Marriage counseling invites you to focus on what your husband is doing, what he’s thinking, and what he wants, taking the focus away from your own actions, thoughts, and desires. It’s a forum for criticism, blame, and shame. It perpetuates the myth, “If only he would change, I would finally be happy.”
Intimacy skills train you to stay laser-focused on where your power is: on your own paper. Instead of trying to control others, you pay attention to how you feel and what you want. That’s the critical data you need to inform your decisions and actions for the relationship—not what he’s doing or thinking.
“A true soul mate is a mirror, the person who shows you everything that is holding you back, the person who brings you to your own attention so you can change your life.”
—Elizabeth Gilbert, Author
John was driving me to a radio interview recently. He got into the left-hand turn lane and I said, “Why are you turning here? Shouldn’t we be going straight?”
That’s right—I was telling him how to drive to a familiar destination, in an urgent “do as I say” tone. It wasn’t pretty. And I was on my way to a show where I would tell other women how to stop controlling their husbands and boyfriends!
In the old days, John might have snapped at me, accepted my invitation to have an argument, or just sighed heavily and then acquiesced to my demands. But these days he responds to me differently, knowing that my standard for myself is to focus on my own responsibilities instead of commenting on how he’s handling his.
John just looked at me, one eyebrow slightly raised as if to say “Really?”
I was busted.
“It’s stuffy in here,” I said. “I’m going to roll down the window and let some of the hypocrisy out of the car.”
But what’s wrong with offering a navigational tip, you might argue? What if my way is faster or better? Shouldn’t I be able to say so?
Of course! I can say whatever I want. We all can. But there are definite downsides to micromanaging my husband’s driving. It’s annoying, for one thing, so it hurts the intimacy and connection between us. In addition, there isn’t much upside to backseat driving. Going straight instead of turning left and then arriving at the same place at around the same time isn’t exactly a big payoff.
Not saying anything about the way he drives, and taking the opportunity to laugh and talk together on the way instead, has a huge upside. Doing that every day for years and years makes our time in the car together sweet and fun.
Getting married was the best self-improvement project I’ve ever undertaken. I can say without a doubt that I’m a better sister, friend, daughter, and coworker now than I was before I started practicing the Six Intimacy Skills with my husband. My happy marriage is my greatest accomplishment because in learning to nurture intimacy, I also gained humility, discipline, dignity, respect, self-care, and acceptance. Where those virtues were once a list of words that I didn’t fully comprehend, I now enjoy the astonishing benefits of having some degree of each of those qualities—all because I desperately wanted to feel loved and desired.
The reason being married has been such an effective teacher is that every day I’m faced with my spouse-mirror. I get a pretty immediate and accurate reflection of my energy from my husband. When I’m happy and playful, he’s typically attentive and affectionate. When I’m controlling, he’s reliably distant and defensive. When I’m vulnerable, he’s quick to respond with tenderness and protection. When I’m grateful, he looks for even more ways to delight me. When I treat him respectfully, it engenders passion and adoration. When I’m anxious, he tries to comfort me, unless I’m anxious about him or something he’s responsible for—then we’re back to distant and defensive.
In other words, he’s a reliable barometer of my attitude, which I have complete control over.
Granted, he’s also a separate person who has complete control over his own attitude, and he may decide to have a crummy demeanor from time to time. He’s only human, after all. But when I embarked on this journey, the most shocking part of all was finding out that, most of the time, my husband was reflecting back to me what I was bringing to the party. In other words, I recognized that I had a lot of power—much more than I realized.
Practicing the Six Intimacy Skills is a lot like applying the Serenity Prayer to my marriage.
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
Who can argue with the universal truths in this prayer? Well, I did, for years. Before I discovered the Six Intimacy Skills, I was pretty unclear on which things I could change and which I couldn’t. For example, if we were going out to a party, I figured I had a say over what “we” were wearing. That meant I could criticize John’s shirt or tell him to change his shoes, and I believed I was still squarely in the part where you change the things you can. I figured I was just being courageous. So I couldn’t understand the hostile response I was getting from simply trying to help him dress better. Granted, I wanted him to dress my way, but my way was clearly better.
