Tools for the Empowered Couple

Apr 30

I believe it was Esther Perel who said, “Tell me how you were loved and I will tell you how you make love.” I would venture to add to that, “tell me how you fight and I will tell you about your childhood.” The choreography of how we fight with our partner is a dance steeped in our earliest memories. Often in the first few years of marriage, I found myself saying things in the heat of an argument and thinking, wow, that sounds like my parents. We all do it. Even the absence of the fight, holds a choreography in the undercurrent. To consciously create something different for ourselves, we must learn new moves and cocreate a different dynamic.

When I see couples, I pay attention to the anatomy of their argument. I say this, they say that, I do this, they do that, on repeat. To interrupt the cadence of that escalation, we must slow down and learn new moves. If you were learning a tango, we would break down the steps. So too with new communication choreography. Active listening, or the speaker-listener technique, is a wonderful tool for that.

Hear me out

The speaker listener technique allows couples a strategy to practice learning how to listen without getting defensive. One couple is the speaker and talks for 2-3 sentences max. This means no flooding with long tangential monologues where your point, and partner, gets lost. The listener then reflects back what they heard, either verbatim or in essence. The speaker then gets a chance to correct on any missed points. We stay in this structure for a few rounds, then the partners swap roles. What I often hear back from the speaker is, “actually I didn’t quite say that, let me try again.” Most people are listening defensively, especially in conflict. As a listener, we may be searching the sentences for confirmation bias of our argument against our partner. Anything that doesn’t fit into our viewpoint, goes over our head. This impedes our ability to truly hear them.

At our core, we as humans deeply want to belong, and be heard and understood. We want to be seen. So being misunderstood can be incredibly painful. This exercise is like a seatbelt, a structure that we can buckle into, in order to ensure safety in the ride and journey through conflict. Once the turbulence passes, you can unbuckle.

I will say for myself, it can be a frustrating process. When I am heated, I want to go into all my wild antics and dysregulation; slowing down doesn’t always feel good. But it’s the right thing to do.

What Should we Avoid?

Another useful tool is to know what to try and avoid in conflict. The Gottman Institute identified through deep research four patterns of communication, which if present, could predict with over 80% accuracy that a couple was headed for divorce. In knowing what they call “the four horsemen,” we can avoid these patterns and strive for their antidotes instead. Shifting stonewalling (cold shoulder) into physiological self-soothing, blame/defense into accountability, contempt into a culture of appreciation, and criticism into gentle startups helps to create more ease.

When you are tempted to ice your partner out, instead try asking for a time-out with an agreed upon time to revisit the conversation. Then take good care of yourself and your body by taking some deep breaths, eating or drinking something nourishing, going for a walk, touching a tree, moving your body, journaling, phoning a friend, taking a shower etc. When you are tempted to feel hopeless about your partnership, try venting for 5 minutes in a journal, then writing a list of things you appreciate in your partner. If you are getting ready to chew your partner out in criticism, try reframing the feedback to “I feel ____ when this happens ____, I would prefer _____ going forward.” Another gentle start up borrowed from Brene Brown is leading with, “The story I am telling myself is xyz.” And when you are tempted to go into the blame defense snowball, try interrupting it by buckling into the speaker/listener technique above.

Are you Speaking the same Language?

So often we can feel unloved by a partner simply because we are speaking another language. It can be helpful to know your love language. For example, if touch is your primary love language and a partner’s primary is gift-giving, you might not recognize their gifts as a form of them saying “I love you” and instead pout about the absence of hugs, trying to extrapolate that to mean they don’t love you. A helpful tool I learned in my own processing is to have each person in a couple write out 10-12 items in each love language category that you would be happy to receive love in and share this with your partner. It is not a honey-do list of requirements, but rather a road map to loving each other well. It can also be a self-awareness practice of looking for they ways others offer you love, even if it’s not your dominate way of receiving. When we silo ourselves into one version of what success and love looks like, we often miss the bids for connection from others.

What do we Really Want?

So often we marry someone because of the role they are playing to make us happy. We might be saying we want our partner to be themselves, but underneath is a lusty greed and desperation yelling “I want what I want from my partner, and I want it now.” A liberated partnership looks like showing up as we are and allowing the other to do the same. A commitment to truth is two people being their authentic selves versus pretending to make the other person happy. I am in this relationship today; I choose this person today. Love is the verb versus the empty promise. Knowing that life changes and our partner could choose to leave at any time, makes it that much more meaningful that they choose authentically to stay each day. This moment in life is what everything else was about. As Ram Dass says, “the truth waits for the I not tangled in longing.” Our only contract is with ourselves in the present moment. If we had thought we wanted something in a relationship and that thing changes, then we change the contract.

Cinderella let us down.

The messages we get in our society about love are usually romantic love that builds a Cinderella complex. It’s an illusion, ideal, attraction-based love that thinks love is “out-there” and the perfect partner will make me happy. We are projecting our Disney prince/princess out onto another person, and then left empty, disenfranchised, disillusioned when that person inevitably disappoints our expectation of them.

Real love is something more profound, more poetic, and deeply spiritual. It is when we know that what we are seeking is within. We become more whole in knowing ourselves. As we dive into acceptance of perfectly imperfect humans and relationships, we come to know ourselves more deeply. We can see this person as who they are without our projections onto them and still choose to be with them despite what we find out. It is a real commitment to insight and agency, leaning into spirituality to fill our cup versus a partner.

Marriage is a passage to find ourselves, and see if real love is going to reveal itself beyond the fairy tale illusion. Are we living out a compulsion that we saw modeled from our own parents or are we living as an authentic person in partnership? So often we are desperate for our partner to fill our bucket when we won’t even sit still to stop and let God/the universe/mother nature do the thing we want another human to do for us. If you find yourself in a comparison trap to other people’s relationships or to an expectation of the movies, try to sit still, be with yourself. The answer is always within.

Ester Perel talks about needing to hold loosely the paradox between our mutual need for love and safety, and desire and mystery. We need both the safety of the cabin and the home front, and the mystery of the adventure going to the woods. Both are necessary for a relationship to thrive. It means getting more comfortable with the unknown.

If you want real love, buckle up and enjoy the ride.