“Knowledge of the self is the mother of all knowledge. So it is incumbent on me to know my self, to know it completely, to know its minutiae, its characteristics, its subtleties, and its very atoms.”
—KAHLIL GIBRAN
If your husband (or anyone else) asks you to do something that will make you resentful, overtired, lose your dignity, or interfere with your self-care, practice saying “I can’t.”
Until you recognize your own limits and start to honor them, peace and harmony in your marriage will elude you. Also, you’ll never get to see how much your husband wants to help you until you admit that you need help.
Before I surrendered, I did everything myself for one very simple reason: I wanted everything done my way. I liked the glasses in the cupboards put in upside down, and the dishes set to soak in the right-hand side of the sink. I preferred to take the freeway to our favorite restaurant because it was quicker than driving the surface streets. My voice graced our answering machine so I was sure it would give everyone who called just the “right” impression of our marriage and home.
I didn’t give John the chance to do anything—from picking out a new computer to making an appointment with our accountant for taxes—because I knew he wouldn’t do things the way I wanted them done. Every time he tried to help, I rejected him for one reason or another. Eventually, he stopped offering to do things.
After a while, I concluded that he was lazy and inconsiderate. I resented him for leaving everything up to me. At the time, I didn’t realize the obvious: I was setting both of us up for unhappiness.
THE HIGH COST OF DOING IT ALL
“I cannot say whether things will get better if we change; what I can say is they must change if they are to get better.”
—G. C. LICHTENBERG
The truth is, I didn’t really want help back then—at least not as much as I wanted to dictate. But keeping authority over every decision came at a very high cost. After so much rejection, John pulled away. I traded the intimacy I could have had to get my way all the time. Today, I’m not willing to pay such a high price.
The message I was sending was that I had everything under control, which I did—my control. It hadn’t occurred to me that I was actually obsessive rather than efficient, and insulting rather than endearing. I didn’t act like I wanted help, but that was only half of me. The other half desperately wanted to collapse in an exhausted heap and know that the world wouldn’t come to an end in my absence. I was betraying the part of me that was lonely and forlorn by putting on an aura of impenetrability.
Even when my husband thanked me for something I’d done, there was no amount of gratitude that could erase my feelings of resentment about having to do everything. When he complimented my efforts, it simply wasn’t enough for me. I heard his nice words as a manipulation to make me do even more.
It’s difficult to escape this cycle, unless we recognize that it’s happening, because the pattern is self-reinforcing. Here’s how it looks:
1. The wife gets burnt out, and tries to get her husband to help by barking orders or “choring” him.
2. The husband then jumps up to complete the tasks, but not out of kindness—he’s trying to avoid further conflict. With this source of motivation, he is not likely to do any more than the absolute minimum required so that he can get out of the way fast. He might also just dig in his heels and not do the chore to prove that nobody can tell him what to do.
3. The wife, dissatisfied with his effort (or lack thereof), begrudgingly decides that it’s just easier to do it herself. She feels more alone than ever, and criticizes her husband for being lazy, childish, etc.
4. The husband is reminded that the woman who knows him best in the world finds him entirely inadequate. He returns to his distant, protective semicoma, and both are worse off for the exchange.
SAY THE MAGIC WORD (HINT: IT’S NOT PLEASE)
“All of us at certain moments of our lives need to take advice and to receive help from other people.”
—ALEXIS CARRELL
If you’re feeling exhausted and overwhelmed all the time, I have a revolutionary prescription for you: practice saying these words: “I can’t.”
If going around saying you can’t do things sounds like a nutty suggestion to you, you are certainly not alone. The typical controlling wife is used to bucking up, persevering, and toughing it out regardless of the cost. She is capable and smart, and doesn’t appear to need help, nor is she accustomed to admitting any kind of weakness. However, when she does invite her husband to help, he sees an opportunity to be the hero, to be chivalrous and win her enduring adoration and gratitude. His drive to feel heroic and proud is going to be much more powerful than the contrary motivation he will feel about doing something to get you off of his back. He’ll take greater care, go to greater lengths and be more thoughtful when his goal is to earn your affection rather than avoiding your wrath.
A surrendered wife is quick to ask for help, and she does it in a way that makes the man feel necessary and needed. This is entirely different from barking orders. For example:
CONTROLLING: Why don’t you carry our toddler into the house?
SURRENDERED: I can’t carry him. I need the help of a big, strong man.
CONTROLLING: You try paying the bills around here. It’s not easy!
SURRENDERED: Paying the bills is making me nuts. I can’t do it anymore.
CONTROLLING: You better get on the phone and get a handyman to come over.
SURRENDERED: There’s something wrong with the water heater, and I don’t know what to do. What do you think?
You could argue that you can handle these situations and you do know what to do. But before you go down that old dirt road, consider the cost. You can do everything if you’re willing to be frazzled and edgy all the time. If you want to be intimate with your husband and have more free time and relaxation, you really can’t do it all. From this moment forward, pay special attention to anything that makes you cranky and start admitting that you just can’t do it. Sadly, you’ve probably been doing things for years that have cost you too much.
