Disagreements are a part of married life. Often they are temporary misperceptions of intent and priority. Sometimes little irritations accumulate over time and are like small items not put away until you look around and see that things are a mess. These little irritations can easily be blown out of proportion where discussions can lead to accusations of character flaws, indifference to shared priorities, and even loss of love. Our early marriage went down this path where we’d fill in the blank “ I always _________; you never do” time and again regarding feeding the cat, changing the toilet paper, putting the laundry away, straightening the house, doing the dishes, dealing with some child issue, and expressing love in some important way. There are important personal skills, marital skills, and parental modeling that are worth discussing.
Of course it’s an exaggeration to say, “Dave, I am always cleaning up the house and you never do.” or “Lis, I always tell you how good you look and you never say that to me.” But hyperbole doesn’t matter in these statements. The point isn’t about accuracy; it’s about exasperation. Essentially: “We’ve talked about this a bunch of times and by you not doing it with my desires in mind, you’re basically telling me you don’t love me.” Or some such thing.
This situation can cause marriages to fall on hard times if not addressed. For us, personal development was required before we could move out of this argument spiral. Both of us needed to gain control of our need to reflexively push the other’s buttons to gain the upper hand. This just escalated things. Every time Dave stepped over some agreed upon line, Lis played the victim card and accused him of “Always doing that”. Similarly, when Lis violated Dave’s stated, or unstated, expectation his voice would rise like his Dad’s and he would declare “You never….”. In other words, in our youthful emotions we felt justified in lashing out at the other person because of some misstep they had made. Until we each grew past the need to lash out beyond what was reasonable, we would continue this back and forth without progress.
Marital skills are given room to develop when each person is able to maintain control of their own frustrations and are able to articulate reasonably and civilly what’s going on. Developing self control is difficult. It’s the thing we can try and enforce on our children, but will be a fruitless endeavor without mastering it first ourselves.
What are marital skills? Marital skills are the accumulation of little agreements built up over time that comprise relational communications. ‘I scratch your back (literally); you scratch mine (by helping me gladly)’. You make exchanges of value, love language stuff, where you agree to focus sincerely on these small issues until they are resolved or at least minimized so the relationship is built up. This spiral upward is built on personal maturity, reinforced by valuable exchange, and made lasting by increasing intentional behavior. This is literally how we took our ok marriage and made it a great one.
This agreement to be intentional about loving does several things: 1) It prioritizes your partner and their stated priorities; 2) It highlights those small irritants so that they won’t be forgotten and violations recur; 3) It eliminates hidden agendas since you won’t be able to bring up something new about an old issue; 4) It models for your children how to deal with everyday conflicts. And 5) creates in your children a baseline of mature civil resolution of life’s issues and how adults successfully navigate tension.
Once we decided we were actually on the same team and didn’t feel the need to lash out and push buttons, we were able to turn life’s little irritants into a joke. To this day every time the coffee maker needs cleaning, the toilet paper roll needs replacing, or some innocent little task to keep order maintained, one of us would casually notify the room “Me always, you never.” You see, these things are a joke to help us gain self control so we can move on to more important issue in life.
To your family’s continued well-being,
Lis and Dave