For years my husband would only respond "it's lovely!" Then he started asking why I asked him if I was going to go ahead and do what I wanted anyway, and I replied sometimes I did take his advice (which is true).
It was an amazing thing yesterday though I was laying out the very simple quilt I'm working on and he participated with me. He has a hard time appreciating most of what I do from an art sense, he is very controlled and doesn't "get" scraps but he can appreciate what I called planned quilts better. He would have liked it better if the star blocks I was making had the same order of fabrics and the blocks were placed in the same direction. So we talked about this particular project and why I'm making the design decisions that I am, but that his way was valid too.
We have similar issues between us in garden styles, I'm the loose overgrown cottage garden type, and he's the neat precise knot garden with everything clipped and forced into geometric shapes.