Sleeping On It: Why Happy Couples Sometimes Go to Bed Angry

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Sleeping On It: Why Happy Couples Sometimes Go to Bed Angry

Guests:Brian Goins, Shaunti Feldhahn, Rob & Liz Hudson, Jon & Alyssa Miller

From the series:Sleeping On It (Day 1 of 2)

Air date:March 20, 2025

Shaunti:That imagery, we haven’t swept things under the rug and left them there. That’s really, really good because that’s a good image for people to go “Is that what we’re doing with these issues that are coming up? Are we sweeping them under the rug and then the next morning leaving them there?”

Brian:I am willing to go to bed mad, but it’s not so that I can resolve it in the morning. It’s not so that I can be fresher in the morning to deal with it. It’s just that I hope the problem just goes away on its own.

Dave:Welcome to FamilyLife Today, where we want to help you pursue the relationships that matter most. I’m Dave Wilson.

Ann:And I’m Ann Wilson. And you can find us at FamilyLifeToday.com. This is FamilyLife Today.

So Married With Benefits is on the FamilyLife YouTube channel, and it’s a podcast that Brian Goins and Shaunti Feldhahn have been doing. This is our fourth season, so you’re going to want to lock into this. You’re going to love this season.

Dave:Go to the YouTube channel, FamilyLife YouTube channel, watch this clip. Watch this whole interview because Shaunti and Brian have been talking about one of the books she wrote called The Surprising Secrets of Highly Happy Couples. What’s a highly happy couple? It’s a couple that’s really highly happy. I mean, you talk about—

Brian:I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Dave:You talk about a strange term, but what she did is she interviewed couples and found the best of the best. So these are couples that really are happy and satisfied.

Ann:Both the husband and wife say they’re highly happy, and in love.

Dave:So she put them in this category like they’re the best and we want to learn from them. So there’s habits, and she calls them surprising secrets. We’ve been looking at some of these. Today’s secret is really interesting. In fact, when you hear it, you’re going to be, “No, that’s not what we should do.” And she’s like, “No, the best couples do this.” So we’re going to watch a clip of Brian Goins and his wife Jen interviewing Shaunti Feldhahn on their Marriage With Benefits podcast about going to bed mad. Watch this.

[Recorded Message]

Brian:Have you guys ever heard or introduced in premarital counseling the idea: “Don’t go to bed mad”?

Jen:Yes, obviously. I mean, there’s scripture to back it up, and so you don’t want to go to bed angry. And I mean, I think generally it seems like a pretty good principle. So we’ll talk about that. T

Shaunti:Yes, it is a pretty good principle.

Brian:Yeah. And it does, you brought up that verse, Ephesians 4:26, “Be angry and do not sin.” I like the fact that Paul says, “Be angry.” Anger is reality. I’ve often said anger is like that check engine light in my heart where I know something’s off in my relationship and I need to resolve it, but I tend to not resolve it. I end up sinning and then has that great advice “Don’t let the sun go down on your anger.”

So since we’re looking at all these pros; that’s what this whole season is about: the pros, the people that are doing marriage right. They are highly happy. They are enjoying life with each other. And we’re like, “That’s who I want to be like.” I’m guessing that in your research, there’s a ton of people that applied this principle; that did this principle.

Shaunti:Hate to tell you this; that this is definitely one of those areas that what they said to do—because everybody who’s happy marriage gives advice all the time. When they said, “These are some of our secrets,” what they said to do was often not what they actually did.

Brian:Really?

Shaunti:Yes. And we were looking at what the highly happy couples actually did because you don’t always know what the advice is.

And so it was actually pretty hilarious because we would be sitting down, Jeff and I would be sitting down across from one of these highly happy couples, tell us your advice. We wanted to get that out of the way. And they would often say, “It’s really important to not go to bed mad.” And I would always say, “Oh, absolutely. I totally agree. Do you…ever…go to bed mad?”

Jen:What did they do? How did they react?

Shaunti:They would be like, “Well, it’s a really important principle. And we were telling Steve and Jeanie the other day”— I’m like, “No, no, no, I get it. I get that it’s important principle, but Mr. And Mrs. Happy couple, that’s not actually what I’m asking you. I’m asking you; do you ever go to bed mad?” “Well, yeah, sometimes.” It was fascinating how in practice—

Brian:So do what I say, not what I do.

Shaunti:Well, and we were, again, I wanted to know what they did because apparently what they did is working. And so I’m like, okay, what does this look like? And so it turns out in practice, many of the happiest couples, not every time, but certainly sometimes they had discovered that when you have two exhausted, angry, upset people trying to duke it out at one in the morning, nothing good—

Jen:—is going to happen.

