Since I changed how I live with my wife last year, trying to do away with selfish and self-centeredness, I’ve been exceptionally fearful and I haven’t written much about it. When I was wrapped up with how awesome I was, I’d built up walls that protected me from hurt… and my wife wasn’t afraid to dole it out from time to time.
Then, just like that, the way I’d been living just wasn’t good enough anymore and I started to change.
Now, to the point of this post; my wife and I used to sweep a lot of hurtful stuff under the rug because we were both afraid to fully talk about anything for fear of that leading to a massive fight. Forgive the phrasing, but when you sweep stuff under the rug, eventually it piles up to a point you have to walk around the rug rather than over it. That was us.
With this new way of life, I chose to ditch the fear. My wife, too. We began talking about some serious issues that caused a lot of fear and pain in our marriage and, when we got to something my wife felt I’d done wrong, rather than look for ways to deny it, I learned to own my stuff. Fearlessly and without flinching. If my wife was mistaken, I’d look at my behavior and, if what she was saying was reasonable, I’d say something like, “I never had that in my heart, but I can understand why you took it that way”. We didn’t justify the other’s feelings if they weren’t accurate, but we didn’t hold them against each other anymore, either.
Today, after eight months of practicing this, nothing goes under the rug. Nothing. My wife and I can talk about anything that we need to without the fear of the other taking advantage.
Now, it wasn’t always like this. My wife used to hammer me by weaponizing what I said. She’d take a snippet of something I said and turn it into a strawman that she could easily strike down. I got frustrated with that approach so I learned to just clam up and not talk about anything important. Before long, that morphed into not caring and withdrawal from the marriage. My wife did the same and would throw in the silent treatment in… until everything blew up under the pressure and we got into a massive donnybrook.
The miracle was that we started working together on these things rather than trying to make points off of them. Today, if I’m feeling a little hurt, I can say so and my wife won’t turn it back on me. We’ll talk it through. That shoe also fits on the other foot as well. My wife can come to me with anything and we negotiate that stuff out. We’ve gotten so good at negotiating, we rarely bother with fighting anymore.
We’ve built our marriage on a solid foundation. Today we don’t have to worry about sweeping anything under the rug. In fact, I’m pretty sure we can throw the rug away.
Fit Recovery 