How One Little Word Can Save a Marriage

I heard an idea recently that I think might be the key to a happy long-term relationship. And as with so many brilliant ideas, it’s tiny and simple. It has to do with changing one word: “should” to “prefer.”

In relationships, we get very caught up in what our partner should do, give, say and be. We carry into the union our childhood dreams of the perfect person. From fairy tales and romantic comedies we learned that this prince or princess would provide for us, care for us, and cherish us (with the occasional cutesy argument in between). These expectations are nearly impossible to live up to—and yet it’s hard to give up the fantasy. It can feel downright dangerous to accept what we see as “less than perfect.”

That’s when we get into the shoulds. He should know how I feel. She should work harder. He should help more. It’s easy to find fault and believe we’re being mistreated.

But try changing that one little word and see how it feels. It’s the difference between “My husband should do the dishes” and “I’d prefer it if he would do dishes.” Or between “My wife should have sex with me more” and “I’d prefer it if she had sex with me more.” This way we’re not saying that we deserve sex or that there’s some cosmic rule about it, we’re simply saying we wish it could be that way. And we know our wishes don't always come true in the exact way we envisioned them.

It’s softer, with more compassion for another point of view. It leaves room for negotiation and the other person’s preferences. And it recognizes that we can’t demand that our partner want what we want, or conform to our desires. If we have preferences rather than demands, or moral stances, then maybe it’s a little easier to accept that we won’t get everything we want. Or to find the middle ground between two different desires.

Because that’s the work of being in relationships: negotiation, compromise and compassion for the other person’s stance. We ask a lot of our partners, and want most of our needs to be met by one person. But this is not always realistic. How do we know when what we’re not getting is too important to give up? We can start by realizing that what we desire is a preference, not a birthright. That just might make it easier to both find common ground and re-evaluate what we really, really need.

Why Your Spouse Can't Make You Happy

I’ve been working with couples a lot lately, which naturally leads me to thinking non-stop about what makes relationships work. Two of my friends, with actual successful marriages, have said virtually the same thing to me lately: that once they stopped asking their spouse to provide them everything they want, they became happy. One was talking about material goods and one was talking about emotional support, but it came down to the exact same idea, namely that taking care of their own needs allowed them to like their partner more.

The concept behind this has been written about in many books, and goes by names like individuation, differentiation, and independence. It means that we expect too much from our partners, and are more satisfied when we realize that we’re separate from them. Angry that your boyfriend doesn’t take you out to nice dinners? Invite a friend and take yourself out. Frustrated that your girlfriend doesn’t compliment you more? Work on your self-esteem, so your good feelings about yourself come from within.

Of course we want our spouses to give us all the love, attention, caretaking and support we deserve. And yet here I am telling you that you need to get that stuff on your own. I’m not saying that you should expect nothing from your loved one, or that you should accept being treated poorly. It’s just that you can’t even know what you need from someone else until you’re really, really good at providing for yourself. Having a full life, with lots of friends, activities and achievements that fulfill you, is a much better path to satisfaction than asking someone else for it. Once you feel secure that you can give yourself love, support and protection, then you can ask for something realistic from someone else, and appreciate it when you get it.

We spend a lot of time in relationships focused on what we don’t have, and on what’s not working. The truth is, it’s hard to know if your relationship is the best one for you. It’s not a mathematical formula, it’s the kind of thing you just kind of know (hopefully). But how can you assess what you do have if you’re only focused on what you don’t have? One good question to ask yourself is, have I ever been with someone who gave me everything I needed? If the answer is no, you might have to look at the only constant in those relationships—you—and realize that you’ve never been able to provide those things for yourself.

So the hard truth is that no one can give us everything we want. But the other truth, the really, really nice one, is that once we realize we’re asking too much of others, the solution is clear, and accessible. You’re not alone. You need only to turn to yourself for more.

The 5 Clichés That Can Fix Your Relationship

When it comes to relationships, many clichés exist for a good reason: a lot of them are true. Making and keeping long-term connections is, of course, some of the oldest and hardest work humankind has ever undertaken, and there isn’t much that’s new to say about it.

The following five basic truths about relationships form the core of my couples counseling. Yes, you’ve heard them before, but when they are looked into more deeply and practiced more willingly, they often lead to a strong, healthy relationship.

1. The secret to a long-lasting relationship is to not split up.

It’s so clear-cut it almost sounds glib, but sometimes the simplest fact is also the most profound. Relationship longevity, at times, comes down to a decision each partner makes to value being in the relationship above all else. We all get seduced by the idea of a new mate who promises more fascination, more compassion, and more romance (the three qualities quickest to fade after a few years together). One characteristic common to all enduring marriages, however, is a shared sense that a long-term connection is worth more than a short-term one. In other words, the security and stability that can come only after decades together is just as, if not more, important than the pull of a shiny, new partnership.

Long-term relationships are for realists. They aren’t easy. Periods that are lovely tend to be interrupted by periods that are stormy. During those tough times, you might feel as if you’re only staying together because it’s the right thing to do or because there’s no other way to achieve longevity. The commitment is to each other, yes, but during those times when “each other” is not the haven you’d like it to be, the commitment becomes to commitment itself.

2. We marry our parents.

This one is the basic tenet of the kind of psychotherapy I practice. The belief is that we all carry scars from our childhoods—even the happiest childhoods—based on disappointments or conflicts with our parents. As adults, we meet partners who we swear up and down are nothing like those disappointing parents, but one day we wake up and realize, “How did this happen? My partner is exactly as critical as my father was.”