Phillipa felt pressured to get the furniture moved out of their old apartment over the weekend so a tenant could move in on Monday as planned. She picked up the phone book on Saturday and started calling moving companies which would have to charge double because of the last-minute notice. In the meantime, her husband was asking her how long she was going to be on the phone and telling her that he was hungry. Indignant at his lack of concern for getting moved and his utter lack of appreciation for her efforts, she explained the urgency of the situation to him—again. Phillipa complained that he was acting like a small child when she wished he would help her. Of course, her husband saw no need to help her because she had already taken over.
Now she was feeling stress from both the original problem of trying to find movers and from wondering how she could get her husband to grow up. She made some more calls, albeit resentfully, and had no luck finding movers to come that day.
Phillipa was still fretting about it the next morning, and complained to her husband that she just didn’t know what else to do. Anxious to solve the dilemma, her husband called a few friends and asked them to come and help him move furniture for a few hours. By dinner, the entire apartment was empty and ready for the new tenant on Monday morning.
Phillipa hadn’t needed to do a thing. She then realized that it wasn’t necessarily up to her to take over this task in the first place. Her husband was well aware of how badly they needed to move the furniture, and even knew how he would do it. If Phillipa felt resentful about single-handedly taking on a shared responsibility, she had the option of just leaving it alone and letting her husband handle it.
When Gary asked his wife, Shawna, to watch the neighbor’s kids along with theirs so he and his friend could spend the morning playing golf, she simply told him, “I can’t.” He was surprised by her reaction, and said “Why not?” She replied honestly by saying that she didn’t want the responsibility of watching extra kids when she had errands mapped out for the day.
Gary found another solution to his problem. He rounded up a teenager who lived on the street and agreed to pay her for a few hours of baby-sitting.
Andrea’s husband was preparing to leave on a business trip when he turned to her and said that he didn’t have time to pay the bills before he left and asked if she could do it for him.
Andrea wisely said the magic words, “I can’t.” While her instinct was to be helpful, she also felt a surge of pride pulse through her when she stayed true to her commitment to herself not to take on the burden of handling the finances instead of rescuing him. Sure enough, he found time to come home from work and pay the bills before he left town, and Andrea avoided a resentment that could have cost her the intimacy she had come to value so much.
LOOK FOR THE HERO IN YOUR HUSBAND
You may wonder if this approach will actually work with your husband. Remember that men generally want to help their wives and give them gifts. They like to be the hero, if we will give them the chance.
Consider the results of a Candid Camera gag. The setup was a woman walking around with one shoe off and limping badly, barely able to walk. She approached some unsuspecting men and asked them to help her get where she was going. Implicit in her approach was the phrase “I can’t walk.”
One of the men she approached—a stranger—actually picked her up and carried her to her destination. The Candid Camera crew tried it again with another man, and again the man picked her up and carried her. By the end of the episode fifteen men had carried the woman to her destination. These men were every size, age, shape, and race, and all of them had the same response: Rescue a woman who needs help.
Is your husband really so different than the men captured by the Candid Camera? You will never know until you admit that you need help.
RESIST TAKING ON THE WORLD
“If a woman can only succeed by emulating men, I think it is a great loss and not a success. The aim is not only for a woman to succeed, but to keep her womanhood and let her womanhood influence society.”
—SUZANNE BROGGER
One last hint: You’ll also want to resist expending your energy unnecessarily in conflicts that show up outside of your home.
If the landlord, principal, store clerk or the city council is causing you grief, do your best not to engage in a battle. Instead, guard and protect your energy for yourself and your family. Let your husband know that you need help in dealing with these annoying people.
When Stephanie felt that her son’s teacher was impatient with him, she marched down to the school to speak to the principal. In no time she felt overwhelmed by her and the teacher and school psychologist who also came to the meeting. Everyone seemed condescending and uncaring.
As Stephanie left the school with the problem still unresolved, she remembered that her husband, Joe, was ready and willing to defend their son and that all she had to do was ask for help. Stephanie and Joe went to the next conference together and he did most of the talking. Stephanie noticed that his physical stature and crossed arms commanded respect. She was relieved that her complaints were finally being heard. Ultimately, the teacher treated their child with more courtesy, and everyone was happy.
But there’s more: Joe felt proud of how he had protected both his wife and child and that made him feel successful, which made him feel strong. In turn, he felt more willing to show his love for his family. Intimacy replaced aggravation, and now Stephanie even had the energy to enjoy it.
Your husband will probably also feel proud to protect you, if you’ll let him. You’ll love all the fringe benefits—harmony, safety, rest, and intimacy—that go along with acknowledging your limits by saying “I can’t.”
If your husband addresses a conflict for you, he’ll probably do a great job because generally men don’t bring as much emotion to their interpersonal situations as women do. Instead of putting on armor, rely on him to go to battle when it’s appropriate, then stand behind him for protection and to lend the support that your presence provides.
On the other hand, your husband may let the whole thing slide because—again—he’s not going to feel as much emotion about it as you do. He may deem it unimportant and walk away. When he does, just let it go. Adopt your “So what?” attitude.
It’s not your job to put the world right by making sure that the school principal is punished for not doing a good job or that the phone company improves its customer service. Fixing those problems isn’t nearly as important as feeling calm and unburdened so that you can put your energy into creating an intimate marriage.
Nurture yourself and your children instead of taking on the entire world. To put the world right, first put your own self right by focusing on how you feel and what you need. Remember that you can’t fix the phone company or the principal, but you can heal yourself.