Marriage and Personal Growth: Learning to Be Good Partners
This is major to a long and successful marriage.
All too often, in my practice as a spiritual counselor, I find couples have derailed their mutual respect in many subtle and not-so-subtle ways through their style of intimacy.
They mistakenly believe being married gives them license to get into each other’s head. Too many married couples, soon after tying the knot-or even before-begin to treat each other the way each one treats him/herself. This is what many of my clients think intimacy is about.
With this style of intimacy, we project on to our spouse all the demoralizing, self-inflicting wounds we give to ourselves. Whatever baggage we carry, we thrust upon our partner. Hidden anger, self-doubt, and fear-to identify our most common failings-get tossed back and forth between the partners. In other words, we treat our spouse as badly as we treat ourselves.
It is my impression, we are more kind to strangers. We ought to treat our spouses as kindly as we treat a stranger. Politeness is not the same as coldness or aloofness. Civility is the beginning of positive intimacy. And that sort of intimacy is worth internalizing. From treating our spouse in a kindly fashion, we can learn from our own behavior and begin to treat ourselves more kindly. By that, I don’t mean pandering ourselves with over-indulgence of our appetites or by avoiding challenges. I don’t mean taking the easy way out.
By exercising kindness to ourselves, we discontinue harboring negative ideas about ourselves. We stop self-judgmental habits; we stop trying to prove we are okay be resorting to perfectionism; we stop nursing past hurts; we stop anticipating future insults. And by clearing our mental house of negative self-intimacy, we are then more able and willing to be kindly disposed to our beloved other.
Treating our spouse as politely as we treat a stranger makes for an easier process when it comes to dealing with issues and differences. Having grown to be more kind toward ourselves, we have learned how to be an observer of our inner as well as outer behaviors. We become a witness to our actions and thoughts. We learn to understand ourselves better. And thinking more kindly about ourselves, we have enabled ourselves to move through our negotiations with our spouse from a higher perspective. It is as if we were standing at the top of a mountain looking down and seeing with more clarity all that is happening below.
We have learned to see our emotions from some amount of distance, enough to be open to hearing more clearly what the other needs to say. We listen to each other without defending ourselves, without seeking to change the other. Just listening, just hearing without heavy emotional involvement, makes all the difference in the world. This is the way of polite negotiation. This is the way marriages are sustained, are nurtured, and ripen.
Generally, people are attracted to an opposite type. We see in the other characteristics and behaviors we secretly wish were ours. At first, being with our opposite is a positive delight. Until it happens-and it generally happens-that each partner, to some extent or another, attempts to change the others habits, behaviors, attitudes, and beliefs. Those very attributes we were attracted to in the first place begin to threaten.
The honeymoon is over when one partner starts working on the other attempting to get the other to become more like him or her. Because the partner harbors unconscious doubts about her/himself, because of the negative intimacy the person inflicts on her/himself, the need to change the other-to take on his/her characteristics and attitudes-is a way to alleviate some of that doubt. If she is more like me, then I must be okay.
This is the path to a hostile environment. In such a marriage, delight in each other dries up, the warmth and love desired evaporates. The partners have a sense of too many differences separating them from each other. If they persist in remaining connected, their life becomes one of quiet desperation. If the two are still civil with each other, the civility is brittle. There is no kindness, no loving, and caring feeling between them. Many marriages persist in this manner for various reasons, financial being the most prominent.
But if each partner practices self-kindness and a detached witnessing of self, then each can allow the other the space needed in which to grow. Gradually, the gap between differences narrows; each has shifted somewhat in attitude and behavior; each has miraculously become more like the other. And then it becomes a joy for the two to be together. Each has realized the pleasure of having become more like that person they were attracted to in the beginning.
Such a ripening can be the consequence of a lengthy and successful marriage. We become more whole. This is why we do it.
