It was several weeks ago. Across from me sat a dear Jew, his eyes worn with exhaustion, as he opened his heart with a story that pierces straight to the soul:
"I'm fifty years old, married for thirty years, father to seven wonderful children. I'll tell you the truth, I'm exhausted. Exhausted from fighting, exhausted from trying to change things, exhausted from hoping, exhausted from arguing, exhausted from living the way I've been living."
He continued: "I got married at twenty. Like any young bochur, I expected a good and happy life, to build a healthy and joyful Jewish home. But hopes are one thing and reality is another."
"I'm a perfectionist by nature. I love everything to be perfect, beautiful, organized and arranged exactly as I want and dream. Of course I also demanded, criticized and commented on myself constantly. For me there was never a middle ground — only one absolute concept: black or white. And the way I conducted myself with myself is exactly how I conducted myself with those dearest to me, first and foremost with my wife."
"My wife is a good woman, but she had shortcomings that I found unbearable to understand and accept. When the house wasn't clean, I couldn't accept it. When she dressed in a style I didn't like, it bothered me. But the root of everything lay in my perspective. Because of this view, I wasn't able to look at my wife with real appreciation. For me everything was black or white. If the house wasn't clean, I immediately stamped her with a black mark. I couldn't digest how a woman manages and functions like this at home. And truthfully, the house was indeed far from clean. It's hard for me to describe in words how the house looked then, but this and other details caused me to put a huge X on my wife. I focused only on the black, until no white and no light remained in my eyes. I commented and criticized her constantly."
"At the beginning of our marriage she stayed silent. But after a year or two, the human soul reached its limit and she started answering back. She told me this is who she is, that I have to accept her as she is, and that I also have plenty of problems and she accepts me with them. And so began countless fights."
"I still harbored the illusion that if I just commented a bit more, something in her would shift and she would change. But as time passed, the situation only worsened. The hurts became mutual, and the type of hurts intensified day by day. A black and gaping hole opened between us. Years passed, the children grew, we celebrated bar mitzvahs and bas mitzvahs, we started marrying off the children, and I remained in exactly the same dark place."
"Then came the moment of truth. I had a severe heart attack, was hospitalized, and underwent open-heart surgery. The doctors presented me with a threatening reality: start losing weight, carefully watch my diet, and above all, stop getting angry. But the one who stood by my side through that entire difficult period and didn't leave me for even a second, that was my wife. She cared for me tirelessly, encouraged me constantly, and slept on a small chair in the hospital for entire nights."
"When you're lying in bed with terrible pain and your life is hanging by a thread, you start thinking deeply about your life, about your relationships with those around you, about all the unnecessary fights. And then the shattering realization hit me: Look, you've been fighting for thirty years, trying to change your wife, commenting, criticizing. Are you actually succeeding? Is anything moving? Nothing. Everything stayed exactly the same and even worse. And not only that, my relationship with my wife descended to the darkest depths."
"I realized I'm a rigid perfectionist, and the way I treat myself is projected cruelly onto my wife as well. I can't stand to feel certain things. For me there's no middle ground, only black or white. I started to understand and internalize that I can continue like this until the end of my days, or simply get divorced and find another woman, or alternatively choose the only real option: to make peace with reality. To understand that there is life, there are situations, where the situation is composed of both black and white. There isn't only black or only white. Sometimes you have a good-hearted wife, the house is messy and disorganized, and any attempt to bend reality by force simply doesn't help. And there are things that even therapy won't change, and they'll stay that way forever."
"It's important for me to emphasize here that certainly one can and should turn to therapy if things are bothering you, and always try to speak pleasantly. But when I look around at people who have real shalom bayis, I see that one of the greatest secrets is simply to make peace with your spouse's shortcomings. To accept that this is who he is and this is who she is. Of course you shouldn't make peace with emotional abuse, but so many fights, over fifty percent of fights in homes, would be spared from us, so much pain and so many divorces would be prevented, if only we learned to let go."
"This is reality. This is how the Creator created it, it's for the good, and I won't succeed in changing the situation by force. Instead of enjoying the tremendous good that exists in one's spouse, we choose to struggle our entire lives to reshape them according to our fantasies."
"Believe me, I don't know a single person who changed by force just because someone commented and criticized them. There's no such reality. The vast majority of people remain faithful to their character traits. It's very difficult for a person to hear criticism, especially when it's said in a harsh and unpleasant way. People immediately become defensive and immediately attack back whoever is criticizing them."
When reading this dear Jew's story, one cannot help but understand what deep mechanisms operate in all our souls without us noticing. Here are four central psychological concepts that explain exactly how this process works:
1. Dichotomous thinking (black-and-white thinking)
A perfectionist operates through a rigid lens that doesn't recognize the middle space. From his perspective, things must be perfect or they're completely terrible. This thinking creates reality blindness: it erases all the gray, the nuances and the good that exists, and focuses only on the smallest flaw.
2. The psychological mechanism of projection
Psychology teaches that the more rigid and critical a person is toward his own weaknesses, the more he will project that anger outward and will have exponentially more difficulty accepting them in his spouse. The bitter criticism directed at the wife was actually that same merciless self-criticism, just wrapped in external blame.
3. The paradox of change
We all fall into the illusion that if we just press harder and criticize more, the other side will eventually break and change. In practice, the opposite happens: the paradox of change states that real change occurs only in a place where we feel accepted as we are. Criticism only creates defense mechanisms and fortifies the other side.
4. Radical acceptance and healthy surrender
This is the critical stage where one stops fighting the wind and reality. Radical acceptance means recognition of life's facts: there are traits and situations that we will never succeed in changing in the other person. The moment we release the need to control and redirect the energy to enjoying what is good, real shalom bayis enters the home.
