Do you realize that contempt is destroying trust and creating resentment and emotional distance in your relationship? Do you notice contempt is often accompanied by various marital problems? Contempt makes spouses seem more like opponents than loved ones. And when love completely turns into contempt and hatred, the marriage is doomed. Therefore, as long as you want to have a long-lasting and happy marriage, you should be cautious of contemptuous behavior in your married life, whether you or your spouse has this detrimental behavior pattern.

tips on how to deal with contempt in marriage

Before talking about how to deal with contempt in marriage, it is necessary to gain a more in-depth understanding of contemptuous behavior:

Dictionaries say the word contempt refers to the feeling that a person is worthless, deserving scorn, or beneath consideration. No doubt, it is a powerful and offensive emotion.

A marriage characterized by contempt is typically void of respect for a spouse and boils down to being mean to a spouse. Contempt in marriage can be viewed as a more destructive form of criticism that involves treating a spouse with disgust, ridicule, disrespect, or condescension. This type of behavior is usually accompanied by mean-spirited sarcasm, eye-rolling, name-calling, sneering, or mockery. In a marriage, contempt grows over time as a spouse builds up resentment towards the other spouse and continuously focuses on the other spouse’s qualities that he/she dislikes.

Contempt in marriage means a spouse’s attempts to feel superior to the other one. When contempt becomes present in marital conflict, it often seems unexpected or puzzling, but usually, it results from deeply-held negative emotions from certain issues that were not addressed properly, and its inherent message is either disgust or discontent or both.

Contempt is particularly corrosive to the relationship between husband and wife, and it is thought to be the worst of the 4 horsemen (they are criticism, defensiveness, stonewalling, and contempt) in marital conflict

And if your marriage is also undergoing a regular dose of contempt, you might read the following tips on how to deal with contempt in marriage.

You have to be aware that marriage can hardly survive if it is constantly riddled with contempt. Of course, you and your spouse should both be responsible for this relationship problem. So both parties should make efforts to ensure that there is no place for contempt in the relationship. However, after all, you have no control over your spouse. And hence, you need to focus on what you can do to keep contempt from further damaging your marriage.

5 Tips on how to avoid contempt in your relationship:

(1) Tell your spouse what you need instead of what is wrong with him/her:

To prevent contempt in marriage, you should learn to stop harming your spouse; and meanwhile, when your spouse causes you harm, you should also not reciprocate by doing something that gets him/her into trouble. And anytime, feeling superior moral should not be the reason why you can hurt your spouse. It is better to learn to give your spouse a detailed road map to your unfulfilled needs, rather than complain about something wrong that your spouse did to you.

If you have no idea how to communicate your needs during an argument, here shares a trick: you may gently approach your spouse with precise complaints following “a complaint formula” – I feel (emotional words) about (a specific event) and I want (a positive expression of your needs). When you choose to express your feelings in a way that avoids blaming and hostility, you naturally avoid a potentially vicious cycle of attacking each other.

In many cases, contemptuous behavior is not only a matter of criticism that has escalated but also an outcome of poor communication. Because if you are lack of willingness to keep direct and honest communication of your feelings and needs with your spouse, you will only feel more and more insecure and isolated in your marriage, and that contributes to your feelings of contempt.

For more tips, you might go on to read the posts below:

How to have effective communication in marriage.

4 annoying habits that cause communication barriers in marriage.

(2) Seek to understand your spouse by asking questions:

To prevent contempt from seeping into your relationship, you must learn how to open up your spouse’s heart rather than shut it down when you realize that he/she has something to say to you.

And it is a good way to respond to your spouse’s complaints with open-ended questions. Although this may take some hard work, it eases marital conflict drastically. So instead of defending against your spouse (e.g. maybe you deliberately stated your own unfulfilled needs again when your spouse was claiming what he/she wanted from you), you might as well try to get deeply, and intensely curious about what he/she wants and needs, that means you are supposed to attentively listen to him/her and seek to exactly understand what your spouse is feeling. The examples below may make this point clear:

For example, sometimes your tone, words, or countenance were a little emotional and made him feel disrespected (you didn’t mean to disrespect him), and yet this may evoke contempt in your spouse; in such a case, you could ask your spouse, “Sorry, I wonder what you want me to do to make you no longer feel that way.” As another example, if some of your remarks make your spouse misunderstand that you do not put him/her first, probably he/she will be tempted to show contempt for you; in this situation, you may ask him/her in time, “That seems to be important for you, so could you tell me more about what that means to you?”  

