A marriage counselor might encourage you to rehash an old hurt or betrayal in an attempt to restore trust in the relationship.
With intimacy skills, you restore trust by abstaining from tolerating and giving up the habit of threatening to leave. Instead you invest yourself completely in the relationship.
“You learn to speak by speaking, to study by studying, to run by running, to work by working; in just the same way, you learn to love by loving.”
—Anatole France, Poet, Journalist, and Novelist
Sometimes I’ll have a client who doesn’t hesitate to say that her husband seems deficient in so many ways that she can’t see herself spending the rest of her life with him. She thinks about leaving often, yet she hasn’t made a move. She is on the fence about her marriage, leaning heavily toward a breakup.
Other times, a client will tell me that her relationship is fine and her husband is a great guy, but she’s not satisfied or she feels she’s outgrown him. She thinks she should stay married, but she describes the relationship as unfulfilling and boring. She suspects there might be someone else out there who is better for her, someone who would make her happier than her husband does. This is a less overt but equally dangerous example of sitting on the fence.
Sitting on the fence hurts your butt. You can’t get comfortable there. That’s true when you feel ambivalent about anything—a job, a car, a friend. But when you sit on the fence in a romance, you pay an especially high price for that uncomfortable seat, because you can’t possibly be intimate with a guy you’re only tolerating. You have a lot of power in this situation, and a choice: either accept him just as he is—quirks and all—or reject him and end the relationship. Merely tolerating your husband is a surefire way to make both of you miserable.
Hannah was firmly planted on the fence when I started coaching her. She had been working on making her nine-year marriage intimate, and she described it as solid. But she was still upset about an incident from two years ago.
After years of encouragement—or nagging, depending on who’s telling the story—Hannah’s husband finally quit smoking. Hannah was very pleased about this, but a short time later he came home smelling of smoke—more than once. She questioned him, letting him know that she would rather know the truth, even if it were that he was smoking again, than to have him lie to her. Each time he assured her he wasn’t smoking.
Then one afternoon, Hannah came home unexpectedly and found her husband puffing away in the backyard with two butts in the ashtray. She had caught him red-handed, and she told him she was incredibly hurt by his betrayal. He apologized repeatedly, but for Hannah, the hurt ran deep and wasn’t easy to get over.
Hannah insisted that they go to couples counseling to address his dishonesty. “That’s where I learned firsthand that couples counseling doesn’t improve your relationship,” she told me. “He would nod his head and agree with the counselor and say everything he was supposed to in the sessions, but I realized he was just humoring us both. I finally decided to drop counseling altogether. But I still feel hurt! So what do I do now?”
Armed with “evidence” that her husband was untrustworthy, Hannah spent her days waiting and watching for him to betray her again. And though their marriage seemed fine on the outside, she found herself fantasizing about having a man she could really trust and be fully emotionally intimate with. After all, this one had lied in a big way. And since she was sure she had done nothing wrong, she felt justified in thinking that perhaps he just wasn’t a guy she could stay with forever.
She was clearly planted on the fence.
That kind of fence-sitting does plenty of harm to the person you’re tolerating. Whether you’ve said so or not, your husband knows when you’re on the fence, which means he knows you’re thinking of leaving him. He may not admit it, but he’s terrified—just like you’d be terrified if someone you loved and built your life around was letting you know in subtle ways that he might just go away for good.
And as we’ve discussed many times in this book, when people are scared, they get defensive. When they’re defensive, they’re much harder to connect with because they’re feeling an overwhelming urge to either fight or flee. If your fence-sitting has gone on for years, your husband may have been bracing for the day you pack your bags for a long time. His response to living with the constant threat of heartbreak could be depression, cynicism, hostility, mistrust, or rage.
I’m not saying it’s your fault if your guy exhibits some of these qualities, since he always gets to choose how he will react. But I am saying that you’re definitely contributing to him feeling hurt, angry, and afraid. Given that he hasn’t been able to persuade you to get off that fence, the power to restore the safety in your relationship lies with you. Without safety, there can be no emotional honesty and no vulnerability—two key ingredients for feeling connected and close. Even if you haven’t said so out loud, threatening to leave a relationship is one of the most severe threats you can make. It’s the emotional equivalent of threatening to drop a nuclear bomb.
Of course, you could argue that you wouldn’t be on the fence if your husband behaved better. You might point out that’s he’s making you hurt, angry, and afraid too. You might wonder why he can’t do something to improve the safety at your house. But if you’re the one on the fence, he really can’t do anything, because the threat of nuclear devastation—ending the relationship—is coming from you. You’re the only one who can decide to stand down.
I’m not excusing him for having said or done hurtful things, for lobbing some grenades in the past. But that kind of damage is repairable. Your relationship can heal from that, and you can minimize further damage, but not while you’re flirting with the idea of pushing the big red button that launches the warhead called “divorce.”
The person who is willing to walk away from a negotiation always has the most power. Since that’s you in this case, the responsibility for restoring the safety of the marriage lies with you.
There’s plenty that’s not perfect in your relationship, but you wouldn’t have stayed in it if there weren’t some very good parts as well, or at least some shared assets or kids. That’s why you’ve had trouble deciding what to do and have come to rest somewhere in the purgatory between commitment and calling it quits. After all, if it were so easy to know what to do, you’d have done it by now.
