How a Sore Throat Can Help A Marriage

Sometimes it seems that it is easier to get along with family when other people are watching. Why is that? I think it is because when we are maximally comfortable - at home and with family - we replace our mouths with upside-down dump trucks which just release all thoughts that pass through our minds.

Saying Less - The Diminishing (Until Negative) Marginal Return of Words

I recently got over a cold, and pretty much lost my voice for a while. And my wife and I had a really amazing morning together. I did a little text-to-speech on the computer, but mostly I just put more energy into listening, making nice facial expressions, and doing physical service (and opportunities for physical service abound when there is a mess-creating baby around). I spent less time nagging, complaining, arguing, and rambling when my wife had things to say.

This reflects the principle of diminishing marginal returns. In the business world, a company might determine that adding one more cook to the kitchen is helpful when there were no cooks, and maybe adding a second and third is still helpful. But if you add a fourth cook to a kitchen with just two ovens, that last cook will probably not add as much quality food as the third did, because he has less to work with. This is called diminishing marginal return: the last cook we added (the cook on the margin) is not delivering as high of a benefit (return) as the cook before him did. And in fact, adding a fifth cook may decrease the amount of quality food, because maybe he gets bored and starts messing with what the other cooks are doing. This is such a decreased marginal return that it is in fact negative.

A similar principle could happen with company inspections: the sixth and seventh inspections this year are having less and less impact on getting employees to get things up to code, and when you add a ninth inspection the employees just feel like they are not trusted and start to misbehave on purpose.

My words also have a decreasing marginal return, and losing my voice showed me that I was using so many words that they had started to have a negative return. Not only did each word add less (because there was less sincere showing of love/service for each word to work with), but my words had started to cancel out the positive things that other words said, by complaining and nagging.

Elder David A. Bednar, in explaining the benefits of the ever-aging leadership of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, said "limited stamina can clarify priorities." A similar principle is true with marriage, as long as we choose to devote our limited energy to what will help our marriage most. I will try to ensure that the words that come out of my mouth are only those that create the loving messages that I hope to send : )