Most of us like to have things fair. Marriage is not fair in any way, shape, or form. Marriage is intentionally designed to cause you pain and inconvenience in order to teach you to love your spouse unselfishly. And by so loving them, you become Christlike. This process is not fair, but it is necessary to become Christlike in many ways—to lay down our lives for our spouses. Remember; this is love.
When this attitude of wanting fairness comes knocking at your door, be careful. The desire for fairness will cause you to create a very destructive habit that will sabotage you and keep you from being an awesome servant in your marriage. The habit fairness wants to create in you is that of keeping score. (As if any human can really, in any way, weigh the complexities of the wide variety of actions in any relationship and somehow tabulate fairness.)
Keeping score is a cancer to your success as a servant. Like all the other attitudes, it starts off a little slow, with: It’s not fair that ___________, or It’s not fair that you get to __________. Then you get into a task that you are not equipped by God to do: You assess and measure what each of you do and keep score as to who is doing more. The problem is, you can only use a subjective scale, so whatever you are doing for the marriage or family, it has at least equal or more important value than what your husband or wife is doing that day, week, month, or year.
Once you start keeping score, you will be tempted to look at your spouse through a false set of lenses that keep him or her constantly in a position one down from you. Over time, this attitude will lead you to a potentially fatal stage of the cancer of fairness: disrespect.
Once you conclude that your spouse is not carrying his or her weight (which is where a false sense of fairness will inevitably lead), you will move toward disrespecting them as a person. It starts with you thinking your spouse does not respect that you do not do this or that, or that your spouse does not appreciate this or that which you do. Inevitably, you begin to move toward wholehearted disrespect of them. Your judgments become personal: My spouse is lazy, incompetent, disorganized, ungrateful, insensitive, and so on.
The attitude of fairness is so seductive at the beginning. I want you to know fairness is a cancer. If you start this, it can ultimately culminate in the destruction of your marriage, or at least make your marriage significantly less happy than if you were both servants who understood life and marriage were not fair (not even supposed to be fair). You must both sacrifice your lives for the marriage to be awesome. To kill fairness you have to tear out some roots of ideas that can lead you down this awful path.