Should Your Partner Always Do What You Want Them To?
Where's the line between someone enforcing healthy boundaries and demanding that their partner obey their wishes?
One partner says Hey, something that’s happening, or something you said or did has resulted in a negative outcome for me and I don’t like it.
Then the other partner says Don’t effing blame me for whatever your problem is, I didn’t do anything wrong, and I don’t like how it feels when you speak to me that way. You’re not my parent. I don’t have to think, feel, say, and do whatever you tell me to do.
Then the two people argue and fight and feel bad for a while. In most hetero relationships (this happens in same-sex couples too, obviously) the wife or girlfriend often wants to communicate until there’s shared understanding and repair. And her husband or boyfriend often wants to stop talking about it because he doesn’t understand why she’s as upset with him as she seems to be over something that wouldn’t upset him that much, and about which he’d never start a fight.
She believes that if they talk long enough, they’ll figure it out, and things will get better.
He believes that if they stop talking, they’ll calm down emotionally, reset, and things will get better.
In most relationships comprised of people lacking high-end relational and communication skills, doing EITHER thing damages the relationship.
Do you see it? If either of them get their way (and one of them will), the relationship will suffer if not navigated effectively.
If they do what she wants, he’ll continue to feel more attacked, shut down more, and invalidate all of her expressed emotions if they don’t make sense to him that she’s thinking or feeling the things she says. She’ll get resentful, and whenever the fight mercifully breaks for him, she’ll feel more abandoned and more alone in the relationship, while he’s relieved the fight is over.
But damage was done. Pain was felt. Trust was eroded.
Too embarrassed to be seen reading a book titled “This is How Your Marriage Ends”?
Five-star review from R.O. Call:
“My wife has begged me to read this book for over a year, but I was stubborn and defiant and refused. Our problems couldn't possibly be solved by a book. I had a change of heart and mindset and started the audiobook on a road trip this past week. I didn't want the trip to end. It was like Matt had been sitting in my living room for the past three years. The "invalidation trifecta" [sic] is real. I learned more in ten hours of driving than I have in two years of couples therapy. We are not out of the woods yet, but I think we can see it from here.”
If they do what he wants, she’ll continue to feel completely disregarded, unheard, invisible, abandoned, and alone whenever things get a little emotionally uncomfortable or inconvenient. While he’s playing a game or otherwise moving on and distracting himself and “getting over it,” she’s reminded that whenever she expresses pain or problems, he only cooperates with her to solve them on his terms. Only when he agrees to the seriousness or importance of the incident. He only validates and demonstrates love and care when he thinks and feels like she does. If he doesn’t? He dismisses, minimizes, and prioritizes ending the conversation and “moving on.”
But damage was done. Nothing was repaired—again. And now the pattern has fully emerged for them.
For her? He always gets to decide whether I’m allowed to hurt or not. He always gets to decide whether my concerns are important. If I bring a problem or pain point to him, I only experience love and support when he arrives at the same conclusion that I do. If he doesn’t? He abandons me in favor of whatever he wants to do, and that’s forever the pattern in our marriage/relationship, and I don’t know how many years I’m willing to spend doing that.
For him? She is constantly finding new and different ways to remind me how I’m letting her down. She totally wanted to get married and indicated she liked and wanted and respected me, and even though I’m more or less EXACTLY the same guy doing the same stuff as when we were dating, she’s now moved the goalpost and changed the rules. What used to be good enough isn’t good enough anymore! It’s bullshit. She’s betraying and abandoning me because I don’t agree to think and feel all of the same things that she does.
It’s Not Always This Exact Pattern, Of Course, But it Mostly Is
So two people who used to get along really well and loved each other enough to forsake all others to share a life together are now angry at one another with some frequency and consistency.
The other partner is less a source of joyful companionship, and more this unfair judge of what I think and feel, and it seems to get a tiny bit worse every week or month.
Which brings me to my thought for the day:
Either,
Your partner is a good person worthy of love and an appropriate judge of what is and is not okay for them to experience, or
They’re not worthy of that. They’re not a good person, or they’re not worthy of love, and they’re not an appropriate decider of whether something hurts them, or scares them, or saddens them, or angers them, or stresses them, or any other negative experiences all of us are trying to avoid or lessen as much as possible.
If you’re in a marriage or long-term relationship, and your partner attempts to tell you that something is wrong, and the result of them doing that is you two arguing, I hope you’ll consider which of those two ideas you believe to be true about them.
And IF you believe they’re a good person, worthy of love, and an appropriate, competent, fair-minded evaluator as to whether what’s happening to them is good or bad, then I hope you can be trusted to communicate that you want good things to happen to them, and COOPERATE with them any time they’re trying to say that they’re experiencing something bad EVEN IF your intentions are good, and even if YOU wouldn’t feel the exact way that they do about whatever has happened.
Most of us aren’t raised with awareness and habits in our human relationships that result in us handling these situations with a lot of grace and care.
Most of us are inclined to prioritize our own feelings and feel upset that those bad feelings are a result of something our partner (who we thought was supposed to love us and help shield us from bad things) did or said to us.
And while we’re busy trying to escape pain or protect ourselves from any more of it, what we do and say often destroys connection and intimacy and trust between us.
There’s a way out, of course.
Understand what’s happening. You have to learn how to see and name the pattern, so your brain knows when to change course.
Develop skills and habits that stop this stuff from happening. (What’s scary about not doing it, is that it more often than not leads to a LONG downward painful spiral that won’t end quickly. It will drag out for many years. It will hurt your hearts and minds and kids and family and friends and bank accounts.)
If necessary, get therapeutic help to rise above your individual triggers, negative habits, and sensitivities when these moments arise in our home and relational lives.
I can help you with the first two. If you’d like to work with me one on one, as a couple, or in our twice-weekly group meetings, click the blue button to learn more.
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
100 percent accurate! Eventually, the one “who always has to complain about something and can’t just be happy” stops communicating their inconvenient feelings to their spouse/partner, suffers in silence feeling abandoned, unloved, unimportant, and unseen. It was comforting knowing you get that, as you talk about it in your book.