We therapists would say that you’ve chosen this partner in the subconscious hope that your childhood wound could be healed. In other words, if your dad never seemed to fully appreciate you, you fall in love with someone who is also withholding so you can finally get the approval you’ve always been looking for.

Your partner is probably not a mirror image of your dad. Instead of being outwardly critical, he or she might say all the right words but then be easily hurt so you consistently feel you’ve failed. The patterns are rarely obvious, but if you look hard enough, they are almost always there. We recreate in adulthood the most pressing problems from our childhood in the hopes that now we’ll succeed where in the past we could not.

The good news about this cliché is that once we’re aware of the pattern, we can work on what really needs to be healed: our own self-esteem. The key to overcoming a critical parent is not to find a partner who is unerringly supportive and non-judgmental, but instead to silence our own inner critic. Sometimes when we see a pattern in our relationships, we have to look at the only constant, ourselves, to see what needs to be repaired.

3. You can’t love someone else until you love yourself.

When you can accept that a problem isn’t going to be fixed, it has less power. If you have to “win” all the time, you’re going to end up losing the most important prize: the relationship itself.This cliché seems to imply that you can’t have a decent relationship until you reach some sort of mythical, enlightened state of self-love. Instead, I interpret it as meaning that often the best gift you can give to your partner is to know yourself better. Getting to know what you need, what makes you tick, and how to stand up for yourself are tools that can seem to strain a relationship at first but make it stronger in the long run.

This leads to a sub-cliché I often share with the people I work with. Just as they tell you on airplanes to put on your own oxygen mask before you help others with theirs, you can only make your relationship strong when you’re coming from a strong position. “Loving yourself” can be as simple as taking the time to know what makes you angry and why and learning a few tools for calming yourself so that you can communicate clearly even when you’re upset.

4. You can’t change anyone else unless they really want to change.

If you go into a relationship expecting your partner to change, you’re in for a disappointment.

This is not to say that others can’t change, just that they won’t, unless they decide it’s incredibly important. People who see me for therapy tend to express frustration when they hear this. If true love means becoming the best person you can for your partner, then does my partner not changing mean he or she doesn’t love me?

The truth may be less romantic, but it’s also more respectful and more compassionate. When we let our partners know what they are doing hurts us and when they trust that we’ve looked at and worked on our own issues before pointing the finger at them, they are often able to agree to modify their behavior and find a compromise.

The end result, then, of two people who are working on “loving themselves” and “not changing others” is that they’ll give more love and more potential for change to their partners. It sounds paradoxical, but it’s more of a shift in perspective. Mutual esteem will bring change more quickly than critiques and blaming.

5. In relationships, you can be right or you can be happy.

Giving in is sometimes the best place to start. Relationship expert John Gottman talks about dozens of ways to communicate more effectively but reserves space for what he calls “perpetual problems,” or the issues that just aren’t going to get resolved. They’re the ones that come back no matter how many times you fight over them. In a long-term relationship, there will always be a couple of key conflicts that you simply can’t figure out how to solve. If they seem insurmountable, they probably are, and that’s OK.

The trick with these issues is to label them—“There’s our old ‘you spend too much, you’re too cheap’ fight again”—and let them go. Instead of getting angrier and having to prove once and for all that you’re right, how about just walking away? When you can accept that a problem isn’t going to be fixed, it has less power. If you have to “win” all the time, you’re going to end up losing the most important prize: the relationship itself.

Sometimes, to find love, just follow the time-tested, worn-out old tropes. But this time, follow them with intelligence, depth, and complexity. After all, any fool can make something complicated, but it takes real intelligence to make something simple. Or is that too cliché?

Why You Need to Be Needy

When I started working with couples, it seemed clear that the biggest problems came up when they blamed each other for, well, everything. Their anger and contempt and sadness was all a way of saying, “I turned to you and you weren’t there.” In return, I focused on working on their ability to get what they need from themselves instead of from their partner.

But lately I’ve been thinking equally hard about that anger and sadness, and the original question most couples come into therapy with: “Why do I feel like my partner doesn’t have my back?” Primary relationships are supposed to be our safe harbor, the place we turn to for peace and support and a foundation for the pressures of life. And we have a right to ask for our home to be our emotional haven. It makes perfect sense to be needy.

Sue Johnson writes about adult attachment, a concept she expanded from John Bowlby, who theorized that babies form connections with their caretakers based on how secure they feel. Later theorists noted that we take these original styles of attachment and use them in our adult relationships. At the simplest level, this means that if our parent was not very attentive (or neglectful or abusive) when we were babies, we never got the assurance and closeness we needed to be feel safe, and so we have a hard time feeling safe and secure with partners later in life.· Just like babies do, adults feel safer when their partner is nearby, responsive, physically loving and paying them close attention.

Johnson says that, even though our society favors independence and autonomy, we need to feel dependent on our partners. At some level, if our partner is open to us emotionally, compassionate and kind, only then can we feel protected enough to ask for what we need. Paradoxically, it’s this dependence that allows us to move away and also get our needs met in other arenas (since clearly, our partner can’t “fix” us, solve all our problems, or be our whole world—see previous blog post).

Further, if we don’t feel safe and secure with our partner, we tend to become either clingy or distant. And underneath the actions that go along with that—begging for more, nagging, shutting down—is a feeling of isolation and despair. Ultimately, when the one place we turn to for peace and love feels precarious, it’s traumatic.

So my definition of what helps of marriage has expanded. In my office, we look at both sides of the same coin: independence and dependence. As with most things in life, what’s important is balance. We need a little of this, a little of that, and plenty of movement back and forth between the two. And yes, there’s always room for us to close down, or to move away from our mates in order to take better care of ourselves. As long as we remember that it’s right to come back, and it’s okay to need them.