My Partner Will Not Work on Us! Now What?

As a coach I get this a LOT. Although I am not really that surprised, we live in a world where we often spend much of our time thinking about what we ARE doing and what our partner ISN’T doing and get hyper-focused on those two things.

Let’s start with the bad news, it may be entirely possible that your partner does not care about you or the relationship, they never did or don’t anymore. There is always that possibility.

There is also the probability that they did 100% care about you and the relationship and over the course of weeks, months, and years their baggage has collided with your baggage and the relationship now looks like my teenagers bedroom after unpacking from a trip.

At the core of this feeling is the desire to have more, to either rekindle a feeling from the past or to take your relationship into something deeper. The easy versions of this are things like the idea of moving from meeting, to dating, to living together, to engagement, to marriage, to kids… We all know someone, maybe ourselves, who has gotten stuck in one of those states, done the evaluation, and decided that this was as far as that relationship was going to go, that is natural and healthy.

But what do you do when you feel like THIS relationship is the one you want to try and move forward, to continue building depth and connection in and you feel like your partner is either not interested in moving forward or you feel like your partner has just checked out and is not participating at the same level?

What I would like to do is share with you some are some of the concepts that have played a major role in how I live my life and how I choose to show up in my relationship. I want to share questions that might help you figure out if this is an opportunity to lead growth and connection or an opportunity to challenge your partner to step up or step away…

Core Beliefs Around Relationships

Relationships are hard, period. If you believe that the “right” relationship should be easy you have been sold a giant bag of lies! Relationships are two imperfect people trying to build something together using different blueprints, ideals, morals, and beliefs. If you believe that the “right” person is going to come along and you are going to live happily ever after you might want to stop reading this right now.
Love is verb, an action, and a choice. That feeling you get in the beginning is not love, it is a delightful cocktail of chemicals being dumped into your body because your brain is telling you that this person has all the things you hold important and desire and therefore they must be the one. Those chemicals are there to hold you together long enough to get to know someone and find out who they really are and more importantly to give you enough time to realize that this person is not 100% of what you dream about at night and to give you time to assess if they are a high enough percentage to fight thru the harder next steps.
“True love starts once you swim out past the breakers” Thank you John Kim for that one! Love, true, deep, connected love doesn’t start in the beginning when feelings flow easily, it comes once you have faced the challenges of life together, have disagreed, shared your true feelings and beliefs, have taken off the mask, and have fought to make the choice to love. That is when real love starts and like number 2 says, it is the active choice to stay and work thru all of that instead of running away.
You will fall in and out of love with the same person over and over. I love how Esther Perel talks about having multiple marriages to the same person. There will be days, weeks, months, or years where you struggle to make the choice to love this person. Being “in love” means choosing to love. The old cliché “I love you but I’m not in love with you” is nothing more than saying you are special to me and I love what we had but today I am choosing to not love you. Which could also be your queue to flip the script and say “I love you but today I’m struggling with that choice AND I’m going to make it anyways because I believe in us”.
Eventually all relationships reach a point where they feel unsteady, like you and your partner are two different people going two different directions. I heard a great analogy once that being in a relationship is like walking a long path together, the tough times are when there is a huge tree in the middle of the path and you are walking around opposite sides of the tree. You are choosing to continue to walk and you are trusting that your partner is going to do the same. Being in a long term relationship means being OK with the idea that their side may take longer to get around and trusting with a vulnerable heart that they will make it back to the path. This means staying on the path and letting them know where you are going and where you want to be as an invitation for them to join.

What to do when you feel like you are the only one doing the work
Its funny in a sad kind of way that deep down I know my marriage issues started long before I knew my wife was struggling and it was because she felt like she was the only one who cared and the only one doing any work. I say its funny because there are days today when I catch myself thinking the exact same thing and I have to remind myself that we are both on our path and that my progress does not look like hers.

Now seems like a great time to introduce confirmation bias, the concept that we see what we are looking for and it confirms that what we are looking for exists. When we believe our partner is not invested in the relationship we look for signs of that and we find them. Sometimes in real ways and sometimes in stupid made up sh*t in our heads kind of ways.

I’ll give an example from my own life just this morning. When my wife gives me a “thumbs up” on a text the first thing that goes thru my had is “she is checked out and disconnected and doesn’t love me”. That seems like a lot, right!?

It makes perfect sense to me in the moment though. I took the time to write out a loving message wishing her and her friend a great trip and to have fun today and she doesn’t care enough to say anything more than “thumbs up”.

Now lets change that around, I know she is with her friend, they both have big things going on in their lives, they are both away from their families (2 husbands and 4 kids between them) and they are probably having a blast being away from all of that energy and her taking the time to acknowledge my message while she is probably deep in another conversation is kind, loving, and respectful instead of leaving it unread.

