Couple Support

The Story You Tell Yourself About Your Marriage

How you describe the problems of your marriage will probably determine whether or not you can find the will to work on solving them. A woman came to me recently wanting help in deciding whether or not to leave her marriage. I could tell from the way she described the relationship that she had already decided to leave. The story she told herself said it all. 

Here is the gist of what she told me: “We should never have gotten married. We were completely incompatible from the beginning. My husband is a thoroughly negative person. He is always complaining about something. I am tired of putting up with him.”

What is it about her story that tells me that she has readied herself to leave the relationship and almost certainly is going to do so? 

* Her whole story is about her husband. Her view of the marriage is devoid of any awareness of her own contribution to the relationship and especially to its problems.

* All her statements are absolutes. Absolutes leave no room for change; “never,” “completely,” “always” and similar words indicate a point of view that is fixed. 

* For this person to consider working to change her relationship, she would need first to change her story so that it also included herself and her behavior. She would need to drop the absolute language and use relative terms instead. She would need to speak of their relationship, especially how they do it — in terms of skills and their absence. E.g., “We don’t know how to get along.” “We can’t make decisions together.” “We can’t handle conflict.” 

Seeing her marriage in terms of skills, she might still leave the relationship, but at least she would have to consider the possibility that she and her husband could learn what they don’t know and make a better relationship.

You Are Both Doing the Best that You Can

Try this on as your operating assumption for you and your partner dealing with each other: You are both good people, and you are both doing the best that you can.

To you, this may look ridiculous on the face of it. Your partner may be a good person, you figure; but you KNOW that your partner is not doing the best that s/he can!

To make it easy for yourself, start with accepting the first proposition: My partner is a good person, and I am a good person Presumably you know that you are a good person; so it shouldn't be that difficult to assume that your partner is as well.

Here is the application: If you accept that your partner is a good person, then you must never permit yourself to demonize that person and to attribute to him/her motives and intentions that are not "good person" motives and intentions, such as deliberately intending to hurt you or do you wrong.

The "we are doing the best that we can" proposition is admittedly more challenging to accept, particularly because you know that your partner—and you— are capable of better and have demonstrated that in the past. Fine. But how about this: At the moment that your partner did whatever irked or angered or hurt you, s/he WAS doing the best that s/he could (maybe because s/he was hampered by feeling attacked by you, by being overly tired, by being stressed.)

If you accept that your partner ALWAYS does the best that at that moment that s/he can, then your job is 1) to refrain from judgment and 2) to make it easier for your partner to do better—i.e., help your partner to out, perhaps by holding off on a provocative statement of your own, or waiting for a better moment to speak up.

Tip for Couples: If You Want to Stay Together, Avoid Hopeless Talk

Here is something obvious that is still worth saying: If you want your relationship to succeed, stay away from doing or saying anything that would leave you or your partner feeling hopeless about being together. By definition, hopelessness is the end—right? There is no where to go from hopeless—except out. Nevertheless, a lot of couples push each other toward hopelessness. Do they know what they’re doing?

For example, you are flirting with hopelessness if you chronically complain about things that can’t be changed, especially about your partner’s character or personality or things your partner did long ago that hurt or infuriated you. You want hopeless? Complain to your wife that you should have married the other girl and not her. Complain to your husband that you should never have let him buy that condo, and when he says, “What can we do to make up for it now?” say “Nothing.”

Complaining is not the problem. The problem is complaining when you offer no remedy—i.e., you leave your partner nowhere to go but into hopeless—or indifference, which is definitely not good either.

If you need to complain about his old affair, do so in terms of something that could be helped, e.g., the insecurity about his love that you still feel occasionally. And if he says, “What can I do to help?” have something in mind—not deadly nothing. Instead you could say, “Be very loving to me today; it helps.”

When you provide a remedy, you help your partner—and yourself—feel hopeful: We can forgive each other; we can go forward; we have reason to stay together.