(3) Be empathetic:

Contempt is a relationship killer; on the contrary, empathy is a relationship builder, it creates an emotional connection and drives blame and disconnection. Contempt can not mutually exist with empathy – when someone holds the other one in contempt, his empathy is blocked at the moment. So try to let your spouse feel that you are trying to empathize with him/her, no matter what you are arguing about; this is a good way to heal a relationship that is poisoned by contempt.

Empathy is a necessary component of a healthy marriage. So it is essential to learn how to put yourself in your spouse’s place and feel what he/she is feeling.

And when you are practicing empathy in your marriage, you need to grasp the 3 key points below:

  • Make your spouse feel welcome in your heart:

Appreciate those strengths and qualities that you respect and honor in your spouse. In doing so, he/she can feel that his/her due value is being restored in your heart.

  • Don’t disregard your spouse’s feelings:

You must still remember your very first date; at that time, you had an insatiable interest in your spouse’s feelings and were eager to know what would make him/her happy. But after years of marriage, you may have already shifted focus away from your spouse and, you focus more on yourself and your kids. Maybe, now you take it for granted that your spouse should be there to support you all the time, no matter what he/she thinks. Or maybe in your family, you have become a highly task-oriented leader who only focuses on getting things done, and even you expect that your spouse does not meddle in or complain about anything that you are handling. If so, you have neglected a point – anytime, you should not disregard your spouse’s feelings as unimportant.

Without fully understanding your spouse’s feelings, you can not have an intimate emotional bond with your spouse; as we all know, usually when one person doesn’t value the other one’s thoughts and feelings, one dismisses or disregards the other one. Therefore, even though you just unconsciously ignore your spouse’s feelings, this may breed contempt in his/her heart. 

  • Validate your spouse’s feelings:

Your spouse wants you to give supportive feedback to him/her when he/she is expressing the inner feelings. This is an important gesture of valuing what your spouse is feeling. Furthermore, you do not have to judge or analyze the validity of his/her feelings, and what you need to do is to just understand his/her feelings.

(4) Share fondness and admiration:

Contempt erodes the emotional bond that securely holds a couple together. And love lasts when both spouses feel respected by each other. If you feel that you are submerged in contempt and you get confused about how to deal with contempt in marriage, you might ask yourself how you two met and fell in love initially. Maybe you can find some hope at the happy recollection. Despite that the painful situation may last for a long time, I bet you still hold a spark of tingly warm feelings for your spouse. This kind of sparks can evoke positive feelings about each other that have been deeply hidden in each other’s heart, thereby promoting emotional connection and avoiding behaving contemptuously towards each other.

In addition to the mentioned above, when you make an intentional effort to find things that you like about your spouse, your relationship improves. To do this, you should learn to catch your spouse doing something right, and then express your sincere appreciation. When you settle down and notice those tiny, constant, and positive things that your spouse does that contribute to your relationship, you can better understand what you like about your spouse. And if you have no clue about what you like about him/her, you might also try to follow the simple formula below:

Think of a word that can be associated with a characteristic of your spouse, such as understanding, loving, funny, strong, active, kind, playful, warm, sweet, and gentle. For the word, think about an incident in which your spouse displayed the characteristic, and recall how it ever made you happy. Then take a chance to tell your spouse that you still remember an event in which certain of his traits left a deep impression on you.

