Making Marriage Simple (3 page)

What goes on behind the scenes
.

If you’re reading this and thinking, “But wait, there is no resemblance between my partner and my parents,” let us clarify: Your partner may not
look
like your parents, and on the surface they may not
act
like your parents. But you will end up
feeling the same feelings you had as a child
when you were with your parents. This includes the sense of belonging and the love you felt. But it also includes the experience and upset of not getting all your needs met.

RELIVING CHILDHOOD

We call the result of not getting all of your needs met your “childhood wounding.” You become sensitive in the present to what was missing in the past. Our unconscious mind is set up so that the only way to heal these wounds is to have someone with traits like our caregivers learn how to give us what we needed—and missed out on—in childhood. Though frustrating to endure, this design of relationship has a wondrous plan: to heal each other’s childhood wounds.

Rest assured that when we talk about childhood wounding, we’re not blaming anyone’s parents (ours or yours). The reality is that nobody’s parents were perfect. Ask any one of our six kids if we were perfect, and they will assure you we’re
certainly
not! But even when parents are great, there are ways their parenting misses the mark. In other words, it’s impossible to parent “perfectly.”

So whether your parents were lousy, or if their wounding was more subtle, the results generally fall into two categories. Your parents were either overinvolved, which left you feeling controlled and smothered.

Or your parents were underinvolved, which left you feeling abandoned.

As a young girl, I felt smothered by the expectations of others. My parents required me to be sweet and thoughtful to everyone, no matter how I really felt. Born and raised in the South, my whole culture expected me to be a gracious Southern Belle who pleased others. I was even taught how to execute a perfect
curtsey—seriously, I was expected to
bow
to others. Busy volunteering at the hospital, my mother was rarely around when I got home from school. And, like her, I was expected to volunteer the majority of my free time.

Now fast-forward to my marriage.

You’d think I’d be the perfect wife, caring for Harville in every way.…

Well, the truth is yes … and no.

When we got married, I vowed to be the best wife I could be to Harville. Utterly devoted, I prided myself on paying attention to all the details of his life—every single one of them. Pretty soon, I felt like I knew him better than he knew himself. (Oh dear, watch out!)

When friends asked Harville a question, I’d often proudly jump in and answer. I’d set out his breakfast and pridefully cook dinner for him without asking what he wanted. I didn’t have to
ask. Because I already knew. Given his love of
Star Trek
, I just knew he’d be delighted with the
Star Trek
mugs and bath towels I surprised him with from time to time. I was so attentive to Harville that if you wanted to know how he was doing, all you had to do was ask me.

Given all I was doing for him, I assumed he felt so lucky to be married to me. Then one day, Harville did something SO completely out of character. He SNAPPED! I’d never seen him so angry. I was shocked. Hurt. And
so
confused. How could he not appreciate
all
that I was doing? After he calmed down, he explained that in all my efforts, I’d never actually
asked
him what he wanted. This was stunning feedback. I’d assumed I already knew, but instead Harville felt utterly eradicated.

In spite of my many efforts, I was failing to meet any of Harville’s real needs. I was doing things for him, but I wasn’t connecting with him.

The patterns from my childhood wounding fit perfectly with Harville’s. Both of Harville’s parents died when he was young and he was sent to live with his older sister, Rosa Lee, when he was six. She tried to do everything she could for him. And she was great in many ways. But she had other children to care for. And she was his older sister. So she wasn’t as attuned to Harville as his mother had been. How could she be? As a result, Harville felt very lonely. His primary childhood wounding was abandonment.

My doing things for Harville without really being connected with him brought up these same childhood feelings. Once again he was being abandoned, but this time by his wife.

It wasn’t a mistake that our childhood wounding fit together so well. Remember, when Romantic Love strikes, you will be
drawn to a person whose behaviors make you re-experience the feelings you had with your caregivers.

So remember, your unconscious mind chose your partner. It knew that in order to heal your childhood wounds, you had to feel these emotions again as an adult. Marriage gives you this chance to relive memories and feelings from your childhood,
but with a different, happier outcome
. As a child you were helpless. As an adult, you have power. You can work with your partner so that each of you gets your needs met.

BUT HERE’S SOME GOOD NEWS

All this may seem like a terrible tangle. But since partnership is designed to resurface feelings from childhood, it means that most of the upset that gets triggered in us during our relationship is from our past. Yes! About 90 percent of the frustrations your partner has with you are really about
their
issues from childhood. That means only 10 percent or so is about each of you right now. Doesn’t that make you feel better?

MYSTERY DECODED!

Romantic Love delivers us into the passionate arms of someone who will ultimately trigger the same frustrations we had with our parents, but for the best possible reason! Doing so brings our childhood wounds to the surface so they can be healed.

You’d think that with this potential for healing, your relationship would get a whole lot better in a hurry. And eventually it will get a whole lot better.

But there’s some challenging work to be done first.

Truth #1: Romantic Love Is a Trick
EXERCISE: THEN AND NOW

First:

1. Write down the frustrations you remember that you had with your childhood caregivers and how you felt (you can use “Frustrations Then and Now” on
this page
, which is part of the exercise program at the back of the book). The frustrations can be a specific event or a general experience.

Reminder: Caregivers include whoever was responsible for your care when you were a child, for example, a parent, older sibling, relative, or babysitter
.

2. List the ongoing frustrations you have with your partner and how these make you feel. List as many as you can—including both petty annoyances and those things that really irritate you.

3. Look over the two lists, noting any similarities.

Then:

Talk over the similarities between the two lists with your partner. As you share, you’ll notice the curiosity growing between you. It’s hard to feel curious and frustrated at the same time. In the exercise for Truth #7 (Negativity Is a Wish in Disguise) you will practice how to turn the more challenging frustrations you have with your partner into specific requests for growth and healing.

And Remember
:
Ninety percent of our frustrations with our partner come from experiences from our past. That means only 10 percent of the frustrations you currently have are about each other
.

TRUTH #2
Incompatibility Is Grounds for Marriage

H
ARVILLE

Why will the work on your marriage be challenging? Not only is the person you’re married to like your parents, but the two of you are also incompatible. It’s as if there is a universal design and, mysteriously, our incompatibility seems to be a key piece of this plan. As you’ll see, incompatibility plays a crucial role in preparing you and your partner to meet each other’s needs.

This is why we say that incompatibility
is
grounds for marriage.

And, honestly, compatibility is grounds for boredom.

We’ve seen it time and again. People want to believe they’ve fallen in love with someone who is a lot like them. But the fact is we’re drawn to people who are, in certain ways, our polar opposite. This is why Romantic Love needs to be such a powerful force. Without it, we’d see the truth of our incompatibility right away—and run screaming in the other direction!

Helen and I were
really
incompatible. I grew up on a sharecropper’s farm in rural Georgia. She grew up in a mansion overlooking a lake in Dallas. I was dirt poor. She was Texas-oil rich. My father died just after I was born, leaving my mother alone with
nine children on a mortgaged one-hundred-acre farm. Mom died when I was six years old. One of the few things Helen and I had in common was this: I grew up an orphan in the care of my older sisters; she grew up “orphaned” in a house with busy household staff and even busier parents.