Shaunti:—comes from that point on.

Jen:So true.

Brian:Yeah. You like to, in fact, Jen, you like to say about, what is it? There’s a word that you use about when you are, it’s like halt, right?

Jen:Oh, yeah, yeah, which I think is a pretty classic thing. When you’re hungry, angry, or when the other person, or yourself, is hungry, angry, lonely or tired. And I don’t know, the lonely part has always kind of confused me because I don’t know how to immediately stop that. But the hungry, angry, tired, you can fix some of those things before you have a conversation.

Brian:Yeah, that’s good. Yeah. So when you’re feeling those things intuitively you should go, I need to stop and make any kind of life-changing decisions or try to deal with conflicts is what—

Jen:Or grab something to eat, take a nap, get some rest, and then you’ll be able to deal with those things, the anger a little bit better.

Shaunti:And if it’s one in the morning, the tired is usually big for both of you.

Brian:That’s huge.

Shaunti:Yes.

Brian:Yeah, absolutely. And I’m realizing this even as she’s talking about these, interviewing these highly happy couples, they never came to talk to us. So I feel like this is us. This is our season to find out what the pros do. Obviously, we’re not pros, so—

Shaunti:I think we actually did talk to you.

Brian:No, you did not.

Shaunti:I think we might have.

Brian:Really?

Shaunti:I think we might actually have, yeah.

Brian:You might’ve interviewed us for this book.

Shaunti:I think we did.

Brian:Okay, I didn’t sign a non-disclosure.

Jen:I would say that I’m a highly happy married woman.

Brian:I’m glad she feels that way. Oh, I’m supposed to reciprocate. Yes, yes, we are. We are so happy and in love, and I love you, honey.

Jen:Thank you.

Brian:That’s great. Okay.

Shaunti:Everybody in the booth is like, “Ugg.”

Brian:Yeah, I know. Exactly. So what does it mean? So in other words, you discovered that basically the title of this session, right? They would go to bed mad.

Shaunti:Yes, they would sometimes, occasionally when they were both like, “Okay, if we keep talking, one of us is going to agree to something we’re going to resent the next day. Somebody’s going to say something that I wish they wouldn’t have said, you can’t take back.” And so they had discovered in practice that there were times that they said, “You know what? We need to time out. We need to say we’ll be okay, but we just can’t do this right now and let’s pick it up in the morning.” And what they found in practice is that sometimes just sleeping on it solved it. Those times when you get up and you’re like, what was that about? It just looks different in the morning.

Brian:Was it that big of an issue? “Was it really that big of an issue that I left the bubbles in the sink?” Right?

Jen:Right.

Shaunti:You can tell she’s like, “I am now starting to think about that.” But they had also discovered, and this is what we actually found in practice—this is where the statistics were really fascinating—is that if sleeping on it didn’t solve it, if that issue was still there the next day, the highly happy couples didn’t let it go. They addressed it and everybody else was far more likely, even the generally happy couples were far more likely to just not want to deal with it and hope it kind of went away the next day. The happy couples didn’t do that. They dealt with it. And so that was, it turns out, the difference. It wasn’t what happened the night before. It was what happened the next morning.

Brian:And I think that’s where, for me, that’s where my pain is in marriage when we deal with conflict, is that I am willing to go to bed mad. But it’s not so that I can resolve it in the morning. It’s not so that I can be fresher in the morning to deal with it. It’s just that I hope the problem just goes away on its own; that it just dissipates. And certainly there’s that verse in Proverbs 29:11 that says it’s the glory of one to overlook an offense. And there are things in marriage that you just need to see overlook. It’s not that big of a deal. Is this something that’s going to affect me later in life or, not later in life, this is something that affect our relationship or lead me to bitterness or we ask those questions. And if it’s not, then okay, that’s fine,

Shaunti:Not being—

Jen:But I think generally, I think that you and I both over time, we have gotten better at that

Brian:We have.

Jen:Where we don’t have a lot of things that we’ve swept under the rug and kept there. Whether it’s a day or two or three or four, I think we’ve gotten better and better at saying, we are going to deal with this. And so I think that makes us a happy couple because we don’t have things where maybe we’re in a counseling office years later—

Shaunti:not piling up.

Jen:Right, that’s piling up and there’s so many things that have piled up. And so I think that is a key of a highly happy couple of dealing with it.

