If you are still waiting and wishing your partner will see the light and behave the way you think they should, then you are living a fantasy. Most of us see our partners through our image of what we think they are rather than seeing them as they are or as they see themselves.
And here’s the rub: when you take up the banner to “improve” your partner, you are annihilating your partner. You are wishing the real person to be gone and your image of them to take their place. Your partner does to you, and you wonder why your relationship isn’t going so well.
Here are four rules to follow to have a happy marriage for life, according to psychology:
1. Let your partner be
Your frustration with your partner is an objection to them being themselves. It is an objection to their reality. You object to the fact they are not like you and do not fit your idealized picture.
Let’s be honest: Your frustration is a denial of reality. The deepest form of suffering is the denial of reality, and the greatest denial of reality is denying the reality of the person you live with.
Your partner will always strive to be who they are, even if they are trying to fit into your image. If your partner tries to deny themselves, they will eventually become angry or depressed, as supported by research in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology. That wish for sameness is the source of difficulty in living with another person. The difference is the reality.
2. Understand the ways your partner’s inner world is different from yours
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- Your partner’s feelings are different.
- Your partner’s thoughts are different.
- Your partner’s temperament is different.
- Your partner’s intimate desires are different.
- Your partner’s childhood was different.
- Your partner is not you!
Get it?
3. Practice simple acceptance
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Ask: “Why do they do that?” “Why do they feel that way?” Ask what it is like to live in your partner’s skin.
When you judge your partner, they cannot help but become defensive. A series of studies published in the Journal of Personality shows when you approach them with curiosity, you have taken the first step on the path to intimacy.
In the early romantic stage of your relationship, you felt inseparable, as though you were so much alike. You knew all of your needs would be met in this relationship.
But in the second stage, you experience conflict. You disagree; you fight. Your partner wants things that you don’t. How could this be? Who is this person?
You try to get your partner to see things your way, to behave as you wish. You criticize, shame, and blame, all to coerce them into being who you think they should be. But they become defensive, distant.
The process will only escalate until the relationship is torn apart, as explained in the Handbook of Divorce and Relationship Dissolution. Before you know it, you are leading parallel lives, and the prospect of divorce has raised its ugly head.
4. Don’t become separate
You are longing to love your partner, and they are longing to love you. But you have become separate. A study in the Psychological Assessment Journal suggests that trying to create sameness will not get you there but learning to accept and honor your differences will. In a healthy relationship, you realize you live with another person who is not an extension of you.
I invite you to take a journey of discovery. Engage your partner with curiosity and surrender any judgment. You may discover a whole new, amazing world. Your partner is an “other,” with a whole world inside, a world you cannot fully enter and you cannot change. You may want sameness — for your partner to be just like you or your ideal image — but that’s not going to happen.
Your partner is a unique individual with an equally valid point of view. When you learn to love those differences you find so annoying, you have entered the realm of mature love.
Harville Hendrix, Ph. D., is a couples therapist with over 40 years of experience as a counselor, educator, clinical trainer, author, and public lecturer and has received many awards for his work with couples. He and his wife, Helen LaKelly Hunt, co-created Imago Relationship Therapy, a therapy for couples now practiced by over 2,200 certified therapists in 30 countries.
