She should just know what I like without having to ask…”
“I shouldn’t have to tell her what hurts, that’s not what guys do….”
“I’ve already told him a thousand times. I’m not telling him again.”
These are statements that I hear from men and women that describe their frustration with being in an intimate relationship and feeling unknown. Being known is not something that happens by chance. It’s a process of living with and alongside someone else as you go through life.
One of the greatest myth’s undermining relationships is that your partner should know you by way of “just being in the same room/house/place.” There is no risk of vulnerability in living this way. Unfortunately, by risking nothing, you will gain nothing. We cannot be in a relationship and expect growth without being vulnerable. Closeness doesn’t happen through relational osmosis.
There are lots of excuses we use to keep from risking ourselves in a relationship:
- The other person won’t accept me.
- It’s too much work to do this. We’re just different people now.
- Our relationship has been this way for years and there’s no way to change that.
- He/She has changed so much since we first met. I don’t know him/her anymore.
- You can’t change the past, so there’s no reason to dwell on it.
We use many excuses in our relationships, because relationships are difficult. What we don’t understand is that underlying these excuses are two competing realities: We expect someone to change first. That someone is not me.
This is not a unique paradox for relationships. It’s been happening in every marriage since the beginning of time. Adam and Eved set the stage for us, unfortunately it’s the stage of blame and finger pointing. Unwittingly, we follow their lead.
The antidote to this is pretty simple, but hard to do: Be honest about the small conflicts of life. Don’t wait for the “big one” to voice your discontent, pain, or resentment.
Lately there have been a number of stressors in my life. I’m self-employed and thus tax season always illicits a certain amount of anxiety in my being. Last November we welcomed our fourth child into our world, and his refusal to behave older than his 4-months of age has been especially difficult (my expectations for life need some help). Work has been full, baseball season for our 9-year-old is in full swing, and sleep is fleeting. All of this said, I’ve been venting to my wife about some of these stressors and her responses have not been what I wanted. I have heard her through a filter that says,
I’m broken, and she’s trying to fix me.”
This filter is present for me even if it’s not true for her, and it’s taken us 10 years of marriage to see how important this filter is for both of us. It’s natural for me to remain silent when things aren’t “that big of a deal.”
If the above example were rated on a 10-point scale, it’d be a 1 or 2. But that 1 or 2 still makes an impact. So to brush it off as “no big deal” would only be partially true. Instead of brushing it off, I addressed it with her. I told her what I needed/wanted from her, and asked if she’d stop giving me advice and just listen. The beautiful thing was that she heard me, understood what I was asking for, and did not defend her actions.
It’s a slippery slope to not speaking up about the small conflicts. If we let the small conflicts remain unaddressed, they will become larger later on down the road. Building something requires that we pay attention to the smallest of details. If you were to build a house and in the process of putting in the foundation your measurements were off by one inch, the entire house will be crooked. It’ll take a lot longer to correct a mistake tomorrow than to address it today. When we pay attention to the small conflicts, we will set the stage to be honest when the big conflicts in relationships happen.
