I love my wife. I used to roll my eyes when people would say, “I married my best friend.” Then, I found her, and now I totally get it.
She makes me laugh. She’ll try things that I love that are new to her. She takes me places I’ve never been. I should shut up. If you married your best friend, you get it. If you haven’t found that person yet, there’s probably nothing I could say to have you understand; I hope you find that person.
I love her. Then, there are patterns we fall into where we absolutely(!) do not get along. Two of these places are:
a) Any time we are travelling out of town for a couple days or longer.
b) Any time someone is coming to visit.
The pattern is completely predictable. She looks around and sees A TON that needs to be done to get ready. I look around and see that all we really need to do is lock the doors and water the plants – tidy up a bit if people are coming.
I tell her I don’t see that much to do, that I am happy to help, and to just let me know what needs to be done.
From there we spiral into a fight. If we’re travelling, two out of three times it reaches a point where I throw up my hands and say, “We should just cancel the whole trip!” Then we go on the trip and 2-3 hours after arriving, we start being best friends again. If people are visiting, its usually once they’ve been here for a few hours and we’re getting ready for bed where friendship reestablishes itself. Totally predictable.
Here’s a great sign you aren’t listening. You keep having the same conversation and it isn’t going the way you want it to.
I was not listening. When she showed signs of being annoyed, I felt threatened. The experience of threat is a predictable place where people stop listening and start defending, which is exactly what I was doing.
The work I did to manage the experience of threat is a story for another time. Once I did that work, however, it made real listening possible.
Real listening is fully getting another’s perspective without adding, subtracting, or judging anything. When real listening is present, magic happens.
We were a couple weeks out from a Thanksgiving trip. The predictable pattern started to unfold. I got defensive. She started to say something she had said dozens of times before. A lightbulb came on. I’m not listening!
Then I got very interested in how the world looks to her. What I hadn’t been hearing is that, when I look to her to tell me what to do, she feels like she has to be the boss. She doesn’t want to be the boss! She wants to be a partner and a buddy! She wants to be with her best friend!
Which is exactly what I want!!
It’s hard to put to words what happened next. The language that comes easiest is to say we solved the problem together. Except… the experience of “problem” disappeared. What was present in its place was partnership and creativity. In that space the next obvious step was to make a checklist of everything that there is to do to prepare for us going or people coming. Included on the checklist are things like, “smoosh faces” – our little phrase for lovingly embracing, cheek to cheek.
We’ve travelled four times since then and had visitors once. We have had zero fights.
That’s frickin’ magic.
Here’s what you can do with this.
1. Find a place where you keep having the same conversation that doesn’t go the way you want it to.
2. Ask yourself, what am I not getting?
3. Repeat step 2 until a lightbulb comes on.
And, if this resonates with you,
book a time with me here to discuss what it would take for you to have a breakthrough in moving your commitments forward – whether that be in your professional or personal life. As far as we know, you get one life. Make it magical.
