How Anger is Bad for your Marriage to a Filipina

At Love Beyond The Sea, I try to have content that would be of special interest to a couple of groups of people. One is a lonely man who is about to give up on love, that wants to be married very badly but is losing hope, to help them consider a Filipina. Another is for someone who already is in a relationship with a Filipina through dating, engagement or marriage.

I want to assist men, often who are foreigners, to have a successful and committed relationship to a Filipina, especially marriage. Please subscribe to Love Beyond the Sea and get notifications for upcoming videos, I have a lot in the vault to make for you. See lvbts.com where you can also find podcasts there on Casting Beyond The Sea.

Now, don’t get angry with me, but there is a lot to share with you and it will take four videos, in order to avoid making them too long. This is a critical topic, it really is. The Bible says “Make no friendship with an angry man and with a furious man thou shalt not go. Lest thou learn his ways and get a snare to your soul.” Conflict can be a source of growth in a relationship but only if it is handled properly with the good of the relationship the goal. Seriously, I cannot have a channel with practical relationship advice without talking about anger. I’ve always wanted to do a series on that and it starts today.

Let’s talk about a temper test I will link in the description box, right on top, along with some other links. Here is a sample of the questions and how to rank yourself. I am sure there is a science to the type of questions and that it wasn’t just tossed together without some reason.

How I fared

Your Anger Test Score is: 80 % So from 25 questions I averaged a 3+. Now that makes me angry!

How your score is calculated:

Each question you answered was rated on the following system:

0: Not at all
1: Little
2: Moderate Amount 
3: Much
4: Very Much

The scored are then totaled to give your stress score.

Please note: This questionnaire is not intended to give the level of diagnosis or advice that a qualified practitioner can. If you feel depressed or suffer from anxiety, you should consult your doctor.

In another video I will reveal how I scored and I how I can learn from it. In addition to that, I want to detail for you a time we had to work through a difficult decision that had resulted in anger on both of our parts. I think talking about that will help this video by being real. I will never throw my wife “under the bus” because I love and respect her, but this is a situation I think we can all learn from. That will be later. I will be adding to some points made in those links.

Everyday annoyances

Things like did my wife buy the right kind of hamburger at the store, the right kind of burritos, did she text me at break, did she ask me about my day? By and large this is not an area that causes much annoyance to me in our marriage. Filipinas have a reputation for being hard working and responsible. If my wife had an accident and the car was totaled, I would only be concerned about her wellbeing, not the car. If she is fine, I don’t know why I would think about it again other than praying for her safety on the road. What would bother me much more would be if she still hasn’t called her doctor for an appointment she needs. Why? Unfinished business.

Increased conflict

If she wasn’t scheduling this doctor appointment, we had an argument about something, she criticized me for spending too much time on YouTube, she bought something I didn’t think we needed, and she took someone else’s side in something, then that increased conflict could lead to a boiling over of emotions. I want to add here that it is not a virtue to just ignore things that cause you some friction out of fear that causing conflict would be bad for the relationship. They will add up eventually and could cause an outburst. A healthy marriage can handle conflict. They must see it as they are in it for the long haul so they won’t bolt after the first sign of trouble and will be committed enough to learn from their conflicts.

Built-up bitterness

Have we been married long enough to have built-up bitterness? Probably. We have to be willing to give a little, sometimes a lot in order to have harmony. The “money issue” between a foreigner and Filipina could certainly become a source of pent-up frustration if there isn’t conversation about it, and I mean straight forward, but without threatening. Social media time, work hours, amount of work, something that makes you jealous, the type of house you live in, where you live, how she looks, disagreement about many things could result in built-up bitterness and anger if it doesn’t get talked about.

The dilemma of angry outbursts and sin

I like this comment from one of the articles I linked in the description box-

Anger is often a secondary emotion. The primary emotions are hurt, fear or frustration. Anger also can be a sign that we care deeply about something or that something is wrong. For example, anger can indicate outrage at child abuse. All anger is not the same.

God gave us a heart and a brain — emotions and logic. Both are necessary and affect our decision-making and worldview. Emotions are the "voice of our heart." As Christians, we so often stuff, deny or invalidate an emotion such as anger because "good Christians don't get angry." But without information from our heart, we often make mind-only decisions, which are incomplete.

How Anger Affects Your Health and Your Marriage

The inappropriate expression of anger on the part of one spouse can hurt both spouses deeply and cause significant harm to their marriage in the following ways:

damage the safe feeling/trust

damage self-esteem by resulting in guilt and shame

make one fearful of self-giving and of receiving love

introduce and increases a fear of being hurt

result in a spouse being distant

lead to sadness, loneliness and anxiety

wound the sense of being “special” and a gift to one’s spouse I agree with all of these ways that anger affects our health and marriage, but this one here I kept going back to as the one that I hate the most. I love to touch my wife in non-sexual ways to show her my deep affection. If I were to have anger issues it would damage my wife by making her think maybe she wasn’t so special after all and feel like she is not really a gift to me. Just thinking of that puts a pit in my stomach. Words definitely hurt. I will link my video on how to communicate with your Filipina wife.

increase sexual temptations

contribute to drinking, gambling and other compulsive behaviors.

Inappropriate expressions of anger in marriage can be a major source of marital distress and unhappiness. Recognizing and managing this unruly emotion can greatly enhance the degree of security and happiness that you and your spouse achieve in your marriage.  If you are willing to take an honest look at yourself, come to grips with the reality that anger is an issue in your marriage and you are willing to work at it, you can overcome this (maritaly) destructive emotion and discover the joy of peace and harmony in your marriage and family.

What man or woman gets married thinking to themselves, “One of these days I’m going to become so upset and angry toward my spouse that I’m going to burst out into frequent fits of anger that will emotionally damage my spouse in a very deep way?”  That’s not the way that anger commonly destroys a marriage. It’s usually something that gradually creeps up unawares until it eventually takes its final toll.

There’s not one of us who doesn’t occasionally get upset and angry with our spouse. You can’t live together under the same roof for too long without finding things you disagree about —things that really make you upset and angry with each other.

The Problem With Anger In Marriage

It’s not whether we get angry, but what we do with it that matters.  It’s how we handle the angry emotions we feel toward our spouse when it occurs.  Are we going to allow our anger to spew out and hurt our spouse emotionally? Or are we going to find ways to express ourselves appropriately – ways to express our anger in appropriate ways that enables our spouse to feel safe amidst the upsets that inevitably happen in every marriage from time to time?

In order to do so, it helps if we understand that anger in and of itself is not wrong.  Anger is a God-given emotion, a natural emotion common to each of us, a human emotion that happens naturally, in response to one’s perception of a threat to our security and well-being.  Emotions are simply a part of the way God wired us. And yet they are subject to our management and control. Everyone experiences anger, some more intensely and frequently than others. It’s not whether we are going to get angry, but what we do with it that matters.

Though anger is an emotion common to all of us, few people are naturally skilled at being able to control this unruly emotion in healthy ways so that it does not become an emotional threat to our spouse and children. Most of us rely on a few specific ways of dealing with our anger that we learned as children and took with us into adulthood.  These “inherited” ways of dealing with anger in marriage often have a destructive impact upon ourselves and upon those closest to us. Recognizing what makes us angry can help us find better ways to cope with this emotion.

Researchers tell us that anger in marital relationship is more prevalent than in any other relationships and that inability to express one’s anger appropriately is the principal cause of harmful interactions within marriage. The success or failure of a marriage may depend on the way spouses manage and express their angry feelings.

There will be more to come in this series on Love Beyond The Sea.