There aren’t all that many benefits to being a grown-up. There are bills, responsibilities, decades of work, raising kids, aging parents and unending things to stress about. It was far less complicated and way more fun being a kid.
But there is one real benefit to growing older and adulting: We essentially get to do whatever we want to do.
We choose our careers. We choose our friends. We choose our partners.
We decide when we want to go to sleep, what we’ll have for dinner and whether we’ll have the scotch on the rocks, a light beer or bottled water.
We choose how we want to engage in our most important relationships, and we choose how to navigate them when the relationship is struggling.
Somehow in our marriages, we tend to forget this principle.
One of my female clients was telling me about the struggles she has been having with her husband over their twenty years together:
He doesn’t get it.
I shouldn’t have to yell to get him to do what I need him to do.
If he would just do as I asked, we could avoid all the arguments.
If nagging worked, we would have a lot more happy marriages and a much lower divorce rate than 40-50%.
Those darn people in our lives… life would just be so much easier if they would just do what we want them to do.
Our spouses… our children… our bosses… Why won’t they just do what we want them to do?
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Why This Never Works
If someone were to put a pillow over your face right now, what would you do?
You’d probably fight like hell to get the pillow removed from your face…wouldn’t you?
When we are trying to get someone to do what we want them to do, to bend to our will or control their actions and behaviors, we are placing a metaphorical pillow over their face, and they’re going to fight like hell to get it off their face so they can breathe again. They’re not bad people; that’s simply natural human behavior.
Fighting to get the pillow off their face might look like dragging their feet or ignoring your request. It might look like debating whether or not the request is even relevant or necessary. Or the person feeling suffocated by the pillow to the face might become obstinate and do the exact opposite of what you want them to do.
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What to Do Instead
This client of mine could see how she didn’t like who she is in the midst of those conversations with her husband, but she was not yet ready to let go of the idea that he should do what she wants him to do. Because after all, she had created a thought in her mind that she was right and that what she was asking for was perfectly reasonable. And that may be true, but it wasn’t getting her the result she wanted, so we had to get back to identifying what it was she was trying to accomplish.
She was feeling overwhelmed in her life and thought that having her husband’s help would lighten that load and ease some of her stress. But what she really wanted for her marriage wasn’t an extra pair of hands. What she wanted was more closeness, more quality time together and more intimacy in her marriage. But anyone can see that her approach was not creating a fertile environment from which closeness and intimacy could grow. As a matter of fact, her husband told her, “I don’t want to curl up next to you at night after you’ve been yelling at me all day.”
To accomplish her larger objective of creating an environment where connection and intimacy could occur between them, she had to begin embracing some new thoughts:
My husband gets to do as he wishes; as do I.
My husband probably wants to feel like he’s a good partner, a good father, a good provider, a good man. He probably wants his wife to feel at ease and happy.
My husband is not a mind reader. He cannot hear, “I asked you three times already to do that!” and translate that into, “I wish we were closer; I miss you.”
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Your Partner Might Surprise You
We cause ourselves an enormous amount of suffering when we’re attempting to get our partners to do as we want them to do. Plus, it creates unnecessary distance in the relationship that takes its toll over time.
This client example was from a female client’s perspective, but we all do this in various ways in various relationships: trying to get others to do what we want them to do. I’ve had many clients that want their wives to bend to their wishes. But the beauty of being an adult is that no one can make us do anything we don’t want to.
Freedom is a basic human desire that shouldn’t disappear once we marry. When we can allow our partners to be exactly who they are and make their own choices—without judgment or criticism or control—they might surprise us with the very best they have to give.
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This post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock