John was happy, confident and successful when he met the woman he would marry.
She bowled him over. She was vivacious, gregarious, and the life of the party.
It wasn’t until they moved in together that he noticed a shift in her.
When they were home alone together, she would confess her suspicions about their acquaintances. Everyone had a flaw. Her job was a joke. She was sick and tired of where they lived. Her friends were idiots.
John felt uncomfortable when she made fun of other people, but he shrugged it off. She just had a different sense of humor. She liked being sarcastic and he didn’t, but that didn’t mean either of them was wrong.
They got married, and John had never been happier. This was the woman he wanted to spend the rest of his life with.
Yet it was like he was married to two different women: the woman she was in public, whom everyone loved and admired…
And the woman she was in private, who had nothing but bad things to say about other people (and nothing but good things to say about herself).
He tried to cheer her up. He loved making her laugh. But at some point he noticed that he was no longer exempt from her sharp wit.
She made comments about him, mocking him for being impatient, for not anticipating her needs, for being messy, for forgetting appointments.
She always accompanied her comments with a laugh. “You know I love you!” she sang out gaily. “Don’t get so offended.” Then she’d kiss him, and he’d shrug off how much the comment stung.
But her comments lingered. There was something familiar about how they felt.
If he’d taken the time to think about it, he might have realized that his mother had been critical of him, too.
He’d never felt good enough for her. Growing up, he’d accepted that he deserved everything his mother said about him. He knew he had to work even harder than most to be a good person. The praise he wanted never came.
So perhaps it was no surprise when, a year into their marriage, John began feeling like he was becoming a child around his wife.
He tried to please her, but nothing he did was ever good enough. She seemed to take distinct pleasure in shooting him down.
“It’s like she’s an attack dog,” he told his friends. “She sees me, and she can’t help but bite. But there’s no malice in it. It’s just the way she is.”
But there was something else going on…
John was becoming fearful around her.
He’d tense up until he saw what mood she was in. He never knew whether she’d be loving or whether she’d be in attack mode.
Sometimes, the attacks came out of nowhere. Like when they were making love, and she prodded his soft belly with a sneer. Or when he’d made her dinner, and she told him she wasn’t really in the mood for his cooking.
So John did what he’d grown up doing:
He tried even harder.
He did more for his wife. He treated her like a queen.
It never occurred to him that, if she were the queen, he should be a king. Instead, he saw himself as a knight, doomed to suffer and sacrifice for love.
If you’d have told John that it wasn’t normal to be afraid of your spouse, or that it wasn’t normal to keep things private in order to avoid giving her ammunition, or that it wasn’t normal to feel worse around the one you loved, he’d have looked at you blankly.
This is what love had always felt like for John. Even as a kid, he never knew any different.
John’s friends told him the problem was his wife.
But it wasn’t… or at least, only partly.
The problem was his pattern.
Even if John ended this marriage, chances are his next relationship wouldn’t be much different.
He’d become accustomed to a certain kind of love, one where he abased himself. He needed to challenge that pattern in himself before he’d see it reflected in his relationships.
That’s what taking responsibility means.
When we let the people we love treat us in a way that’s hurtful, by brushing it off and telling ourselves it doesn’t matter, we unconsciously encourage that behavior.
We don’t nip it in the bud. We don’t gently set boundaries. We don’t say, “Huh uh, that’s not okay.” We let it happen.
So, of course, it keeps happening.
Our power in relationships is to say no to behaviors that overstep our boundaries… not blame our partner for being a bad person who treats us terribly.
Because if your partner is, in fact, a bad person, then you shouldn’t be in that relationship. It won’t ever be healthy for you.
But if you can see your partner as a human being who’s been conditioned to behave in certain ways…
Just as you have been conditioned to behave in certain ways…
You can find the key to unlock change.
You can change those conditions, and thereby change those engrained patterns of behavior.
For John, instead of taking what his wife told him personally, he started seeing what she said objectively, almost like a scientist would.
What did his wife’s behavior tell him about the type of person she was?
What did his wife’s behavior tell him about the kind of behavior he’d been conditioned to accept?
What could he do to interrupt the pattern?
He started practicing one simple phrase: “That’s not okay.”
Every time his wife put him down, he simply said, “Hey, that’s not okay.” He didn’t explain himself. He didn’t argue with her. He just shook his head and reminded her of his boundaries.
Today, John can honestly say that his wife’s unkind behavior was a gift in disguise.
It taught him where he needed to heal himself.
What gift could your spouse be giving you?
