Is it all your spouse’s fault?
Many people write to me, asking, “How do I get my partner to change. If he wasn’t so screwed up, we could have a happy marriage!” Or, they might say, “My partner thinks our problems are all my fault. Are they?”
Ah, blame. We have trouble sharing so many things in life—dessert, money, land, bed space, hot water—but blame is not one of them. Blame? We’re willing to give it all to someone else. We never want to take any for ourselves.
I’m no exception. When my marriage was in the pits, I blamed it all on my husband. He was the one who didn’t help with the parenting. He was the one who talked to me in this cold, stony voice as if he thought I had the mental intelligence of a two year old. He was the one who thwarted my every request. If I said I needed a new computer, he’d tell me why I didn’t need one.
I could go on and on. The point is that I thought our problems were entirely his fault. Me? I was a blameless victim. The only thing I’d done wrong? Married him.
Except, that was not true. I had contributed to our bad marriage in many ways. For one, I often didn’t tell him what I wanted and needed. When I was suffering from post partum depression, I needed help. Did I ask for it? No, because I assumed a man who really loved me would be able to 1) see that I needed help 2) would want to help without being asked.
That was stupid, though, because if I’ve learned anything about marriage it’s this. The day two people get married, they start enabling each other like nobody’s business. In fact, that’s why most people are drawn to each other in the first place. It’s also why miserable people tend to stay married. They complete each other. One of them is strong where the other one is weak and vice versa. Some people actually think this is a good thing and they refer to it endearingly at weddings as “two halves making a whole.”
But that’s really not it at all. It’s two halves preventing each half from becoming whole. It’s enabling. It’s a meek person never learning to be assertive because she married an assertive man. It’s a slacker man never learning to be responsible because, um, his wife plays that role.
So, in not telling my husband what I needed and wanted, I was enabling him to continue to be a slacker. I was allowing him to shirk responsibility, and I was preventing myself from growing up, too. I needed to learn how to speak my voice. If he’d read my mind and did what I wanted without me asking for it? He would have been enabling me. That’s not love. That’s the opposite of love.
So I was just as much a part of the problem as he was. We both contributed to the dysfunction of our relationship in different ways.
Now that we’ve worked on things, we no longer enable each other. I don’t send thank you notes to my husband’s family when they send gifts. That’s his job. I’m allowing him to grow into it at his own pace. He doesn’t solve my problems for me. I speak up when I’m feeling taken advantage of. He steps up to the plate and does what I ask (most of the time, anyway).
We are not two halves blending into a whole. We are two complete wholes. Well, we’re getting there.
That’s where you want to eventually be, too. Own your share of the blame. Work together to grow into stronger, better people. Become two wholes.
How have you contributed to your marital problems? How have you enabled your spouse to stop growing? How has your spouse enabled you to stop growing? Leave a comment.
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Tags: blame, Marriage Advice