In actuality, my attempts to help John dress better were far from courageous. That was me acting out an irrational fear that people would think my husband didn’t dress very well if he didn’t wear what I thought he should wear. I was afraid people were going to judge me for how he was dressed. Maybe some people do, but that’s not something I can control, so I don’t try anymore. My husband and I have a mutual agreement to alert each other about things like unseemly nose hairs, but other than that, I don’t see it as my responsibility to make sure he’s presentable. He was perfectly capable of dressing himself before I was born, and since I thought he was so attractive when we fell in love (and I still do!), he must have been doing just fine with his threads. Now I rarely say anything about what he wears except “That’s a great shirt on you—it really brings out your eyes,” or other similar compliments. And guess what? He dresses himself very well.
Here’s a metaphor I’ve come to rely on for deciding if I should comment on something: I ask myself if this is something that’s “on my paper.” As a kid at school, it was very tempting to look at someone else’s paper, to see if she was doing the homework right. But ultimately my grade was a reflection of what was on my paper when I turned it in, not hers. I was responsible for—and only responsible for—my own work.
Today when I ask myself if something’s “on my paper,” I think about everything I’m responsible for and in control of, such as how I dress, what I say, what tone of voice I use, my attitude, which websites I visit, who I talk to, where I go, what I eat, how much I sleep, and whether or not I floss. Everything that I don’t have direct control over, responsibility for, and choice about is not on my paper, and therefore I don’t need to worry about it. That would take energy away from what’s on my paper.
My version of the serenity prayer is really more like a flow chart:
God, whose paper is this on?
Answer A (which comes up way more than you might think): Not mine.
Then help me be respectful and grateful for it.
Answer B: Mine.
Then help me be brave enough to honor my desire about it.
It turns out that my husband’s clothes are not anywhere on my paper. That means his choice of attire is something to be respectful of and grateful for. After all, I’m not the expert on his life—he is. I haven’t been dressing a guy for decades, but he has. And I’m not exactly a fashionista anyway, so I’m not sure how I got started being so authoritative about his clothes to begin with.
One of the unintended consequences of applying my version of the serenity prayer in my marriage has been that whenever I find myself thinking that my husband should change in some way, it’s actually a sign that there’s something going on with me that I’m not paying attention to. Whenever I’m obsessing about what’s on his paper—what he’s written, why it’s not right, why I think he should change it—it means my own paper is in some kind of trouble. I’m oblivious to the questions I haven’t answered for myself, the blogs I haven’t written, and the lesson I’m not taking in or practicing.
I also see this with my coaching clients all the time. For instance, Jenna was very focused on how her husband’s schedule didn’t sync with hers and how they didn’t get to see each other very often. When she was going to bed, he was often staying up late. When she was up and ready to start her day, he needed to keep sleeping. She asked, pleaded, begged, and cajoled him to change his schedule to be more like hers—more like what she thought the schedule of a normal person should be. But the more she insisted, the more he resisted. She took that as a personal rejection. “If he really wanted to spend more time with me, he could do his work earlier and get up earlier, and then we’d be on a similar schedule,” she told me. Her plaintive tone told me that Jenna believed her husband really needed to change for her to be happy.
She seemed confused when I asked about her self-care. “How are you doing with your oil painting?” I asked her, knowing that was something she enjoyed very much. She was quiet for a moment and then admitted she hadn’t painted a thing in months. “How’s the rest of your self-care?” I pressed. The longer we talked, the clearer it became that Jenna’s husband’s schedule was a clever distraction from her real problem: the inner critic who had moved into her head and was preventing her from painting anything because it wouldn’t be “good enough.”
It’s a lot easier to find fault with someone else than to find the courage to face our own fears and faults. There were plenty of interesting things happening on Jenna’s paper, but she was missing them. When she put herself on a regular painting regimen, her concerns about her husband’s schedule melted away.
