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Sunday, April 29, 2012

The importance of supporting your spouse

Chains do not hold a marriage together. It is threads, hundreds of tiny threads which sew people together through the years. ~Simone Signoret
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Recently I read two short stories that illustrated how important it is to support your spouse and how strong of an influence you can have. I will paraphrase the stories.


The first story is about a wife's influence on her husband:
A president and his wife were out walking one day. The president saw one of his wife's old boyfriends in a less than prestigious occupation. He turned to his wife and said, "If you hadn't married me you could have ended up with him." To which his wife responded, " If I had married him, he would be president."


The second story is about a husband's influence on his wife:
A man was young, strong and highly sought after in his tribe. In his tribe it was customary to give a dowry of 2-3 cows depending on the desirability of the wife. This young man chose a woman who was homely, and shy and offered her father 8 cows as a dowry. This was unheard of, and later in life no one would have known this woman was once homely and shy, because all her met her were struck by her confidence and the spark in her eye. When asked why he gave 8 cows for a wife, the man responded by saying that he wanted an 8 cow wife.


I don't want to say much, but I wanted to share because these stories illustrate to me how much we can influence others by how we treat them.

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