What Evidence Do You Leave Your Loved Ones?
Everything you say and do, whether you're aware of it or not, is a piece of evidence for your spouse or partner indicating how trustworthy you are.
Every day, everything we do and say (and how we do and say them) leaves a trail of evidence. I know it’s a lot to think about and consider. Every. Single. Thing. Sorry to break the news.
When we’re kids, generally just our parents, siblings and a few friends are ever affected by or care about what we’re doing.
When we’re school roommates or coworkers or neighbors, the stakes might increase slightly.
But where it impacts us (and our partner) most, is in our romantic relationships—particularly when we co-habitat in a long-term committed partnership.
And I offer the following as simply as I know how to say it.
Every person alive and every person who has ever lived has their own individual positive and negative experiences. Their own pros and cons list. How they experience everything that happens to them is specific to them. There are things they experience as good. There are other things they experience as bad.
I am allergic to penicillin. What has been used millions of times to save lives from bacterial infection can kill me. This really good, curing, healing substance that helped revolutionize medicine is more like a poison for me. That means people who care about me, and are aware of my medical allergy, should be trusted to not feed me penicillin. If I can’t trust them to do so, our relationship will suffer. I might lose complete trust in them, because whether they’re being intentional, or accidentally thoughtless, they still might kill me.
This is the work of human relationships. These are the seemingly tiny, everyday things that produce beautiful, lasting relationships, or slowly rot them from the inside until one or both partners wish to escape.
And the really difficult part is identifying those nuanced things in your everyday life. Situations which might negatively impact your partner, but which are totally invisible to you because you never even think about them.
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Consider this recent car ride with my son.
Like me, he is a captain in the ADHD squad. According to psychiatrist and author Dr. William W. Dodson, children with ADHD hear 20,000 more negative messages—criticisms and judgments, essentially—by the age of 12 than their friends and siblings who do not have ADHD. Learning this prompted me to focus more intently on how I speak to him.
He’s nearly 16, a high school sophomore, and routinely does or doesn’t do things that sometimes trigger me to offer some sort of criticism or corrective feedback. He's my favorite person, ever, and I couldn’t love him more or be more proud of him.
Yet, when I saw his wrinkly pants when I was driving him to school the other morning, I was quick to give him shit because it seemed to me to be such an easy thing to not do. I suggested that he looked like a bum and that no one’s going to want to date him.
But he wasn’t trying to look unkempt. It wasn’t his aim. And he definitely wasn’t trying to irritate me. He was just living his life and failed to consider the consequences of not planning ahead more effectively for school the next day, which is the story of his life, and mine.
I recognized my tone pretty quickly, and gave him a reassuring, I love you, kid shoulder squeeze and asked him to try to practice more thoughtfulness around his laundry needs from now on (which didn’t work because he did this identical thing with a wrinkly, tennis-bagged quarter-zip pullover a couple of days later).
I’m not against criticizing certain behaviors, and I’m certainly not against trying to turn poor decisions into teaching moments. But what I’m determined to stop doing is saying or doing things which might be interpreted by him as me thinking he’s not good enough. That he’s dumb. That he’s weak. That he’s bad. That he’s always doing things the wrong way. That I’m not proud of him.
Sometimes it’s commenting on wrinkly pants, sometimes it’s leaving dishes by the sink, or where you throw your shoes, or how you always get more of that thing at the grocery store and there’s no more room in the pantry and Why can’t you just check the fucking pantry before getting another bottle of taco sauce?!?!, and it all seems so tedious and lame. “So now I’m a bad husband because we have a few extra bottles of taco sauce?! Good grief. Imagine if I complained as much as she does about something so petty!”
Truly the story of my failed marriage.
Sometimes these little nuanced things are even more subtle and more a result of miscommunication and misunderstanding than anyone actually doing anything wrong or harmful.
These are the moments that make or break relationships, and always will be. Not one time. But the consistency and predictability with which they happen over the long haul is what slowly destroys what once was.
And the longer you’re together, the worse it gets.
Because for the person whose allergic to the otherwise healing medicine, or the person who feels tinges of pain because of perceived criticisms or what we all understand should be a harmless dish by the sink, they can only conclude one of two things.
1. My partner knows me really well after all of these years together. They are well informed and aware of my wants and needs. Therefore, the fact that I keep feeling hurt or disrespected or unwanted or unloved because of these little everyday occurrences suggests that he or she is doing them somewhat intentionally. That’s how invisible and unknown and unheard and unloved and unimportant I am to them.
Or.
2. My partner doesn’t seem to know me very well after all of these years together. I’ve tried to keep them well informed and aware of my wants and needs. Therefore, the fact that I keep feeling hurt or disrespected or unwanted or unloved because of these little everyday occurrences suggests that he or she continues to hurt me accidentally no matter what I say or do. That’s how invisible and unknown and unheard and unloved and unimportant I am to them.
The work always has been, and always will be, protecting our loved ones from having that experience with us. The experience of indifference. The experience that we only demonstrate awareness around the things that matter to us, and rarely, and often at the expense of, things that matter to them.
It’s not convenient to do this work. It’s not easy. It’s not always fun. But this is what it means to love others. To handle with care the things that matter to them, even if these things are sometimes not so obvious to us.
I hope my son remembers to not leave school clothes wadded up in his tennis bag moving forward.
But much more so, I hope I remember to communicate my love for him by not saying or doing something he might experience as a lack of immense pride in him on my part.
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.
I appreciate the perspective shift here… the growth transformation from selfish, inconsiderate, grocery shopper husband to reflective, self-aware individual who practices empathy with others. Whether you were going for that or not, nicely done. A good read!