You Need to Ask Yourself this One Relationship Question

By the time I sought relationship counseling, I was in deep. You know what I’m talking about. He’s the love of my life and all that good love stuff. It was all about him. How could I reach him? How could I live without him? How could I get over him?

Him, him, and more him.

Why couldn’t he hear me? Why didn’t he care? How could he keep hurting me?

He was my entire, exhausting, all-encompassing focus.

One day my marriage counselor disrupted my thoughts.

“A healthy love relationship is not gauged by how I feel about him/her,” he said. “But how I feel about me when I am with him/her.”

Well gee, I feel pretty bad.

Horrific actually. And toss in crummy, lousy, icky, rotten, crappy, low, and miserable. Godawful in fact. I also feel stressed, depressed, and anxious with a dose of unpredictability.

Turns out it wasn’t about my guy.

It was about me.

And one strikingly simple question.

“How do I feel when I am with this person?”

It’s funny how we disregard our own feelings in favor of how we feel for another human being. Not funny, distressing. Our entire focus becomes how we feel about them.

Something about love makes us abandon our self-protective instincts.

If we had any, to begin with.

Personally, I did not.

As my counselor told me more than once, “You need to establish greater boundaries and self-protection.”

I was with a man who made me cry. Who ignored me. Who made me feel lonely.

Who cares about the love of my life and all that good stuff?

It was time to stop making excuses for his bad behavior. He wasn’t a great guy who was stressed by work. Or a confused man experiencing some type of mid-life crisis. Or the plethora of other excuses I offered up.

He was someone who made me feel awful.

Plain and simple.

My counselor had dumbed love down to the basics.

Looking back, I stayed too long.

But in between my enabling excuses for his poor behavior, there was another side to him. A happy guy who could be as fun as he could be ultra-difficult. Truth be told, I didn’t feel great about myself during these times either.

Nothing feels good about a recurring destructive cycle of relationship highs and lows.

I found myself expanding on my counselor’s question.

Do I feel frustrated?

Yes, I felt frustrated.

Partially because of his repeatedly bad behavior, partially because of disrespectful communication, and partially because nothing was ever resolved. He didn’t care.

We simply had the same conversation over and over again.

Do I feel heard?

No, I didn’t feel heard.

He didn’t absorb my words because they didn’t matter to him. If I was hurt, upset, or worried he dismissed me. I was overreacting, too uptight, or I cared too much.

I spoke but no one was listening.

Do I feel controlled?

Yes, I felt controlled.

He was passive-aggressive so he appeared laid-back but nothing could have been further from the truth. He would agree to something and then turn my world upside down to make sure it didn’t happen. Essentially he would say one thing and do another. It created a great sense of unpredictability.

In the long run, he always got his way.

This one simple question is the divider between what is healthy and unhealthy.

Do I feel stressed?

Yes, I felt stressed.

When I was more of a people pleaser, I cried more and stressed less. Over the years, the demands of parenting made me please less and ask for more. This is where the stress escalated. I was with a man who made it clear he did not want to be told what to do.

Asking him to be a present husband and father caused great stress.

Do I feel respected?

No, I didn’t feel respected.

I always say the unfortunate result of disrespectful communication is it sends a contradictory message. “I love you, but I don’t like you.” Disrespectful people communicate with their egos. It gets in the way of seeing you for exactly who you truly are. The disrespectful person will not only talk you out of who you are but tell you all the reasons you shouldn’t be that, want that, care about that, etc. Respect isn’t agreeing with someone, it’s saying because this is important to you it is important to me.

The frustration, control, stress, and lack of respect were not isolated incidents.

They weren’t arguments or moments in time.

They were recurring interactions.

I knew and understood how he made me feel. But I was intent on getting his attention. I believed he could change. I believed he might see how he was hurting me.

But that wasn’t a healthy perspective.

Love of my life or not.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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