Shaunti:You just said something really interesting, Jen, that imagery, we haven’t swept things under the rug and left them there. That’s really, really good because that’s a good image for people to go “Is that what we’re doing with these issues that are coming up? Are we sweeping them under the rug and then the next morning leaving them there?”

Jen:We have to give credit to someone from a Weekend to Remember® who wrote into Weekend to Remember and said, “We got things out from underneath the rug. We’d been pushing them there so much that we could barely”—

Brian:“We kept tripping over it.”

Jen:“We kept tripping over the rugs.”

Shaunti:So good.

Jen:And so we read that a lot so that—I can’t take that for myself. It’s from a Weekend to Remember guest—

Shaunti:That’s awesome.

Jen:—who said, “We took things out from under the rug.” So it is a really good mental picture maybe to ask yourself, do we have things under the rug that we’ve left there? Not only overnight, but for days, for a long time.

Brian:And we keep tripping over them and that’s why we’re struggling. That’s why we may not be highly happy.

Shaunti:Yep, exactly.

Brian:And you talk about in the book a little bit, the difference between resolving the anger and resolving the issue. Why was that such a key?

Shaunti:It comes back to, again, the next morning. You’ve got all the emotions and all of that. Those are real. It’s fine. We’re human. That’s going to happen. You don’t necessarily have to resolve all that before you go to bed, but the next morning what you’re trying to do is actually deal with that issue. You’re actually trying to say, “Okay, I could have hurt feelings and those are maybe even still there, but I can actually work on this despite these hurt feelings and actually tackle the issue without sort of making it an attack.” I mean, all the normal things that we talk about in relationship.

Brian:What’s the benefit really of going to bed mad?

Shaunti:Well, the benefit is, remember that whole thing that the happy couples told us of yeah, someone is actually going to start agreeing to something that they’re going to resent the next day. You’re setting up other problems if you keep trying to force this. And so give yourself—probably, there’s two things—give yourself some emotional space and give yourself some mental space. The emotional space is this like you are just upset. You need to be able to sort of deescalate. One of—our main executive producer, Jim Mitchell, was saying earlier that this whole step of going to bed, even if you’re mad, that is a type of de-escalation. It’s crucial and it’s a willingness to say, “I’m not going to let my emotions take over here.”

Brian:There is a psychological term called flooding; that our emotions actually flood our brain, right?

Shaunti:Yep.

Brian:Absolutely.

Shaunti:The whole limbic system in our brain.

Brian:And it can take up to 40 minutes. I learned this from Art of Marriage, our new series where we talk about conflict, and one of our teachers on that series talked about how it can take up to 40 or 50 minutes for some of that flooding to dissipate from your brain so that you get into a better, what you’re saying, an emotional or a mental state.

Shaunti:And the mental state piece is more recognizing that for some people, and this is stereotypically, it is more common to be men. I actually quantified it, and I can’t remember the number right now, but it was something like 75 or 80 percent of men need internal processing time. They can’t think straight enough to actually articulate and so they instinctively want to withdraw, not in a bad way, but in a way that’s actually good for their brain to be able to process “What am I even thinking? How do I even explain why I’m upset” or whatever.

And there’s plenty of women for whom that’s the case too but that mental thing is for whoever is the internal processor, for whoever needs a little more time. We need to honor that. We can’t force the other person to have the same kind of processing as we do.

Brian:See, honey, it’s brain science. That’s why I’m like a turtle—

Jen:Yes, right.

Brian:—as I withdraw.

[Studio]

Ann:That’s why I’m like a turtle. That’s funny.

Dave:Peeking a little head out every once in a while. Alright, we’re going to talk to two couples who are in different spectrums of their marriage. Rob and Liz Hudson are with us. What, nine years married?

Liz:Yep.

Dave:Three kids.

Liz:Three kids. Almost three, six, and eight. So we’re in the thick of it.

Dave:Are you guys a highly happy couple?

Liz:I kind of side eye that whole highly happy couples.

Dave:What does that mean?

Ann:Look at Rob.

Rob:What does that mean? Let’s talk.

Dave:Rob doesn’t even know.

Liz:Well, I side eye that term in general. It just feels, life right now feels so deep and complex that for someone to say, “We’re a highly happy couple,” my first thought is kind of skepticism, like, “What’s really underneath the surface?” And not to say that there aren’t happy couples.

Ann:Do you think those couples that are highly happy have kids that are older?

Liz:That’s another thing, I think.

Ann:I know!

Liz:What does your life look like?

Ann:Exactly.

