The most recent and confronting conversation has come with the discussion of future children. I’m amazed at how my friends are able to make such severe, life-altering decisions and I’m even more impressed by the confidence in their marriage.
Suddenly, all the issues I believed only needed to be put up with, have evolved to become glaringly obvious and tiresome. Discussing parenthood was impossible without arduously confronting all we had ever bottled up about each other.
You might finally come to think to yourself, and say out loud to your partner, “If we’re talking or thinking about having a baby, I admit that I can’t have us doing that anymore or I think I’ll just go crazy.” With the reluctant implication, of course, that you’re barely able to put up with it now.
Talking about conflict resolution
The issue seems to come from believing that healthy communication is simply that without the traditional signs of anger and resentment. That is, yelling, loaded accusations, bringing up of the past, using previously-shared and totally unrelated vulnerabilities against the other.
Just because we sterilize ourselves in our speech, it doesn’t mean that we’re expressing ourselves in the way I guess a marriage requires. It’s not enough that we recount the annoying or offending events to our spouses, in a matter-of-fact way as if presenting a witness statement, and then expecting them to be the impartial judges of morality in the very case we brought against them. What I’m trying to say is that it’s impossible to appeal to intimate resolution when we refuse to be intimate with ourselves.
In a cliché way, there are those dark, long-forgotten memories and accumulated wounds that come up in our lives that become our complexes. Those complexes in turn contribute to the way we perceive our pain, and how we believe others are hurting us. It is a long, hard, and painful look in the mirror before we admit why we want affection from our partners in any particular way (whatever that way is), that is the validation we seek for our suffering.
It takes many tries to come to that strange vulnerable place where we can admit that we still love them, and mean it when we say it. To admit that the reasons why we become upset with them is because we have felt so abandoned in certain ways, and without understanding it for ourselves, expect them to become the support we wanted and never had.
Weirdly, it’s only another signal to learn how to become that support for ourselves, and then explaining to them, in the vulnerable way of truly trusting them with that information. Not so they can become for us that part of nature which we missed in development, but so they can be patient with us, to understand the meaning behind our patterns, and to help them show up for us when the days are too long and we miss the mark on unrelated things.
The requirement of vulnerability
Sometimes my anger is too self-justified. Sometimes, it’s too self-righteous and it blinds me to the current issue which is much smaller than my pain suggests that it is. Those old wounds of the past are struck by some seemingly unrelated event, and my emotional reaction carries a disproportionate strength so I’m really very unstable.
Had I never learned that self-intimacy takes time, I might have believed that any emotional complaint was just another mysterious working of nature on the feminine body. I might never have learned the importance of expressing things in a way that trusted him. I might have always believed that the only way forward for him to endlessly prove himself was by presenting the impossible task. I’d have him push the rock uphill, fail at it, and do it again until I was satisfied that he had suffered enough in my name. It is some perverse way of making the other as miserable as I was/am with myself, his companionship in that suffering being my only known comfort.
If I take the time to understand (and express) why I’m so hurt and which pain of the past is coming forth, the understanding that appears on my husband’s face when I explain it is what makes the effort worth it. He might understand better why I feel so strongly about eating out that night instead of cooking, or why I just want time alone. There’s greater emotional weight behind postponing a trip, or designing changes to the plans of our buying a house. For now, there’s a reason behind why I’m rejecting every single idea, why I’m extra cold and distant, or why I’m obsessing over some stupid thing that doesn’t matter. No decisions are made within the next 48 hours or moon cycle, but I want my moods, my crazy ideas and compulsions to exist in a safe, accepting space while I manage what’s coming to the surface for me.
Suddenly, those things that annoyed me that I had only previously put up with, now made a lot more sense. I can manage a little better, so my husband can understand my moods more reliably. Those dying, ignored parts of me a little more revived, knowing that I didn’t forget them and they weren’t abandoned to die. He understands that there are still yet things I want for him and for us, before we continue further into the discussions of future children. He is patient, knowing now that he’s more to me than someone who there are many things to tolerate but I otherwise love. I’d like to show him that I trust him more because I think somewhere in this work, there’s a stranger, possibly more interesting future. I hope he sees that I truly believe it, and that I’m trying to put more love in front of us.
In those conversations, I see in his more softened face when his walls are a little less guarded against me. It’s the person who I have hurt for so long, relaxing from the knowledge that truly, I’m not saying these things because I’m only looking for flaws, another target of a bad mood. It’s my husband! Even more so, I glimpse behind his expression for the first time, the face of my child’s father.