Why Be Kind to a Spouse Who Is Being Cruel to You?

Why Be Kind to a Spouse Who Is Being Cruel to You?

You have known this person for five years. Or fifteen. Or thirty. And somewhere in the last few months they turned into someone you don't recognise. Short with you. Cold. Rude in a way they never used to be. They have told you they love you but they're not in love with you, or that they never loved you at all. They've made you the enemy in a story you didn't know was being written.

Then you come across people like us saying things like: be kind to them.

We understand exactly how that sounds. Why would you be kind to someone who is being cruel to you? Shouldn't you protect yourself? Shouldn't you stand up for what's right?

There is real truth in that instinct. Boundaries are healthy and necessary, and nothing here asks you to absorb mistreatment or pretend you're fine. But the question underneath all of it is one most spouses in crisis never get asked.

Who do you want to be?

If your behaviour is decided by how other people treat you, it's only a matter of time. Enough unkind people will pass through your life, and one day you will look up and find you have become an unkind person. That is the risk of living reactively. Your spouse's worst season gets to write your character.

The morning of the gala

Adelé was standing for our marriage. Ren was in a limerent affair, drinking heavily, using drugs, and living forty-five minutes away.

Our daughter had her first ever school swimming gala, and Ren had promised he'd be there. The morning came and Adelé dropped the girls at school early. No Ren. No message. Nothing. And she knew.

There was a part of her that felt something close to relief. Let him miss it. Let the natural consequences do their work. Let their daughter cry and let that sit on him where it belonged.

She describes hearing a quiet question instead. Really? Is that how we're going to do this? After all the work you have done to become better than this?

So she phoned him. She could hear him waking up, scrambling for clothes, saying he was on his way.

Then she went across the road to the coffee shop and stood in the queue thinking she'd just get one for herself. And then she bought two. She went into the school, found seats on the grandstand right by the finish line, and saved him one.

He came screeching into the school moments before the race. He sat down. She handed him the coffee. He couldn't look at her, because he had been drinking the night before and he knew he smelled like a bar.

He asked her why she was being so kind to him.

She said: because I should have always been kind to you. And I'm sorry for the times I wasn't.

Kindness is not a lever you pull

This is the part we most want standing spouses to understand, because it's where most people get it wrong.

That moment did not fix anything.

Ren wasn't struck with gratitude. He was drowning in shame and self-hatred, calculating what kind of man nearly misses his daughter's first gala. He was still in the affair. He was still drinking. Weeks later Adelé asked him to come to a marriage conference in Nashville with her, and he said no, he was going to Nashville with his friends.

If Adelé had been watching him for a return on her kindness, she would have run out of steam inside a fortnight.

She wasn't watching him. She was becoming someone.

Kindness used as a strategy to get your spouse back will collapse, because a spouse in the fog of limerence has almost nothing to give you. At the height of it they may tell you it's too little too late, or that it's convenient you've decided to change now that they've decided to leave. Inside them it is shame and guilt and pride all churning at once. They cannot give you what you're fishing for.

Kindness that comes from a decision about who you are will hold, because it doesn't depend on them.

What consistency does to the villain story

There is something kindness does that you won't see for a long time.

A spouse in limerence needs you to be the villain. The story has to hold together, and it only holds if you are difficult, unkind, ungracious, impossible to live with. Every crisis conversation gets filed as evidence.

When you are consistently kind over months, the evidence stops arriving. Ren describes it from the inside: he kept wanting to vilify her, making mountains out of molehills, and the changes in her were real and consistent enough that continuing to do so meant lying to himself.

Your change does not have to convince your spouse this week. It has to be true long enough that it becomes undeniable.

Why there is no losing outcome for you

Adelé's mission was to do everything within her power to fight for the marriage, knowing full well God does the actual saving. Her part was to clean up her side of the street.

What she found there was uncomfortable. She had not been a kind wife. She had revelled in his failures because they gave her the upper hand. She had been entirely reactive, warm when he pleased her and retaliating when he didn't.

The crisis wasn't only his second chance. It was hers.

Which meant the outcome stopped being a coin flip on her whole life. If the marriage was restored, her husband received the woman she had become. If it wasn't, she carried that woman into whatever came next, and she was never going to repeat the same patterns again. She had peace about either road while still hoping hard for one of them.

And when reconciliation did come, Ren had no idea how to be married. He learned it by watching her. Six and a half years later we are still standing on the foundation she built during the months when nothing appeared to be working.

If you are the one changing right now while your spouse is far away, you are a lighthouse. Straying spouses eventually come out of the fog with no idea how to get home. Your steadiness is the light they navigate by.

The kind of kindness God uses

Romans 2:4 says: "Or do you think lightly of the riches of His kindness and tolerance and patience, not knowing that the kindness of God leads you to repentance?" (NASB 1995)

Not His wrath. Not a list of everything you got wrong. His kindness.

Adelé had five thousand true things she could have said at that gala. She chose one sentence instead, and it did more work than the five thousand ever would have.

Common questions

Does being kind actually bring my spouse back?
There are no guarantees, and kindness used as a tactic runs out of steam quickly. Adelé was kind at the gala and Ren still turned down a marriage conference weeks later. What kindness does is remove your own regret and give the marriage its best possible chance.

Isn't this just being a doormat?
No. A doormat has no boundaries and no self. This is the opposite, because you are choosing your response instead of reacting, which means you are the one in charge of your behaviour. Kindness is not approval, and it does not require you to tolerate abuse.

What if my spouse is in limerence and doesn't care?
At the height of limerence they very likely won't care, and they may tell you it's too little too late. Your changes are still doing work you cannot see. They dismantle the story in which you are the villain.

How long do I have to keep this up?
Long enough that it stops being a performance and becomes who you are. Consistency over time is what makes it real, to you first and to them eventually.

Can one person save a marriage?
One person cannot control the outcome. One person can change the entire environment the marriage exists in, and that is often what makes a return possible.

Watch the full video: Why Be Kind to a Spouse Who Is Being Cruel to You?

New to this? Start with our video on what limerence is.

We're Ren and Adelé. Ren was the straying spouse. Adelé was the standing spouse. The marriage was rebuilt, and we've spent the years since walking with spouses in the middle of the same thing.

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