A marriage counselor might say that you and your husband have grown apart and that you may be better off separating. She may offer to help you have a “successful” divorce.
Intimacy skills avoid the pain and trauma of a divorce. You chose your husband for good reasons, which you may have lost sight of. Practicing the Six Intimacy Skills will help you remember and restore what you always had in common: each other.
When I was miserable in my marriage, I firmly believed that it was because I had chosen the wrong husband. I reasoned that I had been too young and made a hasty decision. But in reality, I had rewritten the story of my relationship—and left out most of the good parts.
When John and I first met, I found his sense of humor and playfulness a joy to be around. He was so much fun! But when it came to the serious business of getting housework done, paying bills, and filing taxes, I decided that he was too playful and not responsible enough. I wanted things to get done the way I thought they should get done, and I decided that John’s laid-back style was a detriment to our well-being. I felt he was leaving me with more of the burden because he didn’t react to things fast enough. Dirty clothes littered the floor of the bedroom, bills went unpaid, and our cars were driven well past three-thousand miles before their oil got changed—unless I intervened, which I did constantly.
Around that time I read an article about how people who get married when they’re young are more likely to get divorced. I thought about how I had only been twenty-one when John and I met and twenty-two when we married, and I concluded that I’d made a big mistake. It said right in the article that, statistically speaking, our chances of making it were not good.
I figured I’d chosen John for the wrong reasons. It was a carefree time in my life, and I’d been seduced by his singing, his guitar playing, and his boyish grin. I never considered whether he’d take care of his half of the chores (he didn’t!), even after I wrote them out for him (which is why he didn’t do them, I realized later). Now that it was time to pay back student loans and a mortgage, I was terrified that I’d focused on all the wrong things when I picked him.
It turns out that I married a guy who was fun-loving and responsible. I just didn’t see it that way because I seized on every responsibility that we had as a couple and did everything myself. That’s what good martyrs do, and I was one of the best.
But just today, while I was expressing concern that I wouldn’t have enough time to finish some errands and meet my deadline to my editor, my husband came into my office and asked what he could do to help. He had just finished doing the dishes and taking out the trash. I handed off some paperwork that really should have been mine, which he took care of efficiently despite having spent all day running his own business. What a guy! How can he be the same one from those early years?
John wasn’t making those kinds of offers in the bad old days for one simple reason: I didn’t respect him enough to entrust him with important work, and he knew it. To avoid rejection and a potential conflict, he didn’t ask if he could help. And I didn’t ask him to help because I was so controlling that I wanted to do everything myself.
Now that the respect is restored in our relationship, John never gets tired of doing whatever he can to take care of me and make me happy.
He’s the same guy, but I get a totally different response because I have a totally different attitude. I see how smart he is, how hardworking and conscientious.
But I had forgotten for a while.
In case you forgot, let me remind you that you fell in love with your husband because he has some great qualities too. You may look back at that courtship time and wonder—like I did—what you were thinking when you said yes to the man standing next to you. You might have chalked up your marriage struggles to having been too hasty or just plain making a mistake.
But my experience with thousands of clients is that they chose their husbands for really good reasons—and then forgot what they were. These women rediscover those valuable qualities as soon as they restore their respect for their husbands. And with the restored respect comes all the excitement and joy that they felt in the beginning of their relationships. They really are completely thrilled again. They’re not just sucking it up because it’s best for the kids or because it would be too embarrassing to divorce. They’re really happy to be married to their husband again.
See if any of these rationales sound familiar. Have you been telling yourself that you made a bad choice of husband because you were:
• Anxious to get away from your parents?
• So needy at the time?
• Looking for a good father for your kids?
• Financially insecure?
• Too young to know any better?
• Going to change him?
• In a rush to marry so you could have kids before you were too old?
• Rebelling against people who told you he was wrong for you?
• Agreeing to marry the guy everyone else thought was right for you?
• Not getting any other offers?
• Telling yourself anything else that dismisses or nullifies the guy you chose?
You’ve almost certainly fallen into what I call the “relationship rewrite rationale,” which goes like this:
1. My marriage is miserable.
2. How did this happen?
3. He must be the wrong guy.
4. I must have said “I do” under duress. It was a huge mistake.
The good news is that your story about why you made a mistake is just that: a story. It’s not the facts. But if you have such a story you’re harboring, you’re not alone. Nearly every wife I work with has a story about why it was a mistake to marry her husband.
Serena explained to me that she was young and trying to get out of her parents’ house when she married her husband. She just couldn’t stand living with them any longer, and then along came a handsome young man—now her husband of fifteen years. Looking back, she felt that she had been hasty and was full of regret now that they had three kids and a house and none of the housework was getting done unless she did it. Her husband was very distant, spending all his time helping his family and not her or the kids.