Liz:Give me the details because there are so many complexities to just the season of life we’re into that I think play into this conversation too.

Dave:Or it could be a couple that just got married.

Jon:Speaking of people that have it all figured out.

Ann:Highly happy.

Dave:Jon and Alyssa are sitting across; what, three months?

Alyssa:Three months.

Dave:Yeah. So you’re sort of that couple with no kids, any pets?

Jon:No.

Dave:No pets. How can you not be happy? You got it all.

Alyssa:Exactly.

Jon:Life is good. Life is so good. Can I point out how silly it is that the couple that’s been married less than three months is on FamilyLife Today? I’m so

Liz:Not silly at all.

Jon:Oh man. We are honored, but I feel like we’re taking notes every time we watch these clips, like, “Remember this for later.” I got to learn stuff.

Dave:Well, let’s talk about what Brian and Shaunti talked about. I mean, when you think about that concept of don’t go to bed mad, you think we should not go to bed mad. We should never go to bed mad. That’s sort of a marriage principle whether you believe the Bible, read the Bible or not. Most people would say that’s not good. You don’t go to bed angry. You figure it out before you go to bed. And they’re saying, no, the best couples go to bed mad. Do you guys do that? Do you agree with that? Do you push back on that? What are your thoughts?

Rob:Well, first I had to become comfortable with the idea that we get mad in marriage. I came into marriage thinking, it was actually the very verse that Brian said about love overcomes a multitude of sins. That the sign of the health of our relationship was the lack of getting mad at each other. So that was—

Liz:And I was on the other end of the spectrum. I’m like—

Dave:I was going to say, how long did that last?

Liz:—to be a healthy relationship you’re going to fight. It’s just inevitable. So you can imagine the clash.

Dave:Did you guys clash quickly?

Liz:Oh,

Rob:I remember our first night. Our first night in our apartment, we argued about something, and I rolled over not facing her, and literally thought, “What have I gotten myself into?” We’ve been married for three days.

Liz:It felt that extreme.

Dave:Three days?

Liz:Yeah.

Ann:Because you’re coming in with unmet expectations. Rob, you’re like, “If we love each other, we won’t be angry.”

Liz:Well, that’s what we had been taught too. And for me, it felt like I was constantly being silenced. There were things I needed to talk about, things I needed to work through and like, “Oh, but now your spirituality is tied up in this. If you are a godly couple, you’ll not go to bed angry,” or “Love will cover a multitude of sins.” I’m like, well, then why am I still feeling all these things inside?

Dave:Yeah, right.

Liz:And so, yeah, complicated.

Dave:I mean, Rob, where did you get that idea? Did your parents never fight?

Rob:Never that I saw.

Dave:Oh, so it was hidden.

Rob:Looking back, I go, “Oh, it just happened behind closed doors when the kids weren’t around.” But I have zero memory of my parents ever fighting.

Dave:Wow.

Rob:Which I understand why they did that. They wanted to give their kids the sense of security. But Liz also had a sense of security because she saw her parents work things through.

Ann:They resolved it.

Liz:Well, sometimes. You know what I mean?

Ann:Which is pretty normal.

Dave:Remember she had the side eye toward highly happy, so we know.

Liz:I’m like, there’s always more. There’s always more. And also there’s this pressure to stay highly happy when that’s just, that’s hard.

Ann:Even that is a great conversation with Jon and Alyssa. Where did your families come in on this? Did you see them resolve issues or even have conflict in the home between your parents?

Dave:And they’re probably listening right now so you got to be careful.

Jon:Mom, Dad, I love you.

Alyssa:I would say for my family, I don’t know. I have a few memories of just people would yell in our home, but I don’t know that I ever saw. You would see the anger, but I don’t know if you would ever see the resolution. And I know for a fact, for me it’s like, oh, I don’t know that I was ever taught how to really resolve it. You just kind of, like they were talking, you just sweep it under the rug, and you never talk about it. So I was like, maybe if I just hide and never talk about it, it’ll be fine. So I feel like that’s what I experienced.

Dave:We can talk about this later, but side note from the empty nesters who have now have grandkids, parents teach your kids how to do conflict. This is one of the most important skills. You can not only model but teach your kids. And I know some parents are going, “Well, we don’t know how to do it. We don’t do it well.” I mean, nobody teaches this. You don’t learn this in school. This is 101 for your kids.

I mean, I watched Ann do this. She was a master when our boys were like middle school sitting and they’re mad and she’d be, “Okay, let’s talk. Why are you mad?” “Look at that man.” “Let’s get to the root.” And I’m like, “Wow. She is just teaching that right now.”

