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Lesson 8 - Pride in Marriage


My youngest daughter has had her share of relationships, but there was one in particular that my husband and I were grateful to have come to a conclusion. This relationship began when she was home on summer break from BYU-Idaho. She worked in an office where the young man was working in sales during his summer break from BYU. He was one of the top salesmen and is destined to be a very successful man in the world’s eyes. They had a very speedy time dating and when the young man came to ask my husband for his daughter’s hand in marriage, the conversation went as follows:

Young man: “I would like to marry your daughter, and I’m asking for your permission.”
My husband: “We think you are nice, but we wish we knew you better.”
Young man: “What would you like to know?”
My husband: “For starters, what is your last name? We don’t even know what our daughter’s last name will be.”
Our daughter doesn’t typically like a lot of flash or attention. Knowing this, he asked her to marry him by stopping the annual community parade (which the company had a float in), doing a dance number with the other salesmen, and ending with dropping to one knee and presenting her with a ring. At the time, it seemed very sweet. In hindsight, we learned a lot about the relationship from this event.

About a month into the engagement, it was broken. It was a difficult time for everyone, but it really was a blessing. They were not a match. I talked to her about this experience recently, and she said some words that frightened me. She said, “He wanted a trophy wife. If I had married him, I wouldn’t have been able to get the education I am pursuing (she starts her master’s program in Social Work soon), and I probably wouldn’t even look the same as I do.” She continued to explain that he was all about social standing and appearance. He was focused on being better than everyone else and that had they been married, there were certain expectations she would have needed to meet. In other words, he had pride.

Counsel from a Prophet

In a conference address in 1989, President Ezra Taft Benson of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints spoke about pride. He said, “The proud depend upon the world to tell them whether they have value or not. Their self-esteem is determined by where they are judged to be on the ladders of worldly success.” The problem with determining our self-esteem in this manner is that it requires others to be below us. We don’t see others as on a separate ladder where each of our ladders is focused on heaven. Instead, we want to be a rung above the rest. Again, from President Benson, “[A] major portion of this very prevalent sin of pride is enmity toward our fellowmen. We are tempted daily to elevate ourselves above others and diminish them. … Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man. … It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest.”

Set Aside Pride

In order to build a strong marriage, pride must be set aside. Rather than looking to change a spouse, we should consider eternal principles such as selflessness and sacrifice. We need to look to the Lord and follow the patterns He has established. In his book Drawing Heaven Into Your Marriage by H. Wallace Goddard, he quotes Terrance Olson, a faculty member at BYU: “the quality of emotions we experience is different when we are faithful and humble as compared to when we live without faith and with the kind of arrogance that makes us independent of God.” Let’s set aside our natural man tendencies, be humble, and willing to work together so that we can bring joy and happiness to ourselves and our spouses.

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