems unless you pay attention to this matter.
In a home, you must allow the other person to have a certain amount of freedom and confidentiality. You must also allow the other person to keep his or her private possessions.
In many homes wives do not have any rights. In other homes husbands do not have any rights. These kind of families are bound to have problems. You may be a husband or a wife, but bear in mind one thing: Anybody in the world can be loved except one type of person—a jailer. No one can love a jailer, a prison warden, or someone who imprisons him. No one can love those who take away his freedom. Many husbands are like prison wardens to their wives. For them to expect their wives to love them is like expecting a prisoner to love the prison warden; nothing can be more impossible than this. They hope for the impossible. Many wives are prison wardens to their husbands. They are asking the impossible when they want their husbands to love them. Prison wardens are objects of fear, not objects of love. You can never completely take away a person’s own freedom. Although marriage does take away a man or a woman’s freedom, not all freedom should be sacrificed. The husband does not have to give up all his freedom to the wife, nor does the wife have to give up all her freedom to her husband. If you expect your wife to give up all her freedom to you, this is the same as saying that you want her to fear or hate you.
No one likes to lose all of his freedom; this is human nature. Even God gives us freedom. The biggest proof of this is that there are no fences around hell. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil was not surrounded by the fiery sword of the cherubim from the beginning. If God did not want man to have any freedom, He would have surrounded the tree of the knowledge of good and evil with the fiery sword of the cherubim in the first place, and Adam and Eve would not have eaten the fruit. But God does not infringe upon man’s freedom. For this reason, every husband should leave room for the wife, and every wife also should leave room for the husband. If you take away all freedom and make all the decisions, it is only natural that the other party will fear you. If you are not careful, the other party may go further; he or she may hate you. As soon as freedom is gone, hatred comes in. At the minimum, fear will come in.
The husband must learn to give the wife some freedom, and the wife must learn to give the husband some freedom. Allow the other party to have his own time, his own money, and his own possessions. Do not think that you can borrow your wife’s time for your use just because you are her husband. Both the husband and the wife have to learn to keep their place. When you waste your wife’s time, you are taking away her freedom. Small matters can become serious problems later.
Every husband and wife should have his or her own secrets. This is a legitimate thing. The right hand does not need to know what the left hand does. If he is the left hand, it is not necessary for you as the right hand to know what he is doing. Learn to respect individuality. Do not make two persons one. If you keep this rule, you will avoid many problems in the family.