Save your Marriage

SUMMARY

Remember that listening and hearing are not the same things. Listening involves our hearts. Open yours, hear what they say, look at your partner while they speak, paraphrase even, and reassure. When the going gets rough and his not-so-great attributes come forward, rather than focusing on the negative, try switching gears, and point out the positive stuff instead.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

This couple comes to me because they’re, they didn’t want to be married anymore, they were having some problems and they had just gotten married and I just married them and it was like a couple of months later, not even six months into their marriage.

The wife comes to me and says "Hey, I’m done with this; I don’t want to do this anymore. I’m sorry that we’re, you know, because we did the whole like pre-marriage stuff and there was this commitment" Like they were really ready right, excited and loved of course and then all of a sudden they get into the marriage and their fantasy of what marriage is like "Hey once we’re married we’re gonna be happily ever after right" And then they find out oh there’s work that you have to do in this relationship! It’s different when you’re living together, all this stuff comes up from the past, the disagreements like "Wait a minute, why are you talking to me like that?" "This, I would never do it that way" Right, and there are disagreements and people don’t know how to communicate conflicts come up. So there’s a conflict that started coming up and they didn’t know how to deal with it, oh he didn’t know how to deal with it. Well, that’s what she said. She was coming and saying “Hey I come and like share things and he doesn’t freaking communicate, it’s like teeth to get him to like share things he doesn’t want to share things, he avoids, doesn’t want to deal with the problems. I want to deal with these things and not because I want to fight, because I want to better our relationship but he doesn’t come and freaking share, what do I do I can’t be in a relationship like this, it’s not gonna work”. So then I go to him, start sharing with him like what’s up, “I don’t know what the problem is like she wants to just fight about everything. I don’t wanna fight about everything. Like I don't want drama like I want peace, I want to have a good healthy relation wants so she just want to focus on these negative things and I want to focus on the negative things and you know, I don’t wanna share, I don’t want to get into that so then she gets mad because she’s not getting the information out of me”.

So they’re both, right or wrong? What would you say? They’re both right, they both have the right and reason, right? So then I go and I start talking to him like okay, what is the issue here when it comes to communication? What’s the problem here? And going back to like how we got our training, how we all learned our level of communication I started to ask them, what do you think about conflict, about problems? What do you think about it? Well, you know what I mean, they happen in life, ok well, like how is it in your family like how did you learn how to deal with conflict? Because he wasn’t able to do it in his marriage right, so I’m asking him like how was it growing up, I said how was it in your home? Did your parents fight a lot? He’s like “no! they actually like they were really peaceful, they’re really good, my parents are still living, they’re still you know married, they’re still together, they’re so happy, but when I was growing up -he says- whenever there was a problem they would fight, they would keep it behind doors, they wouldn’t show us at the kids like they would do it behind doors, they would take care of their own problems and they wouldn’t show us as children, they wouldn’t bring that in front of us.” And he was very proud of that like he’s like man, you know my parents are amazing, they never showed that to us. So you know what I told them? I said well, this is your problem. “What do you mean my problem? I just told you how amazing my parents are”. Yeah but you never learned how to deal with conflict. When they had a conflict, what did they do? They went and hid it. They kept it from the kids right so the kids never saw the conflict or how to resolve it. So he never saw it, he never learned.

So now he gets married and their conflict comes up and now there’s something really wrong, this is now supposed to be there, so he starts to avoid it and shut down because he doesn’t know how to deal with it. This is not supposed to be happening because of his level of programming does that, that make sense? 

Because he never learned how. 

So where did you get you’re learning from? Where did you get your programming? Where did you get your definition of what communication is and what it should look like?