Liz:That’s amazing.

Dave:“That their anger’s coming from somewhere and how you manage it.”

Ann:But let me add this, Dave. I think that if as parents you can deal with conflict in a healthy way—you’re not calling each other names. You’re not saying, “I’m leaving and divorcing you.” If you can have the fight with it being about the issue and not attacking each other, then it is healthy for them to see the conflict and then see it resolved. You might even get angry and yell at each other and sin. But you can still go back to your kids, say, “Hey, we just want you to know we shouldn’t have yelled, and we have apologized,” and let them see that your relationship’s okay. Because if you’re fighting ugly, that will scare your kids. And so I think you pick and choose.

Dave:That’s what I saw in my home with two alcoholic parents and then ended in divorce. So I came into marriage a little bit like Rob, “We won’t fight because divorce couples fight, and we won’t.” And then when we did, I didn’t know what to do with it, so I ran upstairs. I literally left the room.

Ann:And Rob, he turned the other way too. He turned in the bed, faced the wall.

Liz:He was rolling off the bed.

Ann:I’m grabbing him, turning him back like, “Hey, we need to talk about this.”

Dave:I was sort of like Brian. I just withdrew thinking it’ll be gone in the morning. And we’ll talk tomorrow about what happens the next morning, but it’s not gone. And so then you got to figure out how to resolve it.

So let me ask you this. One of the things that they talked about, and it’s in Shaunti’s book, is that sometimes men, and it could go either way I think, but they said sometimes men need to process. And so they’re sort of wanting to put it off till tomorrow because they don’t know. I mean, Ann would say to me, “What are you feeling?” And I’m escalating. It was usually sort of loud at that moment, “What are you feeling?” And I’d be like, “I don’t know.” “Of course you do!”

Ann:You don’t know what you’re feeling. Who doesn’t know what they’re feeling? Dave’s like, “I don’t know. I have no idea.”

Dave:And then when I—

Ann:Were you guys like that?

Dave:Yeah, I resonated with that. I’m just asking, did you?

Jon:I mean, I think we would say both of us fall in that category of, I need a moment of separation. I got to pull away. I got to figure out what I’m thinking, what I’m feeling.

Alyssa:I literally said the other day, “I just need a moment to be moody.” I was trying to figure out, what am I feeling and why am I feeling this way? So I have learned, and he’s learned this about me, I’m a very deep feeler, but I often don’t know what’s causing that feeling.

Jon:And I’ve really come to appreciate that when your emotions are at such a level that you can’t meaningfully unpack the issue, you need to go be moody for a minute, figure out what you’re feeling, what you’re thinking, and then we come back and hash it out.

Ann:Liz, talk about what that’s like with kids. You’re moody, you’re in a bad mood and you can’t pull away from anybody in the moment.

Liz:It’s really hard. I mean, it’s so funny because I feel like as I’ve processed this conversation, kids come into play a ton. Both in, “If we don’t solve this now, there will not be time later to solve it.” There’s no space to solve it. Or we’re in a good conversation and someone’s screaming, someone’s coming through the door, someone’s [screaming] outside of, and we’re escalating just from the external things that are happening.

So I think even just personally to have space to be like, “Okay, I am spiraling. I can feel myself spiraling,” whether it be with Rob or the kids or whatever it might be, to have a moment to just lock the door and put my AirPods in and be like, “Okay, I just need to have a moment.” I tell people I need a padded room sometimes, a noise canceling room to just be and to just gather myself.

It is so difficult to understand what’s going on because not only do I not have time and space to understand what’s going on in here; I’m regularly trying to understand what’s going on in my three kids and help them understand that and to resolve conflict with each other and to communicate and so I am out of gas by the time it comes to me. It’s like I feel all kinds of ways and I have no way to process and move forward or even explain that to somebody else.

Ann:And I’m so tired.

Liz:I’m so tired. I know I need to have a hard conversation. This is sticking with me. It’s heavy on my heart. But where’s that energy going to come from?

Dave:I mean, Rob, when you see that with her, how do you deal with it? I should ask Liz, how does Rob deal with it?

Liz:I see it in him too. This isn’t just me as mom—

Ann:Dad, as well.

Liz:He’s tag team me with me a ton and we’re really in the thick of it. So sometimes we’re looking at each other. We know we’re both out of gas and so I don’t know.

