Parting With Pride

If love is to will the good of the other as other, then pride is its complete antithesis. Pride consists not so much always in thinking highly of yourself, but in thinking about others primarily in terms of how they relate to you. How can you have a marriage of self-giving love if you filter everything through yourself, if you evaluate everything according to how it benefits or harms you?

 

Pride is the sin that is present any time a person will sacrifice their spouse’s needs or their relationship for their own benefit. In the prideful marriage, one or both of the spouses understand the purpose of the marriage is for the other to meet their needs. 

 

Self love does not always overtly express itself as selfishness. Often pride takes the form of unrealistic expectations--a rigid worldview that insists that if someone loves them, they should act according to a specific script, or that marriages should unfold according to inflexible, and often unstated rules.

 

“We encounter problems whenever we think that relationships or people ought to be perfect, or when we put ourselves at the center and expect things to turn out our way,” writes Pope Francis I. “Then everything makes us impatient, everything makes us react aggressively. Unless we cultivate patience, we will always find excuses for responding angrily.”

 

As with the other sins, pride is not really about how one feels inside—it is revealed in how one acts. And we can change our actions.

 

In Dante’s Purgatory, the souls of the proud are disciplined by carrying great weights upon their back. These heavy burdens crush them into the earth, humbling them by reminding them of the dust from which they came. Dante is keenly aware that the term humility derives from the Latin humilis literally "on the ground," derived from the word humus, meaning "earth." As a result of their burdens, they become more humble, less self-absorbed, and less likely to focus on themselves and take others for granted.

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They become more grateful.

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Discernment: Am I prideful?

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Pride, in this sense, is a way of being that generates a lot of negative ways of behaving. You may be a prideful person if you:

• have a critical, fault-finding spirit. You first seek to assign blame for a problem before you try to fix it.

• are overly independent or self-sufficient. You rarely ask your spouse (or anyone else) for help or advice.

• need to prove that you’re right. You would rather be right than make a loved one happy.

• have a demanding spirit. You are usually more concerned about your “rights” in the relationship than you are your responsibilities.

• worry excessively about your reputation. You are more protective of your own reputation than the collective reputation of your coupleship or family.

• desire to be served. You find it better to receive than to give.

• are uncomfortably self-conscious in new situations. You refuse to do things with your spouse because you don’t believe you are good at them and will look foolish or out of place.

• are quick to blame others, or circumstances. Rather than focusing on things over which you have control, you seek to ensure that people see you as the victim of circumstances or the errors of others.

• get defensive when criticized. You are unable to hear criticism without making excuses or becoming defensive. No one enjoys criticism, yet honest criticism from those who know you best is essential to personal growth.

• have a difficult time apologizing. The ability to say, “I was wrong, will you please forgive me?” is crucial to healthy relationships.

• think you have nothing of which to repent.In any conflict, you assume the other person is at fault. When your spouse misunderstands you, it is because they did not listen carefully; when you misunderstand them, it is because they were not clear.

 

Pride’s Antithesis: Humility

 

It was pride that changed angels into devils; it is humility that makes men like angels.

--Saint Augustine

 

The opposite of pride is humility.

 

While Dante has the proud humbled in purgatory by being pushed into the earth to humiliate them (note again the word for earth, humus, in that term), the point of breaking their pride is not to make them ashamed or debased but to make them grounded. Humble people are free to be realistic and unpretentious, seeing the world and their place in it as it really is without the fantasies of pride.

 

Or, as the philosopher Jason Baehr describes it, “To be humble is to be attentive to and disposed to ‘own’ one’s limitations, weaknesses, and mistakes. A humble person does not ignore, avoid, or try to deny her limits or deficiencies.”

 

But true humility does not involve focusing on your faults or diminishing your accomplishments, it is recognizing that even when your wealth, accomplishments or talents are better than some other peoples, they usually have at least some characteristics where they shine more greatly than you if you look for them honestly. Humility recognizes that however hard you’ve worked, your successes required the help of others. And finally, humility recognizes that whatever you’ve accomplished in life is pretty small potatoes in the eternal scale on which God operates.

 

Humble people can look at others without measuring themselves against them, or wondering what they can get out of them, or worrying whether they might have to give something. People with true humility take a quiet satisfaction in their own accomplishments, but don’t care whether others notice them.

 

Humility can mean many things in a marriage.

• Humility is the ability to recognize that your spouse’s bad mood may have nothing to do with you.

