03 – Why See Eye to Eye?

We like harmony. We crave being understood in the name of validation. It’s easy to feel that when someone else agrees with our perspective, that means we must be right.

What I want to talk to you about today is the idea of getting comfortable with not seeing eye to eye with your spouse. Now I know this might seem backwards, but when you’re in a marriage relationship and you are both individuals, oftentimes you are going to have very different ways of going about things, and that is okay.

I don’t want the goal for you to have to be that you understand each other all the time. In fact, I would encourage you to get comfortable not being understood.

First, let’s start by talking about why it feels so important for us to be on the same page with our spouse. Let’s say, maybe your husband thinks it’s really important that there are home cooked dinners every night. Maybe, he’s not home to cook those dinners and he thinks you should be the one cooking.

Now, if you are someone like me who hates cooking, then it’s easy for me to come up with a lot of excuses or a lot of reasons why I just can’t cook.

Here’s how it looks for me:

My husband gets home most nights around 5:30. He walks in the door and I’m like, “Hey Honey, what are we going to do for dinner tonight?” And he’s like, “I don’t know. I’ll come up with something.”

My mom was somebody who would make a homemade dinner every single night, not to mention homemade breakfast, homemade lunches and a nice snack every day after school, I should also mention that my mom would bake the bread that our sandwiches were on. Things were healthy. We didn’t eat much sugar or sweets. I have a lot of chatter in my brain about how I probably should be making dinner. Especially because I’m not doing all of those other things that my mom did, and making dinner is probably what a mom should be doing.

In fact, when I was at my bridal show, Joseph’s mom said to me, “I really hope you like to cook.” And I said, “Oh, I really don’t like cooking. But don’t worry, he likes to cook.” And she said, “Oh no he doesn’t.” Ha. I love you, Lisa, but I was right. He actually does like to cook. Anyway, I still have a lot of chatter in my brain about how I probably should cook.

Now, what I want to feel in that moment is that it’s okay that I’m not cooking that night —or let’s be honest, any night — but it’s hard for me to get there because I, myself, don’t feel like I’m doing it the right way.

What I used to do is I would come up with a bunch of reasons for it. Now this wasn’t conscious, this is just what we do subconsciously…My husband would walk in the door and I’d think, “Oh, today was so hectic and so busy, I just couldn’t possibly get to dinner tonight.” So, I would really want to convince him that I couldn’t make dinner. There was no possible way I could have made dinner that day.

I’m married to a really kind loving man who didn’t really care about that, but I wanted him to see where I was coming from and say, “Oh yeah, your day was so busy! There’s no way you could have cooked!” So that I could then decide that my reason was justified for not cooking.

What I recommend doing, instead of coming up with a whole story to justify your reasons for not liking to cook dinner, is to just decide that you don’t like to cook dinner. Period.

Frankly, I haven’t come up with a compelling reason why I should like to cook dinner. There’s Costco meals and Trader Joe’s meals and lots of easy things we can just throw together. Not to mention, my husband is really great at just whipping something together quickly. So, I don’t have a compelling reason to get past my hatred of cooking.

Instead of doing something just because I think I should, I practice deciding it’s okay that I don’t like to cook. It seems to be working out okay for my family. Nobody has scurvy. They all seem to be growing. They’re getting plenty of food. This is working for us. And I do contribute in other ways that I can get behind.

So instead of making it mean anything about me, I can just notice that I don’t like to cook.

Another thing I would suggest is, instead of looking to our spouse to decide that we’re okay, practice thinking “maybe he’s not going to like that.” Maybe, he’s really not going to be okay with not having home cooked meals, and that’s okay.

This is what I’m talking about getting to the point of deciding we don’t have to see eye to eye on everything. Your husband can come home and — let’s just say he was a husband that expected dinner — I would suggest practicing allowing him to be disappointed that there’s not going to be dinner.

Because here’s the alternative, you could either decide, “I’m just going to make dinner, even though I really don’t want to, and I don’t have any living reason to, except that it will make me decide I’m doing it right as a wife, and I’m fulfilling this expectation that my husband has for me.”

Now, if you go about with that approach, the result is going to be resentment every single time. We never want to do things if we can’t get to a loving reason for doing it. 

“But what if my husband doesn’t like that?” So, I say to him, “Yeah, sorry. I hate cooking.” 

I don’t want to feel resentment towards him by making dinner. So, I just decide that he’s a big boy. We’re going to figure out some food to eat tonight. We’re not going to starve. And maybe he’s a little annoyed by that, and that’s okay.

It’s really powerful to get to that place of just allowing your spouse to be disappointed. It has nothing to do with whether or not you’re a good mom or a good wife or a good husband or a good father, it simply tells you about them.

It tells you that maybe he had an expectation that he would get dinner every night that he was married, and, I’m sorry, Joseph, but that was not the case for you.

And you know what? It’s okay.

We all experience some disappointment sometimes. That’s part of life. It’s funny how often we try to change that for people so that we can feel good about ourselves.

Instead of going the backdoor route, which is going to lead you to resentment, I want you to just practice allowing your spouse to be disappointed. Sometimes it’s a really freeing place to be because it immediately takes off some of that weight that we put on ourselves in marriage.

Let’s look at that from the other angle.

What if we also decided that it is okay for us to sometimes be disappointed, too?

I’m going to use the example of one of my clients who went into marriage thinking her husband would make spiritual matters a priority in the family and he would take the initiative in spearheading that for the kids.

She had a really specific idea on what that would look like. She envisioned that at night he would definitely be the one that was calling everyone together for family prayer and he would be the one that was making sure everyone was getting to church on time. And when he didn’t do these things she had to decide how she wanted to feel. 

Now, sometimes we just kind of want to be disappointed about something. So I like to give people the space to feel whatever they’re feeling. I said, “Yeah, if you want to be disappointed in that, just feel disappointed for a bit. And when you’re done being disappointed, let’s figure out how you want to feel about your husband and what you want to do to make sure spiritual things are a priority in your family.” 

The really amazing thing about approaching it that way is that, first of all, it totally goes against our natural way. Normally, we would try to change our husband if we think he should be the spiritual head of the household. It’s natural to listen to conference through that lens and point out things to your husband and let him know how he should be doing things differently. You also probably start feeling a little bit of resentment towards him. Maybe he’s just not doing it quite the way he should be doing it.

But where does that get you?

That just immediately puts you at odds with your husband and it doesn’t make you the person you want to be. Every single time you’re judging your husband for the way he is, or your wife for the person that she is…every single time it’s going to feel terrible to you. You’re not going to be acting as the person you want to be, and that’s the part that feels the most terrible. It’s you not liking who you’re being and, therefore, not liking being around yourself. That part feels much less comfortable than anything that your spouse might be doing.

Once she just allowed herself to feel some annoyance and resentment, she quickly got to a point where she decided, “Okay, this is who he is, and it’s possible I’m not even seeing all the amazing things about him because I am so focused on the things I think he should be doing differently.”

Instead of thinking he should be different, she decided to think, “What’s the outcome I want? Well, I want to make sure that spiritual things are being taught in the home.” 

And guess who’s the best person to do that teaching? Well, she is.

It’s a priority to her and she has a set way she wanted to happen and that absolutely puts her in the best possible position to be the one that’s going to head that up for the family. Another huge benefit of just deciding it’s perfectly okay for us to not agree on the way things are done is that we then open ourselves up to seeing new ways that we wouldn’t have seen before.

Maybe we had this idea on how things should be handled and when our spouse does it a different way, we’re not judging it, we’re just allowing it to be different. Then, sometimes we’re able to learn from them and learn how maybe that way makes more sense than the idea we had before that we felt so strongly should be the way it was done. 

Do you see that when you’re spending your time thinking what shouldn’t be done, you can’t even see that another way could potentially provide value.

I think the biggest benefit of all of deciding it’s perfectly fine for you and your spouse to have completely different approaches and ideas and opinions is that it’s naturally going to occur anyway. So when it inevitably does, then you don’t instantly disconnect from your spouse. You don’t start thinking, “Something’s gone wrong! My marriage just isn’t quite what it should be.” 

As soon as you start thinking, “It’s not amazing, it’s not what it should be,” you immediately create that for yourself. When you think it’s not as good, that makes you feel shortchanged. When you feel shortchanged, you don’t look for all the amazing things that are there that you can’t even see because you’re blinded by your current view. 

Or, you can allow yourself to think this is normal. We’re not supposed to see eye to eye on everything. Nothing has gone wrong. So instead of noticing all the things that are going wrong out of judgment, you start noticing new ways of doing things out of curiosity and love. Then, it’s just about how we solve a problem versus who’s right and who’s wrong.

It makes all the difference in the world.

Now what if you find yourself in a situation that feels a lot more serious than just being disappointed about not having home cooked meals?

I think a good way to illustrate this is in talking about our intimate relationship with our spouse. This is something I spend a lot of time working with my couples on. It comes up frequently and we always start by talking about who’s the higher and who’s the lower desire partner. Very rarely are we in sync on this.

What we all kind of default to, it seems, is when someone has a higher desire and marriage is the only appropriate place for that desire to be fulfilled, then the lower desire partner has some obligation to engage in intimacy. They maybe are obligated more often than they would like, because there’s nowhere else for the higher desire partner to fulfill this need. We can talk about fulfilling our own needs, but with intimacy it’s only something that can be fulfilled by the other partner.

What we don’t often think about is how what we’re basically saying is that the lower desire partner should be uncomfortable so that the higher desire partner doesn’t have to be uncomfortable. It doesn’t make as much sense when we think about it like that.

Obviously, this is a really good place where we can practice some compromise in marriage. That’s often where we start with my couples.

And guess what? That might lead to a little bit of disappointment or a little bit of discomfort on both sides. When we start embracing this idea, that disappointment is a necessary part of life, it just gives us so much leverage over it.

So the next time you hear yourself saying in your head, “I wonder if they’re going to like this. I wonder if this is going to upset them. They might be disappointed if I don’t…”

I want you to follow it up with, “So what? Why is that a problem if they’re disappointed?”

In that moment, instead of needing them to react a particular way, just decide, “It’s okay.” T

This requires you getting past some of these ideas that we have of what’s normal, what’s fair, and what should you be doing?

Those ideas don’t really help us because you’re an individual and your spouse is an individual and we have different thoughts and feelings and motivations and all of it is okay when we decide it shouldn’t all be aligned.

It’s really not a problem.

Now, the first few times this won’t feel comfortable, I know. Some really great growth comes from learning how to get your own back and put your belief in the decisions that you’re making. Trust in your sense of integrity and live by it. There’s nothing more freeing than living in integrity with yourself, so give it a try the next time you find yourself worried about what your spouse is thinking about you. Just do what you feel like is the right thing for you to be doing and just decide it’s okay for them to not understand. It will bring you closer together.

Remember, of all the emotions you can choose to feel…love feels the very best.