Years ago, there was a cartoon in the Sunday comic section that I’ve always remembered. In the first box is a young couple, and the woman is asking the man, “How do you feel about that?” In the next box, he is stammering, “Uh, um, uh.” Then in the third, bigger, full-color box, he is alone in a beautiful new place, asking, “Where am I?” In the final box, they are together again, and she is reassuring him, saying, “Relax, we’re in the land of emotions!” And that’s the goal of this last competency of SMART Love—to relax together in the land of emotions.
To get to this point together has meant we as a couple are motivated to grow. We have worked hard because we want to improve our fulfillment in our marriage. The Action Plans have called for taking the time to practice. And the more Action Plans we have successfully navigated, the more we have grown, both as an individual and as a couple. They have also required that we be open to feedback from our spouse. We need all three—motivation, practice, and feedback—to grow together emotionally in our relationship.
Let’s imagine a wife who scored low on her ability to be empathic—to read her husband’s emotions. It is hard for her to listen, for she believes she already knows what she needs to know. She interrupts her husband and doesn’t pay close attention to what he is trying to tell her. For her to develop empathy and attunement, she needs to be motivated to change, practice listening to herself first, and then listen more carefully to her husband. She has to give up the idea that she can assume she knows what he is going to say, and that means she has to be willing to listen to feedback from her husband. They both have to recognize they are in this process together.
Or let’s imagine a husband who can recognize his emotions only when he is angry, and he typically shows his anger by raising his voice and getting impatient. He has to face his basic fear about the strange world of the other emotions and feelings, be motivated to learn how to distinguish different feelings in himself, and be able to name them. For quite a while, he needs to carry around the word list of feelings and emotions until its contents become a part of him. He practices and practices until he becomes relaxed in the land of emotions. Obviously, to get to this point, he has learned a lot from the feedback given to him by his wife and friends.
When husbands and wives begin to relax together emotionally, they experience married life the way it was designed to be. We aren’t trying to create something unnatural—it’s the norm, for we are wired to connect, and it is especially true that we are wired to connect emotionally. When we don’t, something in us dies or goes into hiding. That’s part of the design as well.
For example, when babies are born, they have over two hundred billion nerve cells, or neurons, in their brains. As adults, we end up with only one hundred billion nerve cells. What happened to the other one hundred billion? They died, and they were meant to die, because they did not connect with other cells. They were not used. Cells that fired together wired together, and they are the ones that survived. Everything about life is based on our cells wiring together, and our lives are meant to be wired together with significant others—to be connected to others. We don’t survive in isolation.
The Problem of Balance
As we grow, life becomes more complex. In order for us to relax together emotionally, we have to be connected, and that means we have to resolve a basic personal contradiction. We must create a sense of resonance out of our personal dissonance. For the first months of a baby’s life, he is working on one task—to be connected to Mom and to Dad. Eventually that comes into conflict with a countermove—the move to autonomy.
During “the terrible twos,” the child is in a personal struggle between being connected and discovering some sense of autonomy. He wants to be connected to his mother and father. That’s been his primary focus the first months of his life. But at some point, a conflicting drive kicked in and now he also wants to experience a sense of autonomy, which is the opposite of connection. One of his favorite sayings at this stage is “I can do it myself!” The other favorite is “no.” About six months ago, my four-year-old granddaughter resolved this conflict for now. She’s content again to be connected—she’s had her first taste of independence, or autonomy, and it is basically at rest . . . until she becomes a teenager.
All this gets stirred up again during the teen years. Watch a teenager struggle with finding the balance, the resonance, between their drive to become an autonomous adult and still be a kid and part of the family. One minute they are arguing and angry, the next they are walking arm in arm with you, maybe even holding your hand. It’s their attempt to find resonance between the drive for autonomy and the need to be connected.
To succeed in marriage requires that we resolve the same conflict. How can I be connected with my spouse and yet still be me? Prior to our getting married and continuing into the early stages of marriage, this isn’t a problem. We are working on being connected and are willing to ignore our need to still be ourselves. But then at some point, we start to feel “too connected,” as if we are losing ourselves.
We can picture the conflict as sometimes we are moving toward each other to connect, but at the same time we are moving away from each other to protect our autonomy. SMART Love represents the resolution in that we move to where we can be emotional with each other in a managed, empathic way, while at the same time we are more competent in our autonomy because we are comfortable in our emotions. We have together learned to relax in the land of emotions.
As we’ll see, the results also include other skills, such as having the ability to communicate more clearly, quickly disarm potential conflict situations, and build stronger connections with each other and with other significant people in our lives. And we do these things with a higher degree of kindness and even humor.
Family Influences
Part of our ability to relax together emotionally is a resolution of the differing influences of our family of origin. As we were growing up, we were taught to follow the unique rules of our family, especially in the area of emotions. Different families allow for the expression of some emotions but not others. Some families allow only positive emotions: “If you’re going to be sad (or mad), go to your room until you can put a smile on your face.” Other families don’t allow emotions, for everything is focused on performance. If you have an emotion, you just have to tough it out on your own. There are all kinds of family rules for every emotion and how they should and should not be expressed.
Researcher Paul Ekman talks about how our family of origin had what he calls “display rules.”1 Some families allow for the strong expression of all emotions, while others allow a strong expression of only certain emotions. Other families prefer a weak, quiet expression of emotions. The weak display might be experienced as talking quietly with Mom about what’s bothering me. Add to the display rules the training we received in “being nice.” We may have been told, “Go tell the lady you’re sorry, and do it with a smile,” when we were not sorry and we certainly didn’t want to smile. But we learned to do it anyway.
Now think about the fact that no two people grow up the same way. Even siblings experience the family and its rules differently from each other. Therefore, you and your spouse came to your marriage with different family rules, and these rules needed to be negotiated early in the marriage. But typically they aren’t negotiated; they’re just there under the surface ready to frustrate us. That is, until you learn to love SMART. Now you have your own rules, and rule number one is to relax together emotionally.
Resonance
When we can relax together emotionally, we begin to experience a growing resonance with each other. One could say that our two egos are discovering there are actually times when they are in emotional harmony. That’s called resonance. Its opposite, dissonance, is what we experience when our egos are not in harmony. But as we relax together emotionally, we can increase those times of resonance. We’ve discussed this in terms of the conflicting drives toward autonomy and the need for connection. These two drives are by nature dissonant, and maturity means working to make them harmonious with each other—that’s resonance. I can be who I am and, at the same time, be connected to my spouse.
Now think of this desire for resonance in terms of just our gender differences. We joke a lot about how men will never stop to ask for directions unless it’s a last resort. We joke because it is generally true, and it drives wives crazy. Or how men won’t go see a doctor, even though their wives urge or even beg them to do so. I often point to these differences to prove that every marriage is an incompatible one, simply because of our gender differences.
Then add in our personality differences, which at first attracted us to each other but later become unacceptable. They quickly became the agenda for change—the other person must become a clone of me. And when we include the differing family backgrounds, it’s easy to understand why we experience a lot of dissonance and very little resonance. As we become more competent at SMART Love, we gradually overcome the dissonance and restore resonance—the harmony of two hearts beating as one.
This is hard work. We knew before that it’s only in fairy tales that the story ends with the words, “They lived happily ever after.” But we all have had the dream of living happily ever after. We know all too well that in real life, happily ever after runs head-on into life’s ups and downs. That’s why we need to learn the art of married life. It requires work to create harmony, but it is worth the effort!
Contagious Emotions
Our emotions are like a contagious infection. Hang around someone else for a while, and you’ll catch the same emotion they have. That’s why the negative emotions are so destructive to harmony. They are caught by the other person. Remember the story of Don and Pat. Pat started from the basic emotional posture of fear. But as Don ramped up his basic emotional posture of anger, her fears quickly changed into her own expression of anger. Don’s anger was contagious, and Pat quickly caught the disease. The more upset one person becomes, the more the other person synchronizes what they feel with what the upset person feels.
What’s true of the negative core emotions is even more true when you look at the contagion of the positive emotions. Let’s say the husband has had a good day at the office and comes home all hyped up about what happened. If a couple has learned to relax emotionally, the wife will soon be in harmony with his up mood. Even if she’s had a bad day, her need to talk about her day with her husband may dissipate as she is able to enter into his up mood. It lifts her emotionally to where they are in harmony. In fact, his up mood may even calm her and enable her to lift herself out of her down mood.
This is, of course, based on the authenticity of the emotions, feelings, and moods. You can’t fake it, as it will be obvious to your spouse. We’re talking about the contagiousness of authentic emotions and feelings. If one person pretends to feel something, like being happy, the other spouse quickly picks up on the fact that it is not authentic. They may not pick up on the “emotion,” but they do pick up on the lack of authenticity in it. Any faked emotion will quickly be seen as such and will not be contagious.
The Evidence of Harmony
Now that you have worked at becoming more competent in using all the skills of SMART Love, here is a review of some of the great things you will experience together. You will have found that your communication skills have grown. You were once misunderstood perhaps because you didn’t know what you were feeling, or maybe you were afraid to say what you meant. Now you are increasingly able to talk to each other in a clear and direct way that is seldom misunderstood. Not only is this true in your marriage relationship, but it also shows itself in how you more clearly communicate with your kids, your extended family, and your friends and co-workers.
Your social skills in general have improved. Since you have learned to monitor and manage your own emotions, you are better able to anticipate the reactions of others. You are also more able to fine-tune your own social abilities to where you can make a good and authentic impression on other people.
You have become more capable in your ability to negotiate with each other. Shouting matches and hurt feelings from being misunderstood are now rare occurrences. You are able to resolve some of the recalcitrant issues. It has always amazed me how people can be highly competent at negotiation in the workplace, but they seldom think about bringing those skills home. It seems to me that it’s equally or even more important to be able to negotiate a situation with our spouse and family than it is to negotiate something successfully at work.
When it comes to making changes together, it no longer stirs up resistance and fear. You no longer just go along to get along. You are open to new ideas and are willing to discuss the possibility and the need for change. As part of this openness, you are willing to receive feedback from each other and even from your family. Your desire is to learn and to become more competent emotionally. Now, instead of one of you getting defensive when your spouse offers feedback, you see it as a means to grow and gain self-knowledge.
An important bonus is that you are better able, as a couple and in your family, to manage your potential conflicts. It’s not that conflicts don’t exist—the potential will be there as long as two separate and different people are living together and are invested in the relationship. But now these situations seldom get out of control, for you both have learned how to better manage your own emotions as well as manage the conflict. What a relief!
Finally, you increasingly find that you are able to work more together as a team. You actually feel like you are a team. Before, it felt like you were often standing face-to-face, struggling to work things out. Now it feels like you are standing side by side, looking forward and working together. You are a team with a purpose—to move your marriage in the right direction. You are seeking to build a meaningful, fulfilling, and satisfying relationship that will be a model of success for others and will be enjoyed by each of you. You can relax together in the land of emotions!
Now let’s work on some Action Plans that will help us relax more with all we’ve learned.