Everything in your world—your decisions, your responsibilities, your relationships, what you wear and eat—that’s on your paper. Everything in your husband’s world—his decisions, his responsibilities, his relationships, what he wears and eats—that’s on his paper. Know the difference, and your marriage will be a cakewalk. Get them mixed up and it becomes a forced march.
But what about things in the middle, things you’re both responsible for or that impact you both, like your children, your finances, and the household chores? What if what’s on his paper impacts you? How can you know whether to weigh in on the things that you share or keep silent?
Tiffany felt she understood the concept of staying on her own paper, but she wanted to know what she should do if her husband’s paper overlapped with hers or if her daughter’s paper overlapped with both of theirs. Tiffany had been feeling resentful about picking up dirty clothes her daughter Anna was throwing on the floor instead of in the hamper. Instead of letting the resentment build, she made a new policy: When her daughter put things in the hamper, she would wash them for her. Anything not in the hamper wouldn’t get washed.
Her daughter didn’t pay much attention to the new policy and continued to leave clothes on the floor. Tiffany was prepared to follow through and let the consequences be what they may, but her husband came in and gathered up all the dirty clothes—even the ones on the floor—and washed them. Tiffany was hurt and angry that her husband was undermining her efforts. She asked him to stop, explaining that she was trying to teach their daughter the consequences of not using the hamper, but her husband was more interested in getting the chores done than worrying about where the dirty clothes belonged. Frustrated, Tiffany wanted to know how she could get her husband to stop washing her daughter’s clothes and help Anna understand that actions have consequences.
I asked Tiffany to think carefully about just what was on her paper, what she really had control over. She thought for a moment and said, “I don’t pick up socks from the floor. I only wash what’s in the hamper.” Those were clear limits, which were perfectly on her paper.
Her next question was, “How can I teach my daughter to use the hamper if my husband keeps indulging her?” Now she was back on her husband’s and daughter’s papers.
I asked Tiffany what the benefit would be to her if her husband did stop picking up the clothes off the floor. “I would get my daughter to start picking up her clothes,” she answered. I asked her how it would benefit her if her daughter started picking up her clothes, since she was not planning to pick them up herself. Tiffany thought hard and said, “Well, her room wouldn’t be such a mess all the time.”
“How does it affect you if her room is a mess?” I asked.
“I don’t like to see the mess in there!” she said. “In fact, I’m sick of it.”
“Is it within your control to have her room be tidy?” I asked.
“Well, so far it doesn’t seem like it is,” she said. “I guess you’re right. I would love to have it be tidy, but I can’t make her clean it and I don’t want to clean it myself. I can always close the door and walk away,” she admitted. “That might be the best thing.”
It’s reasonable to want to have order in your home, and it’s reasonable to want to teach your daughter to be tidy. But as much as Tiffany felt that her husband was undermining her efforts to mother her daughter, it would have been just as interfering for Tiffany to insist that her husband do things her way. After all, dads often do things differently than moms. By staying focused on her own limits (not being willing to pick up dirty clothes from the floor), Tiffany was able to untangle her paper from her husband’s and her daughter’s papers—two distinctly sovereign individuals whom she can either accept or reject, but not control. This also allowed them to have their own father-daughter relationship without interference from Tiffany.
She could have easily gone down the path of trying to convince everyone that her way was right—that the daughter needed to put clothes in the hamper—but it probably wouldn’t have worked. Tiffany would have also created plenty of tension and stress in her home by doing that. Instead, she looked at her own feelings and desires and responded accordingly.
Tiffany knew that she could continue to express her pure desire to have a tidy room. By detaching from the outcome, she was choosing harmony and intimacy with her husband over a few dirty socks that she no longer has to pick up. She even took a playful approach by saying to her daughter, “You’re so lucky your dad did the laundry! Otherwise you’d have had to go barefoot today.”
In a light way, she acknowledged the different policies between her and her husband, and let her daughter know she was taking her chances with her socks.