Can Anger Ruin Your Marriage?

1:09But he found out a week later that even though the wedding was a big celebration—everyone celebrated, the bride looked good, the groom looked good, everybody seemed happy, everything was great—a week later, they got a divorce. Why? As the story would have it, The bride, her parents didn't really like the husband so much, so they didn't chip in for the wedding. They didn't contribute. Listen, his family has money, let them pay for it. So, the groom, the husband, said, ah, whatever, if they don't want to pay for it, don't pay for it, whatever. No problem. Probably they'll give us a gift. So, at the end of the wedding, at the conclusion of the celebration, everything was settled. A day or so later, the new husband and wife were wondering what gifts they received. They began to enumerate their blessings: Steve gave them $100, Joe gave them $500, and so on. The husband was particularly interested.

2:10party, everything's good, everything was done after a day or so. The husband and the wife, the new couple, they're saying, okay, what did we get? What did we receive? You know, like part of the celebration is to, you know, count your blessings, if you will. What did we receive from him? What did we receive from them? Everybody recounts the gifts they received. Oh, Steve gave us $100. Joe gave us $500. And so on and so forth. Everyone contributes, and the husband was really interested. What did the parents give? What did her parents give? They didn't give any money for the wedding, so they must have given something. So he says, honey, what did your parents give? The wife says, they gave us a present. He says, okay, how much? No, no, they didn't give us any money. What kind of present is not money? Oh, they gave us this present, this big box over here. You want to open it? The husband says, yeah, okay, let's open it. He opens the present and he sees a fan. Fan. $125 at Walmart. A fan, if that much. He looks at this fan, and he thinks about how much money his family spent on this wedding. They spent tens of thousands of dollars—$30,000, $40,000 on the wedding—and her parents gave them a fan. What was he meant to do with a fan? What was he meant to do with a fan? Hey, hey, hey, she says, at least they gave you me. It's meant to be cute, right? But he didn’t find it cute.

3:35killed her, right? He didn't find a kid, he didn't find a kid at all. He took the friend, he smashed it, and she took the marriage, and she smashed it also—as if in the moment of anger. "Daddy, who cares what they bought you? What? Are you marrying the gift? You married her for the gift? Who cares?" He didn't think about that. He thought about, "What if they don't give me a gift?" They’re disrespecting me, you know, and the ego continues to build and build and build. She didn’t exactly know how to soothe his pain, soothe his ego, soothe his foolishness. She said the wrong thing. Even if she said the right thing, she probably would have made a mistake anyway, because that’s the mood that he was in, regardless. He overreacted, expressed his anger in a way she had never seen before, took the fan that her precious parents gave her, and broke it. And she says, if you break the fan, I'm breaking the marriage. Now let me ask you something. Does anyone here think that he made the right decision? Obviously not.

4:52Problem is, Rabotai, that when we get angry, we cannot make the right decision. It is impossible for us to make the right decision. And that's what the Ramban says. Once you allow anger to control you, you are allowing all of the worst things in creation to control you as well. Those things will control you to make every mistake under the sun. Those influences will lead you to make the worst decisions you could possibly make. They can break up a marriage that was meant to last forever. Destroy a relationship that was supposed to be the best thing ever. Sever something you believed would be a permanent part of your life. that anger will ruin it. And if that's not bad enough, if you don't do teshuva for this anger, And you live your whole life as this angry monster, thinking it's acceptable to get angry. Initially, you break pencils. Then you progress to breaking pens. But soon that's not enough, so you break a cup. Then it escalates to breaking the computer. As that becomes insufficient, you break the phone, then start punching windows, and eventually, you punch walls. Over time, you become accustomed to breaking things.

6:13HaKadosh Baruch Hu is telling you that each and every single one of those actions is considered 100% idol worship. If you do not do teshuva for such a thing, Gehinnom will eventually control you. That place we talked about some time ago that scared the living lights out of everybody here, including myself, that place. Meaning if we learn anything... And all from the Rambam's letter, the first thing we need to learn is that anger doesn't pay. It doesn't pay at all. It only ends up in bad outcomes. Anger, last but not least, the Chachamim say, is like drinking poison and expecting the other guy to die. That's what anger is. because when you start expressing your anger in such a way, in essence, what's happening is that you are angry at them, but the problem is, by expressing your anger, you're hurting yourself, not them. You're drinking your own poison, yet you're expecting them to die. It makes no sense, and that's the point about anger; it makes no sense.

7:34Anger leads us to depression. Anger leads us to anxiety. Anger leads us to every single sin in the Torah. So much so that Eliyahu HaNavi, the same one that gave us the tour of Gehinom, said in the Gemara, Masechet Berachot, page 29, that if you work on your anger, you can become a perfect human being who never sins. Why? Because anger leads to all the sins in the Torah. Every single sin in the Torah.