(5) Stop chewing on the unpleasant past:

Due to your difference not being accepted, a hurtful thing that your spouse did do you, or a regrettable incident that had happened, your negative feelings about your spouse may have not been healed. And if you allow those feelings to simmer inside you, your contempt towards him/her will be fueled. As you always arouse the feelings of hatred towards your spouse, you have a stronger and stronger temptation to retaliate against your spouse; maybe you tell yourself from time to time, “I will show him/her”, “I can’t forgive what he/she did.”, or even “I have had enough, I will let him/her know I am not a person to be trifled with.” Such a thought tends to promote your contemptuous attitude towards your spouse. And if you can’t clear these thoughts in time, showing contempt for your spouse will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

It is quite common that one spouse clashes with the other one at some point. But for couples in healthy marriages, they know how to better deal with unhappiness in the marriage. Of course, there are also some unhappy and unforgettable events that have already happened in their relationships; but generally, they do not view those things as isolated and static, they do not see things in black and white, and they are aware that there is no perfect marriage, and that happy marriage means that a married couple should learn to accept each other’s flaws and work through each other’s differences. By the way, when you have contempt for your spouse, you stop seeing the positive side of your spouse. But probably, he/she is not as bad as what you have assumed him/her.

Therefore, those happy couples have already set a good example for you, and there are a lot of things that you can also learn from them. For example, when you resent something unpleasant that your spouse did to you, you might think about some positive traits that he/she exhibited when he/she was doing it, or you might think of other happy or amazing things that he/she ever did for you. Surely, resolutions of a lot of relationship problems depend on open and honest communication. So, it is also necessary to learn how to get your spouse to hear your complaints in a constructive manner.

When it comes to how to deal with contempt in marriage, you must awake to a truth about why contempt occurs – one of its main reasons lies in unresolved conflict from the past. So, you might work through a laundry list of your spouse’s past offenses, and then recognize them again. Letting go of past hurts is easier said than done. If necessary, directly share with your spouse your feelings about those past hurts, and then discuss again how to avoid those problems in the future. In a nutshell, don’t dwell on the unpleasant past, as long as you want to stop feeling contempt for your spouse.

What to do if your spouse has a pattern of contemptuous behavior?

There may be no exact words to describe how emotionally hurt you feel, at the moment when your spouse feels justified in being contemptuous towards you and not considering your feelings. Although such passive-aggressive behavior can be overcome, the premise is that he/she should see the error of his/her ways and that he/she is willing to change that devastating behavior pattern.

On your end, first of all, you should try to figure out what you did lead to his negative feelings, and then try to talk to him/her and work together to fix the past problems again. When he/she is feeling contempt for you, probably he/she is too emotional to tell you why he/she treats you that way; in that situation, you should avoid the thought – “If you don’t want me, then I also don’t want you”, and what you need to is to figure out the underlying reasons behind his/her contemptuous behavior.

When your spouse holds you in contempt, he/she is reluctant to be the first one who talks about why he/she treats you with contempt (you must have the similar experience: he/she just grunted in contempt, gave a contemptuous little laugh, or broke off with a sound of contempt, and then walked away without saying much), he/she secretly wants you to figure out reasons spontaneously; so if you are proactive about asking whether he/she feels hurt by you, most likely he/she is pleased to see you make this move, and hence he/she will be more willing to voice his/her mind.

Surely, if your spouse always remains passive and unwilling to stop contemptuous behavior, the relationship tends to be at stake.

The final word on contempt in marriage:

No matter what you do to deal with contempt in marriage, you should make a point of enhancing the connection with your spouse; and if necessary, you might take the initiative to engage each other.

The antidote for contempt in a marriage is to build a culture of appreciation and respect. As long as you both have enough respect for each other, you both can get the benefit of the doubt when conflict occurs.

Contempt can be a strong predictor of divorce when it has been a long-existing issue in your marriage. If you feel that your marriage is failing and you need more marriage-saving tips, you might go on to read the page below to follow the comprehensive guidance that is offered by Brad Browning, a well-known marriage coach who has 12+ years of experience helping couples survive their difficult marriages:

In this video, I’ll reveal to you how those married couples stay together for tens of years…and still feel that connection, love, and unbreakable desire for each other – 3 key steps to remain happily married

Maybe, you are also interested in the related posts below:

How to deal with constant criticism in marriage.

How to manage anger in marriage – deal with your & your spouse’s anger.

How to deal with marital conflict – resolve conflict in marriage.

7 basic tips on how to stop keeping score in marriage.

How to have a fulfilling marriage – Make your marriage last.

How to keep your marriage alive – Maintain a happy long term marriage.

5 warning signs of a toxic marriage – Toxic relationship patterns.

7 common things that ruin a marriage slowly – Save your marriage.