Author and speaker David Erickson recently said, “There is a child in me always seeking to destroy the man that I am.” As I sat with Josh and Katy a couple of weeks ago, I remembered what David said because it fit Josh and Katy perfectly. They had only been married a little over a year, but by the way they were treating each other one would have thought they were mortal enemies.
Just before their current argument escalated to war-like proportions in my office, I stopped them and spoke David’s words to them.”Josh and Katy,” I said. “There is a child inside both of you that is destroying this marriage.”
It’s easy to shame someone, especially when speaking about another’s immaturity or childishness, but my words to them were not about shame, they were about truth. Josh and Katy were both acting like four-year-olds who didn’t get a candy bar at the grocery store.
They were blaming each other for their unhappiness, and both were sounding like a whiny kid. They agreed with my observation and then chose to behave as adults for the remainder of the session. It was productive only because of this choice.
I recently wrote about approaching your marriage as though it is the first child. Taking this approach requires nurturing, patience, and tenderness. I want to piggyback on this idea and speak to the challenging side of seeing your marriage as a child. Children need to be taught, grown up, and loved well so that they don’t get their way. Dan Allender says that children are always asking two questions: “Am I loved, and can I get my own way?” Love means we sometimes say no, that we do what’s hard, not what’s easy. Ultimately, love will result in the greatest opportunity for growth. This is the challenge for marriages: To love the boy/girl inside each other so that the man/woman can be grown up and flourish.
Josh and Katy’s relationship is alarming to me because they are a microcosm of a larger problem for the newly married. The overarching theme I continually see in my work as a marriage counselor is couples’ inability, or outright refusal, to empathically view their spouses problems, hurts, and desires. In simple terms, this inability or refusal is childlike behavior. Adults do what is hard, children do what is easy.
I recently heard a comedian talk about the current generation of teenagers only knowing relationships through Facebook, texting, and twitter. He said, and I tend to agree, that these digital methods of relationship building are preventing empathy from being developed because there is no human face to engage. When we hurt someone, their face and body tell us before their words do. This creates challenging feelings for the person who offended their friend. These challenging feelings are what birth empathy.
Children are too consumed with their own wellbeing to want to spend much of their own energy on others. Just ask a 3 year old to share his toys with a friend … it’s not going to happen. That same 3 year old resides in each of us as adults. We are continually faced with the decision to let that inner 3 year old go on a rampage in our lives. When we do, the results are disastrous.
Our spouses need us to be adults, just as much as we need them to be adults. When we behave like children we cheat, lie, steal, call each other names, and ultimately live life for ourselves. This is the reason so many marriages are failing today. We fail to grow up and be mature adults. I want you, the reader, to consider what needs to be matured in your life. What is the child inside you doing that is threatening the marriage you want to build?