As part of practicing the Six Intimacy Skills, Serena asked her husband to help their kids with their homework. He agreed, but said he wanted to take them swimming first, as it was a nice day out. He asked her what she thought about that. Serena was very tempted to say, “Homework should come first,” which would have been a subtle criticism, but she chose to respect her husband instead. She told him, “Whatever you think.”
To her surprise, the homework did get done, right after the kids had a nice afternoon with their dad, leaving Serena blissfully alone to catch up on her work. She reflected that one of her big complaints was that her husband didn’t spend time with the kids, and she realized that if she had said what she’d been tempted to say, she would have deprived them all of a good time together.
Serena began to remember what she saw in her husband fifteen years ago but had forgotten about. “I’m grateful for how hardworking, loyal, and generous he is,” she told me. “I was mad because he wasn’t spending time with me and the kids, but now he’s doing so much of what I wanted, I don’t feel angry anymore. It’s part of his nature to be thoughtful and helpful, and that was part of what I liked about him. He’s really very considerate.”
The way that I know your husband is a good guy is because you wouldn’t have married him otherwise. Of course there are bad guys, as we talked about in the beginning of this book, but if your husband is not one of those, he’s a good guy.
That doesn’t mean your husband is a perfect man. He has many flaws. But he is a man you can have a wonderful relationship with if you make a few adjustments that are within your power. You wouldn’t have married a putz. You wouldn’t have committed to spend the rest of your life with a jerk. You wouldn’t have picked a worthless bozo to start a family with or grow old with.
Given the choice, you would have picked the most attractive, smart, talented person you could find. So you did. You chose your man because you saw a lot of good qualities in him.
We really can’t marry up or marry down; we wouldn’t match. That’s one of the laws of nature. We can only marry our match.
Since you’re not mean and spiteful, he’s not mean and spiteful. You’re not a bad person, so he’s not a bad person either. And if he seems that way right now, what that tells me is that you’re getting hurt a lot, and the reason you’re getting hurt a lot is twofold.
The first reason is that your husband doesn’t feel respected right now. A man needs respect like he needs oxygen, and when he’s not getting it from the woman who knows him best in the world, he’s going to respond defensively. As the saying goes, the best defense is a good offense, so at times he may be slinging metaphorical rocks and stones your way in order to restore his sense of self-worth. When he’s not having to defend himself, he can focus on protecting you, finding ways to make you smile, bringing you presents, and telling you how beautiful you are. Those are the things that make him feel successful as a husband.
But first, he’s got to get his respect. He’s likely going to fight for himself every moment that he’s not feeling respected. I see that in my coaching practice over and over.
Marge experienced this when she tried to discourage her husband from drinking soda, which she deemed dangerous. Whenever he drank it, she reminded him that he was poisoning himself and making himself sick—to which her husband responded, “What you say doesn’t matter.” That hurt Marge deeply, because she saw it as her husband dismissing her and saying she wasn’t important. But he was forced to dismiss what she said for the survival of his own identity. She was making his choices (and therefore him) out to be bad and wrong, so he had to either take that on or dismiss her as bad and wrong.
I’m not saying it’s okay for a husband to dismiss his wife and tell her what she says doesn’t matter. But when you’re trying to blame or shame someone, it’s not unusual for that person to try to defend himself. And at times that defense may look like dismissal, which is very hurtful.
The other reason you’re getting hurt in your relationship is because that’s part of being in an intimate relationship. When we live so close together, it’s bound to happen sometimes. Kids hurt each other when they play, not because they mean to but because they bump into each other. Drivers cut you off in traffic, not because they set out to scare you but because they’re distracted. Even the happiest couples hurt each other sometimes.
When the culture of your relationship feels strong, safe, and steady, you can easily shrug off that kind of hurt and recognize that it’s not intentional. But when there’s lots of hurt going back and forth between you, it’s hard to separate the innocent mistakes from the ongoing battles. When you’re treating your husband with disrespect, it’s going to result in a lot of Needless Emotional Turmoil (NET). The result is that the relationship feels hopeless.
But all of that changes quickly when you focus on being respectful.
Keep thinking about why you chose to marry your husband. Maybe it was the way he loved you. Maybe it was his book smarts or street smarts. Maybe he was sweet to your kids, or protective of your pets, or generous to your mom. You might have loved how feminine you felt around him or how much you laughed together. Maybe you felt some inner strength around him and a sense of optimism that made you look forward to the future. Maybe you felt drawn to him physically or liked how well he listened. You thought he was considerate, generous, charming. Those are all excellent reasons for getting married.