There is a simple way to know if you should invest your energy in this relationship in the hopes that things will improve. There’s just one question to ask yourself, and it’s an easy one. The question is: Are you leaving him today?
That’s not the same as thinking of leaving him next week or next month. To tell the difference, ask yourself, are your bags already packed? Are you walking out the door right now?
No?
I didn’t think so. After all, why would you pick up this book if you really wanted to leave? You still have hope. There are many more cynical books you could be reading if you wanted permission to go. But you picked a book that is going to help you feel desired, cherished, and adored for life, which tells me that you’re tired of being on the fence and that you want to jump off on the marriage side and figure out a way to make your relationship really special and wonderful. See how I’m on to you?
I admire your courage and persistence. I respect your willingness to be accountable and your desire to improve your life. You’re going to need some courage to get your relationship out of the ditch. But I know you can do it because I see women just like you doing it every day.
You may think my reasoning is oversimplified, that I don’t understand your situation, that if I knew what horrors you were enduring in your relationship, I would change my opinion and tell you it’s okay to just limp along until you leave him next month or next year. Perhaps you feel that even if you don’t leave until next month, it makes no sense to waste your energy on a relationship that has never been good enough.
Complaining about someone is a symptom that you’re tolerating, not accepting or rejecting him. If you decide to abstain from tolerating your husband, the only choices left are to accept him or reject him. Rejecting him means you leave. So if you’re not leaving him today, it’s time to start accepting him by practicing the Six Intimacy Skills. Just by doing that, you’re taking a step toward making your relationship absolutely wonderful.
Now that you’ve decided you’re going to invest yourself emotionally in this relationship again (right? Didn’t I hear you say that?), your connection will improve almost immediately as long as you go all-in. In poker, you go all-in by pushing all your chips into the pot, risking everything. In a marriage, going all-in means that you open your heart by being vulnerable, risking everything. You’re choosing faith instead of indulging your fear. It means that when you find yourself getting annoyed with your husband’s faults, you force yourself to make a list of his virtues so you remember why you chose him and why you continue to choose him. It means that you do everything in your power to accept him just as he is, quirks and all. It means you stop indulging in fantasies that someday you’ll find a better man. You make a decision to see the good qualities in the man you married. It means saying to yourself, “I’m going to pin all my hopes on this working out.”
That’s entirely different from thinking, I’ll see how it goes for the next month. Until you jump off the fence, you won’t be able to create a lasting, gratifying love. But once you do jump, you’ll be amazed at how quickly things improve. That’s because everyone can relax when there’s no immediate crisis or drama, no fear-based adrenaline shooting through the house. There’s no tension, no waiting for the other shoe to drop. Your butt stops hurting.
You may feel a different kind of fear, though. Although you have to go all-in to make your relationship safe, doing so won’t feel safe to you. It will likely feel risky—because it is risky. What if you put all your effort and energy into creating lasting love with your man and it doesn’t work? You’ll be terribly disappointed. Whenever we love someone, we also risk losing that love.
However, in my experience, the risk of getting hurt by going all-in is actually smaller than the risk of staying on the fence. You’re taking a reasonable risk for the chance of a great payoff: the passionate, peaceful, intimate relationship you crave. You’ve got a good guy, an imperfect man who is committed to you even when you waver in your commitment to him. Chances are excellent that if you make yourself vulnerable, things will go well. The odds are good that you’ll come out ahead on this risk because it’s pretty safe to bet on a man who’s so loyal to you.
If you don’t go all-in, you’re practically guaranteeing that your romance will be tense, distant, and disconnected. That’s hard for anybody to sustain over time, so it actually increases your risk of divorce, and the accompanying tragedy and heartache, if you commit to the fence instead of to the man you sleep with every night.
But it’s not going to feel safer for you when you first jump off the fence. The reason you climbed on the fence to begin with was because it felt less scary to sit there, contemplating your ability to get the hell out if you wanted to. That seems reassuring, especially compared to being vulnerable with your man by doing the things that contribute to intimacy—like apologizing for your part in a conflict, letting him know you need him and miss him, and telling him that he makes you happy. That’s the stuff that seems dangerous. Your knee-jerk reaction might be, “No way! I’m not going to be the one to apologize or let him know I’m all-in. Forget it!”
Nobody’s saying you have to. You always have a choice and you always get to do what fits for you. But if what you want is to be intimate, choose the vulnerable approach. If what you want is more splinters in your butt, stay on the fence. I understand your hesitation because I’ve been there. But recognize that you’re making the choice and you can change your mind at any time.
Now that you realize you have so much of the power (or at least you suspect on some level that it might be true), put what you’ve learned to the test. Prove me right or prove me wrong, but give your relationship the best chance to succeed before you give up. Jump off the fence right now and put all your energy and faith into making your marriage the most passionate, intimate, and nurturing it can be, instead of spending that energy worrying about whether or not you should leave.
When I say “succeed,” I don’t mean that you’re giving it the chance to become just a little better. I’m talking about creating a really exciting, gratifying, pleasurable romance. I’m talking about having fun together, looking forward to seeing each other, delighting in each other, and feeling really protected and secure. Maybe you’ve given up hope that you can have that, but I’m here to tell you that you can—just as soon as you jump off that fence.
Your butt will thank you.