My wife and I have a tradition that we’re amazing at continuing. At every one of our daughters’ birthdays, we have a fight. It’s as impressive as it sounds. Even better, we have three girls, so there are plenty of opportunities to keep that tradition alive. I don’t know if I’d recommend this tradition to others, but for us it seems to work out. My youngest recently turned two, and our streak was kept alive – yea, us. In the last lesson, I described how my wife and I had a very frustrating week and the following continued that pattern (Lady Luck was as happy with me as my wife). The day of my daughter’s birthday began and continued to be particularly frustrating for me through work and home situations. If you regularly read my lessons, you’ll know that when it comes to potential conflicts, I always teach that fights (or confronting someone) should be less than five minutes long, which is best achieved by making a request (e.g. “Can you please do A instead of B?”) or asking a two option question to better understand what the other person was trying to do while also gently calling them out if there was any bad behavior (e.g. “When you (thing they did) were you trying to (what it felt like) or was it (a more positive option)?”) Of course, even if you have the best request or two option question, if you’re timing sucks, you still suck. Like the best joke; timing is almost everything.
To find the right request or two option question, you need to first recognize what the problem is in one sentence like the thesis of an essay. For our situation, I would say that my wife was upset that I didn’t appear to care enough about our daughter’s birthday while I thought she cared way too much, which further perpetuates my concern that our kids are being spoiled. To me, when a two-year-old who can’t read a calendar has a birthday on a Monday and there’s a big party the following Saturday for her, you don’t need to do anything major on the actual day. You can do something to acknowledge it to make yourself feel better, but either way, it shouldn’t be stressful. After all, a two-year-old is happy playing in your pots and pans drawer.
Before addressing my concerns with my wife, I knew I was upset with her because of some choices she had made through the day. What I didn’t know was she was equally upset with some of the choices I had made through the day. Can you believe that? How could I have done anything wrong… minus forgetting that when one person is upset, there’s almost a 100% chance the other person is also upset. This is where the fun starts: I knew when I finished work the kids would be in bed, so this would be a good time to address my concerns of the day. Of course, should the first thing I talk to my wife about be my concerns or should there be a buffer chat time in order to ease us into it? I also had a handful of concerns (if the hand was an alien with a dozen fingers), so should I be addressing all of these in this conversation or selecting a few to focus on? After coming up with two solid requests that were gentle, yet would address two important concerns to reduce frustrations in the future, I left my office getting ready for some buffer conversation when I was greeted by my wife who decided that all of the lessons I’ve just shared, lessons she knows, should be thrown out the window. She was like, “Screw it; we’re doing this.” When she started, I had two choices: Call a time out with a time and regroup (a wise choice) or I could engage, and see how terrible things could get. For whatever reason, I was like “Screw it; we are doing this.” We then embarked on an exploratory conversation (is that a nice way of saying fight?) What my wife and I had wasn’t a true fight because it was more sharing and responding rather than zing, zang, boom, “Suck it!” We even kept our voices normal to slightly louder than normal. A major reason for this is I didn’t throw out my bag of tools. I continually reverted back to using two option questions to keep us on track like “Did I really say that or are you twisting my words?” which I used three times. All in all, I would say as far as exploratory conversations go, we did very well. If you read my lesson last week, you’ll know how my wife and I have different conflict styles. She managed to keep herself from getting too angry and would be very good at responding well when I asked her a two option question. Others could’ve been triggered… at least if they wanted to manipulate the conversation. My wife is very good at not trying to control me or the conversation. That’s more my area. Does that sound bad? I control the conversation in a good way like a captain of a team (at least in my opinion). Instead of being controlling for my own benefit (bad controlling), I try to control the conversation to keep it running forward and prevent any escalation or misunderstanding, which is largely helped by the two option questions.
What was interesting is at one point my wife said, “There’s no point saying anything that bugs me because you just twist it around and use it against me.” This is pretty much the definition of gaslighting. What’s interesting is a normal response would be something like “That’s not true. You’re not understanding me,” but guess what that would do? Inadvertently prove her point. This is why people who accuse others of gaslighting tend to “win” an argument. What’s important to note is one of my favourite rules is “We accuse others of doing what we do ourselves.” A fun way of saying that is “Pots call kettles black.” So if my wife accuses me of twisting things against her, guess what that likely means about her. Considering I was the one who three times asked “Did I really say that or are you twisting my words?” the evidence is not in her favor. In general, she regularly accuses me of being critical of her and nothing she does is good enough for me. This is strange because I would say I bottle my frustrations, which she’s also recognized because she’s accused me of not sharing more. This came up in our “fun” discussion time: (me) “Do you not realize how much I suppress and not tell you?” (her) “I wish you’d tell me.” (me) “That’s hilarious. No you don’t. You already think I’m too critical.” This is not an example of my finer conversation moments (I should’ve used a two option question), but do you know what’s fun about this moment? This is the same problem for a lot of husbands: “I get accused of criticizing my wife, but then I also get accused of not sharing anything? How do these two things co-exist?” (me) “In the land of saying what you feel and not really thinking about what you’re saying because you’re expressing emotion you hope will lead to you feeling cared about, this all makes sense.” (Does that make me sound like a jerk?) Please know, I’m not trying to throw my wife under the bus, but I want to point out my wife hits the stereotypes, which can be helpful for others to see.
