How Spouses Draw Out Each Other's Best, Past and All

Key takeaways

• Potential can be spoken. Adam says women are often good at seeing what a man may become, and naming it helps him grow into it.
• Family can draw out your best. Adam says having a wife and kids sharpened his focus and his work.
• Sharing the load works best without keeping score. Sanaz describes dividing tasks by what each spouse minds least, then never holding it over the other.
• Tone shapes change. Praise invites a spouse to do better, while resentment shuts the conversation down.
• Covering a past is part of marriage. Adam and Nathan describe taking on their wives' histories with grace, and Sanaz tells how Nathan's support freed her to be honest in ministry.

From ADHD banter to a question about potential

Pastor Adam Mesa opened this episode of Beyond I Do with his brother Nathan, his sister-in-law Sanaz and his wife Ashley. The first minutes were jokes about dry mouth and ADHD medication, and Adam said he would save the conversation about kids and ADHD for another day.

The main question came from a recent episode for singles. Adam had been thinking about what women do well, and he put it this way: "women are really good at recognizing potential in men." He added that this is true when they are sober minded, by which he meant rational about choosing a spouse, not free of alcohol or drugs.

He said Ashley used to name that potential in him, whether it was accomplishment or fatherhood, even when he was not thinking about it. Then he asked the others how they had seen it while dating.

Finding the diamond in the rough

Sanaz answered that the right woman for the right man can help him find his best self. She said women look for the diamond in the rough in their friends, their children and their coworkers, and then encourage it. By her own telling, her list of things she did not want had grown long by her thirties.

Adam pointed to Nathan as proof. When Nathan met Sanaz, Adam said, his lounge shorts rode up to his chest. Nathan added that on Sundays he dressed as if he lived in Alabama, and he agreed that he is a very different guy now.

What a wife and kids pull out of a man

Adam described a video of a man known online for a collection, either shoes or Legos (Adam could not remember which). Asked how much more he would own without a wife and kids, the man said he would own none of it, because his family pulled the drive to work and provide out of him.

Adam said the same was true for him: "it sobered me up really quick having wife and kids." Before, he would try things out. Now a wasted six months could affect the mouths he feeds, so he has to be more focused.

Ashley described her side of that. When Adam wanted to grow a company or write a book, he would often talk himself out of it because of the extra work. She would tell him to do it, and he said she never made him feel she was picking those projects over the family. She also remembered wondering early on whether he was lazy because he slept late, until he explained what he was working on. Her answer was to ask him to keep the family included while they were awake.

Ashley encouraged him in smaller things too. After Adam started an eagle tattoo and stopped partway because of what people might say, she asked who cared, since he was married to her. His father, Pastor Diego, had worried about tattoos and promotion. Within a year, Adam said, people were asking his dad to tell them when his son was preaching, because a friend just out of prison would feel comfortable with him.

Sharing the load without keeping score

Nathan said he was confident when he met Sanaz and also very selfish. Because they dated and married quickly, he doubts she knew how selfish. He credited her with giving him "perspective through a variety of lenses," which brought out a more compassionate heart. He admitted he was defensive when she first corrected him.

Sanaz said she was set in her ways after being single into her thirties. In her view, if both people compromise on everything, nobody gets what they want. So the two of them look for what matters to Nathan and not to her, and the reverse.

She gave an example: she hates packing for trips, and Nathan does it every time. He does not like to cook or to wash dishes well, and she covers those. The most important part, she said, is that "we don't hold it over each other's heads."

Speaking life, and guiding with love

Sanaz drew a line between two ways of asking a husband to be present. One says the family loves having him around. The other says he is lazy, and it comes from resentment. She said that when Nathan tells her where she is doing well, it makes her "want to do an even better job at what I'm doing well."

Ashley added that encouraging a spouse does not mean giving up guidance. She sometimes asks Adam whether one more commitment is necessary, then adapts to his answer. She said that is guiding him, not controlling him.

Adam widened the point. He said social media gives young people loud and conflicting ideas of what a man should be, and he encouraged women to look at character: how a man treats his mother and how he treats a stranger. Like a mother who sees who her child will become, a woman can see past a man's job at the moment.

Covering a past the way Christ covers

The pastors turned to dating women with a past. Adam said he was drawn to Ashley's compassion and her work with children with autism, and he disliked judgmental attitudes. He learned months into dating that some details of her history were not what she had first told him. He saw it as a decision: was he willing "to cover her the way that the scriptures say that love covers a multitude of sins"?

And above all things be earnest in your love among yourselves, for love covers a multitude of sins.

(1 Peter 4:8, WEB)

He also pointed to loving a wife as Christ loves the church (Ephesians 5:25), which he took to mean loving her regardless of her shortcomings.

Nathan said that two weeks before their wedding, Sanaz's pastor told him that he was about to cover her and could not hold her past over her head. Adam said that if an ex's memory comes up later, the husband's role is to talk it through, pray, and invite trusted pastors in. He also said, "I can't love you so much so that it erases your past." Only the Lord can do that.

Sanaz closed with a story. About two months after they married, Nathan, then a children's pastor, planned his first sermon in the main sanctuary, on purity. He asked her to share her testimony at the end. She was new to the church and hesitated, since she had a sexual past. Nathan said God had delivered her and that her story could help people. She recalled, "I knew in that moment that as long as I had his support in ministry, I did not have to pretend to be anybody that I wasn't."

What this means for you

If you are married, ask yourself what you are planting in your spouse. A word that names something good can reach a person in a way a complaint cannot. If you are dating, this conversation suggests watching character and how someone treats others.

The same grace applies to a past, yours or your spouse's. Husbands and wives who love like Christ do not have to pretend, and they do not have to hold old failures over each other.