Forget Yourself—Focus on Making Your Partner’s Life Better
Asterisk Note: I hope it goes without saying that self-love matters and not subjecting oneself to abuse or neglect is both healthy and necessary.
5-star review of This is How Your Marriage Ends:
“FINALLY. This book accurately explains why so many relationships fall apart and what can be done to FIX them. I mean really fix them. I've read Brene Brown, Glennon Doyle, Dr. Shefali, The Five Love Languages and more.1 None of them hold a candle to what Matthew Fray has hit upon here. I would trade years of couples therapy for this book. Don't wait another day, buy it, read it and share it with your significant other.” - M.M.P.
This is How Your Marriage Ends is 40% off on Amazon, available in local bookstores, or you can order an author-signed copy here from my friends at Islandport Media.
I was scrolling Substack Notes this morning, and came across this from
.
Alex is a business coach trying to help people like me be better at what I’m doing.
But I couldn’t help but read these words and think “This is what marriage is supposed to be. This is what long-term committed partnership is supposed to be.”
I want to be careful here because context and nuance are often lost in today’s fast-paced digital world. I do NOT mean that you don’t matter. I do NOT mean that you’re not allowed to be sad, hurt, or angry because of what your spouse or partner is doing. I do NOT mean that your partner should matter more than you, and you should compromise your boundaries, values, integrity, and self-respect in order to do whatever they want.
Subservience is rarely useful in a healthy partnership.
So, keep it simple, and heed Mathers’ advice.
Focus on Making Others’ Lives Better
Do this, and trust in the “law” of reciprocity.
Because I’m not saying to bend over backward in order to love and respect your relationship partner, only to have them take, take, take from you now and always.
I AM saying that a beautiful relationship that will last a lifetime is comprised of two people with the same agenda: To serve the other. To serve something greater than themselves.
My job is to wake up every day and do the following (if my aim is to have a long-lasting, healthy relationship):
Know my spouse/partner the best I possibly can. What is important to them? Why? What hurts them? Why? What don’t I know or understand about them? How can I learn it?
Speak and act in a manner that indicates I care about what’s important to them, and that I care about protecting them from injury—large AND small. (Most of our domestic-life conflict revolves around so-called “little things” like laundry and dishes, and who’s bathing the kids, and who’s walking the dog, and the degree to which we can all trust each other to be on the same team in everyday adult scenarios.)
Notice and/or acknowledge when my behavior might signal that I did NOT honor or respect their unique way of experiencing something in our shared lives together. Because I’m human and imperfect, I will undoubtedly do or say things sometimes which might be interpreted by my spouse/partner as me disrespecting or neglecting or mistreating them somehow. (I might be 10 minutes late to something that was really important to them because I mismanaged my time an hour earlier and didn’t realize it. Or I might seem disengaged or blowing them off when they’re sharing something that’s important to them because I’m thinking about or otherwise focused on something else. Or I might have done something as seemingly inconsequential as leaving the toilet seat up, or hurriedly leaving a dish by the sink.) For relationships to survive this over time, we must learn to verbally validate the experience of the other person, even if we think and feel much differently about these situations than they do.
Be a reliable validator, and learn effective repair language. Even if what I think is different than what she thinks, and even if I’m confused about why she feels a certain way about something that doesn’t hit me the same way, and even if I feel misunderstood and inclined to defend myself, I MUST be able to validate the other person. And that happens when I KNOW her, or seek to understand her rather than judge her as wrong or worse than me or somehow weirdly different than me. Example: Is it rational to freak out surprised and angrily because someone just handed you a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and said: “I made one for you too, babe,”? Probably not if those are the only data points we have. But what if the PB&J recipient has a severe, potentially fatal peanut allergy, and believes strongly that the sandwich giver should understand that based on their history together and previous conversations? In either case, is it not understandable that the vulnerable person might be upset? Demonstrating validation of this emotion and learning how to say things like “Holy shit, I can’t believe I just handed you this. I promise I know about your allergy, and that you MUST be able to trust me to not put your health in harm’s way like this. I’m sorry you couldn’t count on me to think about you more considerately when I decided to make these,” is necessary for trust to be maintained in the relationship.
Demonstrate trustworthiness moving forward. And let’s be honest—that’s ONLY if it’s early enough in the relationship that it “makes sense” for the other person to have forgotten that peanut butter might kill his or her partner. If this is a talk they’ve had a bunch of times, then breaking up over something as seemingly “small” and “silly” as a sandwich shouldn’t be so hard to understand. Being handed that sandwich is either, A. A deliberate attempt to sicken or murder, or B. An honest, derpy-derp mistake by someone you really need to trust to not do things which might kill you. Either scenario is a threat to the long-term viability of a relationship for anyone who values themselves and is cautious about who they allow to be close to them.
Join our twice-weekly support group.
To be fair, it’s only twice-weekly for men. We have a men’s-only meeting on Mondays, and a mixed meeting (men and women) on Fridays. The people are great. Come hang out and work on some of your stuff. Learn more about group and 1-on-1 relationship coaching here.
That’s the work of building and maintaining trust in relationships.
You can trust me to think about you and learn about you, and calculate for the different way you experience things relative to me.
And.
In the instances in which I don’t get that part right, you can trust me to listen to you and hear you when you express your thoughts and feelings. EVEN WHEN the subject matter isn’t life or death, and maybe something as seemingly inconsequential as the dish by the sink.
This is how I make my spouse/partner’s life better. This is how I serve something bigger than me.
And if I do that for her, I will be a trustworthy and high-functioning relationship partner.
And if she does that for me, we’ll spend our lives giving more to each other than we take, and always having someone else looking out for us so that neither of us run out of energy or experience the other person selfishly vampire-siphoning from the relationship.
THIS is the way.
This is how you succeed in business and life. By focusing less on the self, and more on helping others.
AND, this is how you succeed in relationships.
Focus on making others’ lives betters. Then you will have what you want.
Focus on making your partner’s life better. Then you will have what you want.
Thanks for the reminder, Alex.
Matthew Fray is the author of “This is How Your Marriage Ends: A Hopeful Approach to Saving Relationships”, a relationship coach, and formerly the blogger at Must Be This Tall To Ride.
P.S. - I know these things can present really small to some of you in your busy lives and marriages/partnerships. But that’s exactly why developing mindfulness and communication habits around these domestic scenarios is so critical to maintaining peaceful, loving relationships. If you have trust erosion, and/or pain points and frustrations around things like this at home, consider working with me as your relationship coach to develop these skills and habits. This stuff matters. Book your next appointment here. - MF
Brene Brown, Glennon Doyle, Dr. Shefali, and Dr. Gary Chapman (author of The Five Love Languages) are all brilliant thinkers and authors whose work has done much for me and the world. Please don’t read my sharing of that book review and it’s super-flattering content about my book as me thinking myself the equal of any of those amazing names mentioned. But also… if you’re just a regular person in a sort-of fucky relationship and you’re super frustrated and can’t figure out what’s wrong? It’s possible my book will help you identify what’s hurting you guys as well as any other. Seriously. - MF
My beloved well-being and happiness is as vital to me as my own.
He is part of me.
We are interdependent emotionally as well as in other ways.
How sadly mis-construed our concepts have become!
Ignorance of recent decades around this simple truth has been gargantuan.
A bumper-sticker while waiting behind a car at a red light woke me up:
"Just give me what you want."
I began with my father, giving to him what I'd wanted from him all my life.
I stopped running from my lovers and picked the one I will never leave.
Twenty-one years later we are so in love with life and each other!
Thank you, Matthew. Let's turn this shipwreck around!