• When you are humble, you are not made defensive by your spouse’s irritability or sharp words, so you can focus on helping them feel better.

• Humility helps us serve without counting the cost, to care more about people seeing you as a loving couple than seeing how much smarter or better looking you are than your spouse.

• Humility allows you to be the first to apologize, even if you don’t feel you did anything wrong, because you care more about your relationship than you do about being right.

As C.S. Lewis wrote, “True humility is not thinking less of yourself, it is thinking of yourself less.”

 

It should come as no surprise that in studies people tend to rank humility highly in their romantic partners.

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Practical Exercises

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Being crushed into the ground by great weights is a powerful metaphor, but not likely to produce the desired results in real life. There are, however, many simple tasks you can perform that can help make you more humble in your relationships.

 

1. Unseen Service. Perform some act of service each day that you know you won’t get credit for. Clean up a mess your spouse made without even letting them know. Say yes to something without considering the difficulties it will make for you, then figure out a way to make it happen so your spouse never even knows there was a problem. Secretly fill their car with gas. Secretly replenish the household supply you noticed was running low.

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Try each day to make your spouse’s life better without them even knowing you’ve done it. The purest gifts happen, as Jesus tells us, when the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing—that is, when you give in such a way that you neither seek praise, nor praise yourself, but focus on the good of the receiver of your gift. This pure gift—a gift that expects neither repayment nor praise—will help you master the meaning of selflessness.

 

2. Use the three magic phrases. In his advice to married couples, Pope Francis advises that spouses do not let any day go by in which they do not use the phrases “I’m sorry,” “please” and “thank you” -- preferably more than once. Each of these is humbling in its own way.

 

Saying “I’m sorry” involves acknowledging fault. Apologizing for your part in a conflict can be used to restore a breach between you and your spouse even when you believe they are almost entirely to blame for the problem (as long as a need to tell them they are mostly to blame does not poison your apology!).

 

Saying “please” humbles us by acknowledging our spouse’s agency. When couples share a single car, it’s easy to say “I’ll need you to drive me to the airport Friday.” Saying instead “Honey, will you please drive me to the airport” forces us to acknowledge that our needs do not create a requirement for our spouse to meet those needs. On the contrary, our needs create in us an obligation to petition them to meet our needs.

 

Saying “thank you” humbles us by acknowledging the services our spouse performs for us. When couples agree to a separation of chores, such as he cooks dinner and she does the laundry, they rarely acknowledge these services with a “thank you.” After all, the spouse is supposed to do their chores. Saying thank you each and every time they do these tasks is a reminder that following the household rules is a daily service to the relationship and is not to be taken for granted.

 

3. Don’t talk about yourself. Have you gotten a raise? Did you put through an important business deal? Did you just buy a new boat, widescreen TV, or antique lamp? Don't bring it up in conversation. If someone else brings it up, answer their questions briefly and honestly, then ask them a question. Similarly, if someone compliments you, thank them briefly, then ask them a question or offer them a compliment.

 

In conversations with your spouse, try to share as much as you need to, or as much as your spouse asks and no more. Make it a contest: you win every time you can get your spouse to talk more about themselves than you talk about yourself (but this game only counts if you don’t share with anyone else that you won!)

 

4. Count your regrets. When you find yourself complaining about your circumstances because things are not going the way you believe they should, make a list of your regrets. If you are thinking, "I'm cold. I'm tired of walking in the snow," ask yourself "Okay, so what do I regret?"  The answers may be many: "I regret not checking the weather report before I decided to walk. I regret not taking a bus. I regret not calling a friend to ask for a ride. I regret not calling an Uber." The trick is to focus on what you could have done differently, rather than on how circumstances or the actions of others have affected you.

 

Focusing on our complaints feeds our sense of entitlement, our belief that it’s unfair that things like this should happen to us--and if they do, it’s not our fault but the fault of others, or bad luck, or external circumstances. Focusing on our regrets turns the tables and makes us recognize that at least part of the onus for our unhappiness is the choices we have made. Focusing on regrets humbles us by making us own the consequences of our actions.

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Prayer:

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Empty me, Lord, that I may approach my spouse with true humility and love. Help me to think first of my family, and then of myself. Help me to truly listen, to understand, and to serve. Help me to get outside myself so that I can see in my spouse the face of God. Amen

 

Resources

 

Daryl R. Van Tongeren, Don E. Davis & Joshua N. Hook (2014) Social benefits of humility: Initiating and maintaining romantic relationships, The Journal of Positive Psychology, 9:4, 313-321