Complement Don't Compete with your Filipina to be a Winning Team

Many times, I hear the comment “What could you possibly have in common?” regarding marrying a younger woman from the Philippines. Possibly, not a lot, but the foreigner and the Filipina still need to become good teammates to have a successful marriage. Please subscribe to Love Beyond The Sea if you want to learn about the ins and outs, the practicalities of a relationship with a woman from the Philippines. Go ahead and leave a comment and get notifications for upcoming videos. I married my wife in Davao City Philippines in May of 2015, that’s when we became a team, but both of us have had to learn how to play like a team, and today’s video is about the teamwork aspect of being married to a Filipina. This is so important, I will focus on only three today and seven more in another video.

“We win as a team, we lose as a team”, “we are either united or we are divided”, “individual glory or success in not important”. Let’s get into why these clichés are true in marriage.

As a lifelong sports fan, many times I have heard the expression “There is no I in team”. That’s because marriage isn’t about each individual being fulfilled and accomplishing their will, it is about those individuals doing whatever it takes for the marriage to be fulfilling and successful, to be a perennial winner.

The best way to look at it is that these two individuals need to learn how to live like one unit, they need to be unified, even if there is an age gap, a different culture, even if the marriage was arranged. It sounds great at first, to be married, but the problems arise when the individual assumes too much importance. It must be all about the team.

For me that’s a good thing because I recognize I am not smart enough or talented enough to carry my marriage to my Amazing Aiza. I don’t want to be a lone wolf either, being single all my life, I knew I needed to be married and I knew that marriage doesn’t come easily or even naturally, it is so different from being single. Fortunately for me, I married a woman who is strong where I am weak. I don’t have to be perfect. Maybe you’ve heard Filipinas make good wives, and they do, but playing like a team isn’t automatic and involves some things that I want to talk about today.

Complementary abilities-On any team, the players don’t have the exact same skills, which is good because if they did, they would have glaring weaknesses. In baseball if a team has excellent hitters, but the pitchers can’t get an out to save their lives, they are going to lose more games than they win. I don’t have an aptitude for fixing things, for electronic gadgets, but my wife does.

We enjoy some things together that I wouldn’t even bother to try to use as a single person. Long before getting married, I would say that if I ever owned a house, I would not do it unless my wife had skills that a handyman would possess, because I was sick the day those skills were handed out. My wife can do things like that. When I would say “call someone to fix it”, she would say “let me try to fix it first”.

If I said “Honey, I’m the man of the house, stand back, it’s my job to repair this”, that would be silly because I know my wife is gifted or skilled to be able to do this. When we go to the airport for the many flights it takes to get to the Philippines and back, which is eight, my wife naturally leads us through the maze of places we need to go, all that stuff makes my head spin, but I can rely on her since she is strong in this way and I am weak.

My wife is bright, she’s smarter than I am. She doesn’t hold that over my head, she doesn’t try to make me feel small, it is what it is, and I as the leader of this relationship, more on this later, do well to recognize who is better at the things that need to be done for us to operate as a unit successfully. Our egos need to go.

Another way my wife is stronger is she is better at letting things go than I am. Before she immigrated here, she would tell me “Let it be, let it be”. That’s difficult to do when you want to win, when you feel you’ve been wronged but my wife can manage that better than I can, so I can learn how to handle frustrating situations better such as talking to a customer service representative, or I can let her do it. A weakness of mine was exposed when I married, that is how frustrated I can get when I just can’t understand how in the world something is the way it is.

By the same token, while my Filipina wife is better at handling situations like this without losing her temper, she needs me to help encourage her to stand up for herself. She has met some people here who bother her and I don’t want her being pushed around so we talk about how to handle that. Filipinas don’t grow up in a culture of confrontation so she is an easy target for bullying, but she doesn’t have to let that happen.

I am very verbal, whereas she isn’t but there are times when she asks me how to express something, a proper way to word it, and I love helping her with that. I have loved words since elementary school, which makes up for other shortcomings I have. When I heard a teacher in school read us a story and she used the word “astonished” I was hooked. I immediately asked her what that meant and from then on wanted to know what words meant. Not only that, but the synonyms and the antonyms.

To me, listing all the words I can think of that start with the letter B for example in thirty seconds, and the longer the word the better, is fun! Sesquipedalian is an adjective that means a word that has many syllables or the use of long words. Remembering words is fairly easy for me, that is one strength God gave me. Naturally my favorite board game is scrabble. Any time I can use that to help my wife I am happy. To be a good team we need to humbly admit our weaknesses and recognize each other’s strengths as something beneficial for us as a team.

Don’t compete, you’re on the same team-I suppose it’s natural in a relationship to want to show each other what you are good at, but on a team, someone is better at something than you are but there is always someone who might not have the most glaring skills, yet has an intangible quality that makes them a good teammate. I don’t want to compete with my wife, I want whatever is best for us as a team. If I “win” in some marital situation, our team loses. In everything I do or allow to be done, I need to make sure we win as a couple.

Find a way to win-Sometimes a team has to “win ugly”. They aren’t playing up to their capabilities but must somehow dig down inside and find a way to win”. Winning should be very important to a married couple. You play to win, don’t you? We need to pick each other up when we are down, sick, in a bad mood, or afraid of something. I think concessions need to be made. Sometimes you experience losing streaks where you aren’t communicating well or someone acts selfishly, but as a team, we need to ride those out and get back on track.

I could continue but will save that for the next video about How to be a Good Team in Marriage with a local woman or with your love beyond the sea.