By Terry Real (Part 1 of 3)
Originally published in the August, 2006 issue of "O, the Oprah Magazine"
At work your spouse is the soul of consideration. At night it’s all you can do to get him to be civil. And, sometimes, you’re the bad guy. Therapist Terry Real blogs about how to make home a nicer place to come home to.
TED and ANNE and THE 800 LB GORILLA
A couple I’ll call Ted and Anne were attending a workshop I was giving on relationship skills. They were there because they quarreled constantly, they said just that week they had argued bitterly over driving the kids to school. As best I could piece it together, the fight went something like this:
Anne: “Honey, you’re going to need to take both kids to school tomorrow. I scheduled a doctor’s appointment.”
Ted: “You know I can’t do that. I made a plan to run with Jim, and I've canceled twice already. This is called ‘How many ways can we stop Ted from exercising?’”
Anne: “You know, Ted----”
Ted (irritated): “Thirty minutes is what I ask for, thirty minutes out of 24 hours. That’s all I want.”
Anne (shouting): “And all I want is a real partner for a change. Someone who cares about something besides himself!”
After hearing them out, I asked Ted, "Was there any other time this week when you were equally annoyed with someone but chose to handle things differently?" After some prodding, he came up with a mistake his assistant had made at work. He'd been packing up his papers for an important presentation when Julie admitted she'd forgotten to tell him that the meeting was canceled.
"Julie is terrific," Ted told me. "But ever since her mother's hospitalization, she'd been letting things slip." Her apology didn't change the fact that this latest lapse cost him hours of valuable time. Still, Ted knew better than to lash out. Looking at Julie's stricken face, he said, his anger drained and he asked her whether she needed time off. When she responded that it was better for her to be at the office, he was touched, and she was reassured.
Placing the two incidents side by side, an obvious question emerged: Why did Ted show more consideration to his assistant than to his wife? For her part, Anne was known as a as a straight shooter with her friends and at work, but with Ted she allowed resentment to build until she blew up in a rage. As shocking as it might sound, Ted and Anne reserved their worst behavior for each other.
POPEYE and OLIVE OYL
Helping couples for more than 20 years has brought me face-to-face with a sobering truth: Most of us don't treat our spouses with nearly the same level of respect and diplomacy that we extend to colleagues, friends, and even strangers. We give lip service to the idea that marriage takes effort, but in our day-to-day lives we think, I don't want to work this hard.
"Look," Ted said to me, "when I'm in the office, I have to manage my staff, but I don't want to think of my marriage as a job."
Ted was pleading the case for what I call the Popeye syndrome: "I yam what I yam!" His fantasy was to come home, loosen his belt, pop open a beer, flip on the TV, belch... and still be loved. Men might have gotten away with this a generation ago, but now it's quite likely that as we pull up in our driveways after a hard day at work, our wives pull in behind us.
If we want our marriages to be happy, we don't get to come home and just "relax" -- which to most of the men I work with means "to be left alone."
MEET OLIVE OYL IN PART 2 ON MONDAY, OCTOBER 15. Until then, we welcome your comments and insights.
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