Makati Polytechnic Community College H.S. 1978

Last year my wife and I toured the country by car. One afternoon we stopped at a farmhouse that sold fresh apple cider. An elderly farmer and his wife greeted us.

As we sipped cider, the old man remarked that he and his wife had been happily married for nearly 50 years. Then he added. “I believe the best marriages are really mutual-admiration societies. Elsie likes a little compliment from time to time and so do I.”

This bit of rural philosophy brought to mind writer and physician Oliver Wendell Holmes’s description of friendship as “the pleasing game of interchanging praise.” Yet how many spouses praised each other for maneuvering the car through difficult traffic? And how many give praise for sewing on a shirt button?

Praise brings warmth and pleasure into the commonplace and turns the noisy rattle of the world into music. And nowhere is this more true than in marriage. The wife or the husband who is alert to saying the heartening thing at the right moment has taken out valuable marriage insurance.

Living side by side, year after year, you may be taking your spouse’s virtues for granted. If there’s some special thing you like about your partner, be sure to mention it. Make a point to praise something at least once a day.

Just be careful not to generalize. Be specific. Don’t say, “This is a fine meal.” Compliment your spouse on a particular dish. And never offer borderline compliments. If you’re mate has lost 30 pounds, don’t say, “You look better now that you’re not lugging around all that tonnage.” Better to slip your arm around your spouse’s waist and say, “You must feel good, now that you’re slim again.” Or remark on how proud you feel to be seen together.

The pressures of day-to-day living too often cause us to pass up opportunities to enrich our spouse’s self-esteem, thereby endangering the marriage relationship.

Praise is like sunlight to the human spirit; we cannot flower and grow without it. Writer and humorist Mark Twain once confessed he could “live for two months on a good compliment.” Not an exceptionally vain man, Twain was just admitting what most of us feel privately ----- that we all need a lift from time to time. And yet, we are somehow reluctant to give the warm sunshine of praise.

None of us wants to be a flattering fraud, expressing emotions we don’t feel. Such insincerity is easily detected and is a form of cheating. But isn’t it cheating, too, when we withhold words that a loved one may desperately need to hear?

Advice columnist “Dear Abby” once published a letter from a secretary complaining that a co-worker frequently received flowers a the office from her husband for no special reason. A card expressing love and affection always accompanied the flowers. The writer was a bit suspicious of anyone showing his feelings in public this way.

Abby’s reply: “Your co-worker and her husband could have a truly super-great marriage. It’s a wise and thoughtful husband who lets others know that he loves and appreciates his wife. When a man publicly compliments his woman (or when a woman publicly lauds her man), the compliment is enhanced.”

This is so true. One characteristic above all others distinguishes marriage that last: the willingness of husband and wife to testify in public in each others behalf. If a husband or wife occasionally offers public praise of his or her mate, nothing really bad should happen to their union.

Timing is important. Don’t wait too long to tell the a person how well he cut your grass, trimmed your hair or typed your letter. But don’t do it immediately, when he is expecting it, either. Wait. Then when he thinks you may have forgotten, pass the praise. It will have a telling effect.

Most of us in this sophisticated, dehumanized age tend to place the checkreins on our emotions. We withhold words of love, admiration and approval ----- words that could endear us forever to our life partner.

Perhaps we make marriage too complicated. Ultimately, it’s just a relationship in which human beings try to find release and fulfillment ----- and they don’t ask so very much. Just to come first with someone. To be needed by someone. And to hear an occasional word of appreciation from that someone.

It’s not much, but it’s enough. As the Bible reminds us: “A word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in pictures of silver.”