To her accusation that I’m critical when I think I suppress my problems with her, either she’s projecting her own issues with herself onto me (i.e. she hates things about herself and assumes I do as well), she’s accusing me of what she does (most husbands would go with this), or I’m being more critical than I realize. Because she’s made this accusation, I have to consider this last option, but since I focus on using requests to address a concern like I planned before this conversation, I know this can’t be true; requests are solution based and supposed eliminate the potential critical side.
To her accusation of gaslighting, I fortunately was able to come up with a good two option question: “Am I twisting what you’re saying and using it against you or after you presented your issues with me, did I follow your lead and present my issues with you?” In this exploratory conversation, I mirrored what she gave me, but unfortunately, this isn’t what she wanted. She wanted to have her accusations validated… but that’s not what happens in these kinds of situations. It’s two people with the gloves off. I ended up saying, “Yes, you were upset with how things went today, but I was also upset by how things went today.” It turns out, like me, she forgot when one person is upset, the other person likely is as well.
Doesn’t being married to a therapist sound fun? We can overanalyze everything.
Overall, I’d say my wife was very good for her conflict mode as described in the last lesson, and I was very good for mine. That means we had as good an initial exploratory conversation as possible and guess how it ended? With both of us feeling like garbage – oh, yeah; good times. But that’s how they always end – terribly. This situation gave me a solid reminder of why I prefer my style of keeping “fights” to less than five minutes with requests and two option questions.
Part of the reason you end up feeling like garbage is you end up angrier with a side of gross. That’s the problem with talking – it doesn’t go anywhere good. People say they need to “get together and hash things out,” but that’s the worst thing you can do. It will only make it bigger and leave you worse.
That being noted, our initial exploratory conversation ended when my wife was done with it and walked away. I’m not sure if she was fed up with not being able to get me to accept the blame for the day in order to change to my attitude and help her feel cared about or if she was excusing herself before she became too angry. Either way, what’s important is while we had a few minutes apart, I quickly processed the conversation (it helps my brain is trained to do this for work), as I tried to find something to learn from it. If you’re going to have an exploratory conversation, you need to reflect after in order to come up with a way to move forward in a healthy way. When I found my wife, I started by saying, “You were right, and I need to apologize.” That’s a good start. “I need to be better at remembering that you’re very good at putting the girls’ lunches together at night and putting their clothes out because it makes it easier for me to get them ready in the morning.” That’s also a good finish. I avoided a “but” or some type of blame throwing like many use in an “apology”. My wife now had two options: She can accept my apology and leave it there (not the best, but it’s okay), she can, in turn, offer me an apology for something in order to continue this new path meant for healing (the ideal), or she can use this as an opportunity to attack me (less than ideal). I will first point out that men have a stereotype of being quicker to apologize (whether it’s a good apology or not will depend) while women are known for never apologizing. My wife and I almost always follow the stereotypes, so guess what came next. My wife used my apology as a way to springboard into accusing me of something else. I’m not sure what that was because that led to me emotionally shutting down (also a stereotype). The end result? This confirmed I hate exploratory conversations and never recommend them unless the couple is good at learning from what’s said and not using it as fuel for future fights, but I can’t imagine that being a common situation because hurt tends to fuel hurtful behavior.
It’s important to note that since my wife didn’t receive my apology well, I needed to celebrate my own proper behavior. It’s like moms who complain they don’t receive the appreciation they deserve at home; you need to celebrate yourself to yourself. Don’t rely on others to do what you can do for you. Praising yourself is wise because it can prevent resentment.
So what does resolution look like? I teach that resolution comes to the individual when they reflect on what’s happened, they can summarize it in one sentence, and they use it to improve the situation. Another way of putting this is learning something gives an experience purpose, which makes it more acceptable. The one benefit for me writing these lessons is it forces me to find lessons to learn, which makes them easier to accept. I would even go so far as to claim my best insights have come from my worst situations. Last week’s lesson was a great example of that. I wish I could learn things in a gentler way, but at least there’s good to come out of these experiences.
My resolution started with: I wish my wife would be more consistently grateful for what she has because her being grateful would help her be happier, which would help me feel good enough as a husband (a stereotypical male desire). Instead, she’s stuck on making everyone else happy, especially the kids (a stereotypical female desire). And what can I do about this? Absolutely nothing. She knows she has this problem, so it’s up to her to address it. I need to focus on my own issues like finding happiness without relying on my wife being happy.
What was interesting for me was while I was journalling all my thoughts about the day and complaining to God about it, it felt like He was telling me to read the love passage in 1 Corinthians. This is the verse people typically read at weddings: Love is patient and kind… I’ve always focused on the first two while throwing in “Love is self controlled” because it summarizes some of the other points. When I read the whole paragraph, however, it was the last line that really jumped out at me: “Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance.” (1 Cor 13:7) It was like God was reminding me: This is what I do for you and what you promised your wife. Don’t forget that.
This week may consider how you can better handle difficult situations.
Rev. Chad David, ChadDavid.ca, learning to love dumb people (like me)
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