Those are also the reasons that matter now, because he still has all those qualities. They’ll come shining through again as soon as you go back to treating him respectfully—just the way you did when you were falling in love. When you do that, you’ll not only eliminate most of the conflict in your relationship, you’ll also restore the excitement that you once shared.
As long as you have a good guy, the potential for your relationship is equal to what you experienced during your courtship. If you felt desired, cherished, adored, protected, and excited during your courtship, your marriage has the potential to make you feel all those things again. If you never felt those things during your courtship, now you have the chance to experience them for the first time with your husband.
As an added bonus, his steady presence will help you become the person you want to be. Part of you knew that when you made the choice to marry him.
Pema Chodron has a book by that name, and it instantly made me think of marriage. One of the great things about getting married—about swearing in front of God and everybody that you want to be together until your last breath—is that you wisely give yourself no easy way out.
You were clever to do that. You did it partly because you knew that at some point it might be tempting to walk away. You wanted to give yourself some glue that would bind you and your husband together even when you were hurt or scared.
Now there are probably financial entanglements you share, or maybe children. Your home and your cats would have to be divided up or sold if you split, and you would have to have a lot of awkward conversations with friends and family about how your marriage didn’t make it.
You did a good job leaving yourself no good option but to learn how to make your marriage really gratifying. I say that with all sincerity, because now that I have these skills, I’m grateful that I didn’t leave myself an escape. I would have missed out on the greatest self-improvement project I’ve ever undertaken. I would never have become my best self.
Once a client confided to me that she would have left her husband long ago except that she didn’t want to be alone. “I know it’s a terrible reason to stay,” she told me.
Loneliness is a huge concern for most of us. Most humans find another person’s presence a great comfort, if not essential for their well-being. I have a very low tolerance for loneliness. I feel it acutely when I travel alone for a few days. Imagine the suffering I would have endured from ending my marriage!
Another client told me her reason for not wanting to get divorced was because she didn’t want to have to go to work while her children were still small. She too thought that was a bad reason to stay in a painful marriage. But her marriage was only painful because of her lack of intimacy skills, and after some training she was able to rediscover the romance that led her to get married in the first place.
I can’t think of a bad reason to stay married. Sometimes women tell me that they stay married just because they don’t want to be failures at love. That’s a very good reason to stay married! No matter how you spin it, divorce is a tragedy and often unnecessary.
When you’re learning intimacy skills, you not only preserve your marriage, you make it so that you don’t even consider divorce anymore because you’re so happy. You feel excited, pursued, and beautiful. You feel desired, cherished, and protected. That’s what it means to be in a happy relationship. Nobody wants to get out of that.
Miriam experienced this firsthand when she trained in the Six Intimacy Skills. Early in her training, she believed the only thing that would really change her marriage was if her husband went to marriage counseling so he would be more sensitive to her needs. She told him that, reiterating that a therapist had told her he would never be emotionally available until he worked on healing his dysfunctional childhood. She was unhappy that he wasn’t more romantic and attentive, and she told him that often. Eventually she came to see that she wasn’t being very respectful. She agreed to practice being more respectful as an experiment, even though she didn’t really think it would help.
Over the next few weeks, a series of events led her to look at things differently. She was bursting to tell us about how much her husband had changed. Of course, Miriam was the one who changed—and then her husband started responding to her differently.
First there was an incident where her husband caused them to be late to a family party, even though he knew she really wanted to be there a bit early. Miriam was so moved when he apologized for disappointing her with no prompting whatsoever.
“This is a man who I thought did not consider my feelings,” Miriam reported. “I don’t remember him ever apologizing to me like that on his own! It was a very special moment for me.”
A few days later Miriam had cabin fever from staying home all morning with her little ones. She was feeling overwhelmed by the mess. In the past, that situation had been a recipe for conflict, but this time was different. Her husband not only cleaned up and got the kids to help, he also helped her get out of the house and even prepared a salad for her to eat when she got back.
“Before,” Miriam said, “there was a lot of grumbling when he helped me out of the house, and he was always in a rush to leave. He didn’t like to be home very much.”
Next, Miriam expressed her desire for a vacation, but they agreed that it was not a good time to travel because she was starting a new job. But her husband saw a chance to make his wife happy and planned a romantic night at a local hotel.
“I was so touched that he would want to vacation with me. In the past he would give me reasons we couldn’t go, so we almost never took vacations together. When we did, it was because I made all the arrangements,” Miriam reported.
She went on, “In the beginning of the year, I was convinced he needed therapy. I learned to change my perspective and not my husband. He is so kind and caring and always looking for ways to please me. I know he cherishes me and loves me. He has become so attuned to my needs and loves me so much more passionately. I can’t remember why I ever wanted him to go to therapy. I finally have the intimacy I always craved.”
You will too, as soon as you begin practicing being respectful in your marriage.