Staying in your own business is the number 1 tool when it comes to your happily ever after. But what are the biggest challenges to staying in your own business?
There are two main elements I see that make it difficult to stay in your own business:
Blending and judging.
Let’s look at how blending and judging act as stumbling blocks for your relationship.
Why does blending make it difficult to stay in your own business?
When you fall in love, and especially when you have sex with your partner, there’s this wonderful connection feeling: It’s like we’re the same person. All the boundaries between I and thou disappear and that haunting existential loneliness of being a human disappears.
This feeling—we’re the same person—causes confusion because it’s hard to stay in your own business. You have a thought and you’re positive your partner feels the same way. And, when you’re falling in love, many of your thoughts are aligned.
Then you land in love: that stage of everyday love where you’re no longer twitterpated and you’re trying to get the bills paid and the dog walked.
I am a huge fan of landed love. It’s the birth place of truly unconditional love, and the greatest intimacy I’ve ever known. But sometimes the transition between falling and landing can leave you bruised.
The example I use of this is how I asked my husband for years to make our bed and he just couldn’t hear me. If I’m honest, I was asking dirty and you can hear the whole story about that in episode 29.
Rather than focus on my dirty or clean ask right now, however, let’s focus on my blending and why that was causing trouble in my relationship.
I was typically up and out of bed before my husband. Each day, after he woke up, he’d stumble out to the kitchen to make coffee, leaving the sheets tangled and the blankets bunched up.
I thought I was clearly communicating that I wanted David to make the bed. Why wasn’t he hearing me?
The answer is romantic
The gorgeous thing about romantic love is that blending feeling. Sex is the epitome of this blending. That orgasmic moment when the boundaries that define you and the boundaries that define your partner disappear and you are ONE.
This ONEness erases the existential angst we all live with. Those lovely sex hormones erase that feeling of separateness and make you feel like you and your partner are one person.
Now watch the Black Hole of Confusion that gets built inside of me because of this feeling of ONEness:
- David and I are one person.
- We want the same things.
- I want a made bed.
- So, David must want a made bed.
Pretty ridiculous, right?
But wait. It gets worse.
It does NOT occur to me to question this made-bed-truism because, after all, we are the same person and I want a made bed because a made bed is what happily married people have and I want to see that we are happily married each time I walk into our bedroom.
And then—shock of the century—I walk into the bedroom and there it is: a rumpled pile of sheets and blankets.
Now I get afraid. (But my fear disguises itself as anger.)
Isn’t that funny that seeing an unmade bed is freaking me out? But I know I’m not alone in this wacky way of seeing the world.
Your hormone-filled brain desperately wants to believe the premise that you and your partner are the same person, too. It’s terrifying to question that. So, instead of questioning that you’re the same person, you question your partner’s intention about the tiny thing, like the unmade bed.
I decide David’s message to me is I don’t care all that much about maintaining our love. I’ll leave that to you, Rebecca. I’m sure you’ll take care of our love life the way you make our bed each day.
I arrive at this fear:
a) Because of my set point from the way I grew up. My parent’s divorced. I’m sure David and I will be divorcing any moment. Now, I’ve found the moment: the unmade bed will be the death of our marriage.
b) So, I leap to the far-flung conclusion that IF David loved me, THEN he would care about a made bed.
Armed with this (false) awareness, each time I see those sheets and blankets piled up, I practice this message in my head: David doesn’t care about our marriage.
Of course, this is my fear talking. Because the template in my head was that marriage doesn’t work, I was pre-programmed to see evidence for the impending divorce I knew was coming.
The minute I learned how to unblend and let David be his own person with preferences about blankets and sheets, I realized it was never about our marriage. David just doesn’t value a made bed enough to take the time to smooth the covers.
You end up in your partner’s business for romantic reasons: you love your partner. You feel that ONEness that lovers get. It’s a great reason.
But it still causes a lot of confusion, and, because of the confusion, conflict.
Why does judging make it difficult to stay in your own business?
When you judge your partner, you want them to be different. Sometimes this judgment is born from those blended feelings.
I regularly said things to David like, “You should care about making our bed.” What I didn’t say—because I was so afraid—was:
A made bed is sort of a symbol to me. It says we care about the romance of our marriage. When you make the bed, I feel cozy and cared for. Would you be willing to make our bed?
But I was too afraid to say all of that. That is hyper vulnerability. After all, I had told myself the story that David didn’t care about our marriage, and, if I drew attention to it by telling him exactly what I wanted, he might just say:
Oh. I don’t really care about our bed. For that matter, I don’t really care about our romance. You know, I’ve been thinking about this, and, now that you bring it up, I’ve decided I’m done being married to you.
Isn’t that silly? Now that I have all this distance and all this perspective and all this ability to stay in my own business, I can see how ridiculous it all is.
But that’s where I see couples get confused all the time. The blended feeling makes you feel like you can read your partner’s mind. Then you’re puzzled because your partner’s actions send a contradictory story, and, instead of questioning the initial premise—that you know exactly what your partner is thinking—you tell a worse story inside your head.
And out pops judgment: You should be different!
“Should” is a clue to stay in your own business
The word “should” is your clue that you are lost in a land of judgmental thoughts about your partner.
How often do you think, “My partner should…fill in the blank…”
- Put their dirty dishes in the dishwasher
- Kiss me when they walk in the door
- Ask about my day
The list goes on and on.
But every time that word “should” shows up—even in your thought, maybe ESPECIALLY in your thoughts—you are polluting your relationship’s happily ever after.
You’re in your partner’s business.
Judging is you wanting your partner to be different than they are. Blending is believing you and your partner think exactly the same thing.
Date Night Discussion
You blend because you are romantic partners. And when you blend, you make assumptions about your partner. Those assumptions are what gets toxic for your relationship.
The antidote to assumptions and expectations is instead to get curious.
To spark your curiosity this week, I invite you to play Would You Rather?
Here’s a couple of examples…
…of Would You Rather? questions that you could play with your partner to unlock some of those assumptions that your blended mind has created:
- Would you rather have a dedicated night that we know we’re going to have a sexual encounter, or would you rather have one of us initiate and be in charge of getting the other person turned on?
- Would you rather wake up to a clean kitchen in the morning, or would you rather be able to linger over dinner and not worry about the dishes at night and just fall into bed at a relaxed pace?
- Would you rather have a dedicated time that we sit down and put our feet in each other’s lap and ask about our days, or would you rather come home and be able to do our own things and just trust that we’ll find time to know about each other and not drift apart?
Can you see how when you ask these kinds of questions, you begin to unpack and understand what is important to your partner, instead of assuming?
Can you see how those kinds of questions help you to unblend?
This week’s habit for your happily ever after:
Instead of saying “should” when talking to your partner, simply change the word to “would.” Then it sounds like:
- “Would you be willing to put your dishes in the dishwasher?”
- “Would you be willing to kiss me when you come home?”
- “Would you be willing to ask me about my day?”
The reason this is so powerful is that you are giving your partner agency.
Think of the character of relationship that you’re creating when you change, “You should,” into “Would you?” Instead of the finger wag of shame, you’re motioning, come to me.
If you want to hear more about this idea of changing should to would, listen to episode 4 of my podcast.
For now, just concentrate on how you can change things at your house this week by listening each time you say “You should,” and see if you can switch it to “Would you?”
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