My point here is the dialoge you keep in your head is the results you will see in your relationship. If you see your partner as cold and uncaring, you will look for signs of that and find them. If you see your partner as kind and loving you can build a mental state around the good instead of the bad, and you will see more good in every action.

Questions for you to ask yourself

Have you taken the time to sit down and get curious about them? It is far too easy when we feel disconnected to focus on how our partner does not seem to care about us, our goals, our life, our hopes, and our dreams. It is also very common when this happens to stop being curious about our partner and asking them questions that will both help you understand where they want to go and to really find out what is going on in their life. It is also very common place to believe that we “know” our partner, who they are, what they want, etc. If you can sit down and realize that you are not who you were 2, 5, 10 years ago then can you stop and take in that they are not either and to stop trying to keep them in that box?
When you think about your needs, are you thinking mostly about your needs that are not being met by your partner? Can you instead get curious about what your partner needs from you to want to put in the effort to meet your needs? My favorite example of this is a family member who shared that all he wanted from his wife was for her to appreciate all he does for her, to say think you, to tell him that she appreciates him doing X, Y, or Z for her. When I asked “what does she need from you that she is not getting” his answer was simply “who gives a sh*t, she doesn’t care about what I want, why should I care about what she wants?”. Can you make a list of your desires, unmet needs, wants, and wishes from the relationship and then turn that around to ask what your partner needs, wants, and wishes from you?
When you think about the work you are doing, you now exactly how much effort you are putting in, at the same time it is very hard to know what type of effort your partner is actually putting in, its just so much easier to focus on the fact that the relationship is not what you want. And believe that because you are doing something, it must be their fault. Instead, can you look at the work you are doing as simply just doing your part as a gift to the relationship? A gift is just that, it doesn’t come with expectations or strings, can you simply see it as this is the part you contribute without expectations and clear that negative energy away from what you are bringing?
Are you communicating with love, kindness, openness, and honesty with your partner or are you holding it in until it comes out as an attempt to share but feels more like a fight? I’ll share another example from my own marriage: as my marriage was falling apart I remember one night so desperately wanting to feel closer to my wife and I started kissing her neck and snuggling up against her, yes I wanted to make love because that was how I felt most connected to her. She was feeling very disconnected and instead of bringing that to me with love, kindness, and a desire to openly share her feelings that she was also feeling disconnected just in a different way she started yelling at me that all I wanted was sex and that she had no desire to have sex with someone she felt like she didn’t even know anymore. In her mind, yelling at me that “all you want is sex” was her telling me that she wanted to feel more connected to me and that she didn’t. Being on the receiving end of that I can tell you with certainty that I never understand or felt like she wanted any sort of closeness or intimacy just that all she did was push me away, there was no sense that she had or was communicating any of that. Be clear with your words, intentions, desires, and feelings. Can you sit down with your partner and instead of complaining that there isn’t enough sex acknowledge that what you really desire is intimacy and closeness and just tell them you are feeling distant and ask what would help bring back the intimacy in all forms?
Are you being genuine, honest, and open about your wants, desires, goals, and path with your partner? My wife and I were struggling to see each other, to connect, and to get on the same page. We met with an amazing life coach that helped us both define what we wanted for ourselves and our marriage. We found common ground and a vision to build together. I spent every waking moment that wasn’t dedicated to my job or kid putting effort in to helping her build her dream life, office, house, etc. As we started to drift, her goals changed and she never took the time to loop me in, to sit down and have a check-in around the goal I thought we were both working towards. She developed resentment for me because what I was doing was not supporting her new goal and yet she had not taken the time to tell me the goal posts had moved. Even if you had a conversation 3 months ago about where you were both going, can you be honest with yourself and your partner if that has changed? Can you be curious if it is still the same for them?

At the end of the day, if you are feeling that disconnect from your partner can you acknowledge that this is the challenge for you to invite your partner in.

Can you see this as the opportunity for you to both lead the change you want to see in your relationship, and lead the honesty around what you need, want and desire?

Can you lead the growth in a way that you invite your partner in instead of holding on to resentment and pushing them away?

Can you be ok with the idea that if there will be times where you both fall out of love and that it may be your turn to be the one holding the relationship together?

Can you be ok with the idea that today is your day to keep walking around the tree and trust that your partner will meet you on the other side? Even when it is scary and feels like they may never come around?

Thank you for taking the time to read this, not for me, but for you and your loved one. Every time you take a moment to learn how to show up differently and build a healthy relationship you are giving a gift to yourself and your partner. Thank you for being willing to be part of the movement of people who want more, who fight for love, and for the people who show the world that love is a choice, even when its a tough choice.

Much love!
Stephen

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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