Rob:What might be, maybe the answer I’ll give is related to needing that time to pull back and process. I think one of the things that was really important for Liz and I, is because I think I’ve always needed that. But it took us a lot of time to rebuild trust because for so long I wasn’t engaging in the hard conversations. And so what looked like when I did legitimately need to pull back to think, what it looked like was I was just shoving it under the rug again. Which pressed up against what she needed was we need to work through this. And so it’s taken us a long time for me to know that I’m actually going to deal with it. And for her to know that I’m going to deal with it and that we will come back to this at some point.

Liz:That I’m not going to be forgotten and then lost in the mix.

Dave:That’s big.

Ann:For the person that wants to resolve conflict that can create incredible insecurity and angst.

Liz:Yeah. I’m not seen. I’m not valued. I’m not prioritized. It’s not worth getting into the muck.

Rob:You’re not worth getting into the muck it could feel like.

Ann:If it goes even deeper.

Liz:Yeah. Oh, a hundred percent. There’s always so many layers to it.

Ann:And I think we all know that marriage is not easy. I think Dave and I would be the first to say that that’s true. And it can be absolutely wonderful. It can be amazing, but it can be incredibly hard. And we have resources here at FamilyLife that I think they’ll really help you. So I hope, and I really pray that you’ll just take advantage of the resources that we have for you. You can go to FamilyLife.com/MarriageHelp. Again, that’s FamilyLife.com/MarriageHelp.

Dave:I don’t know where I saw this. I honestly—it was on Instagram, some marriage couple talking about marriage principles. I should be able to tell you who it was. Maybe you’ll remember, but I’d never seen it explained this way. They said, in our marriage we typically every day will say something like this to one another, “I’ve only got 30.”

Jon:That’s a Brené Brown bit.

Dave:Is that a Brené?

Jon:Yeah.

Dave:And her husband will say, “Okay, I got 70.” And the husband may say, “I got 40.” “Okay, I got 60.” We need a hundred, but I’ve been with the kids all day or whatever, my job, whatever. And I thought that is because you always think 50/50, and sometimes you don’t have 50 and sometimes you have 10.

Ann:Your supposed to give a hundred. We all know we’re supposed to give a hundred.

Jon:And if the two of you together can’t make a hundred, you got to make a plan of attack. How are you going to create that space?

Liz:What are the priorities?

Jon:Exactly.

Rob:Isn’t Netflix the last 15 percent?

Jon:I always thought Netflix just, I like that.

I want to pick on something that actually you guys taught us in premarital counseling. Rob and Liz did our premarital counseling. They’re amazing.

Ann:That is really cool.

Jon:It’s so fun. So fun. We’re talking conflict styles, right? You explained this idea that some people are rhinos is the metaphor. They see the problem; they want to attack it. They’re just going to give it full force, confront it immediately. Some people are more like hedgehogs or turtles. “Hold on, I got to withdraw away. I can’t deal with this right now.”

And so even just kind of for us, we’ve talked about this a lot. Like, “Okay, I’m hedgehogging right now. I don’t have the emotional or mental space to deal with this.” We’ve even seen among ourselves or between ourselves, there are more often than not moments where I will rhino. I feel insecure. If I know the problem exists, I need to attack it and deal with it right away. Or at least figure out where we’re at and more often than not—

Alyssa:I’m the opposite. I’m like, “Ah, I know this is a problem, but right now I just can’t do it.”

Jon:Which is funny because I think going into marriage, we thought we’d be the opposite.

Alyssa:We are not.

Jon:So it’s funny, I’m sitting here going, I don’t think you said that three or four months ago. That was different. It turns out we got married and it’s the exact opposite of what we thought.

Ann:But aren’t these great conversations?

Jon:Well, and once you know, you can kind of explain why you’re reacting the way that you are. It’s like, “Okay, you’re hedgehogging. I get it. Go take a minute. Go take a lap. Go take a nap.”

Ann:And don’t take it personally.

Jon:Right, exactly. And she knows where my need to attack the problem is coming from. So yeah, I think that created an opportunity for empathy once we kind of had that language to deal with it.

Alyssa:Totally.

Jon:So that was really great.

Dave:And I think we all know this. One of the big pushbacks to what Shaunti said about go to bed angry is if you’re a Bible believing person, the Bible says, no, no, no, no, no. You never go to bed angry.

Ann:Don’t let the sun go down.

Dave:Do not let the sun go down on your anger.

Rob:Yeah.

Dave:And that’s actually one of the principles she talks about that we’re going to hit tomorrow.

Jon:Amazing.

Dave:So come back tomorrow. Let’s talk about that.

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