07 – Roles in Marriage

Have you ever taken the time to think about what your identity is in your marriage?

We take on various roles and often we’re not very deliberate about those roles. So today we’re going to take some time to discuss who you are in your marriage, so you can really decide if you like the roles you’re choosing.

This is Couples Coaching and I’m Natalie clay.

Have you noticed that we get married and take on some weird roles? Some of these come from our own upbringing. Other things we pick up from spending time at friends’ houses. And of course, there’s always the amazing example of TV and movies. And don’t forget the expectation of perfection that we all seem to maintain as the standard for ourselves.

If you find yourself feeling a lot of resentment in your marriage, it might be time to reexamine your role. Let’s talk a little bit about this resentment, because this comes up a lot.

Resentment isn’t something that just happens to you. Resentment comes when you’re expecting someone else to take care of your needs. I’m going to say that again because I want you to really think about that. Resentment comes when you’re expecting someone else to take care of your needs.

So let me give you an example. Imagine this if you can. You have a new baby. This baby is amazing and you are so tired.

You spend the day with little to no adult conversation and you’re counting down the minutes until your husband gets home so you can have a break and take a shower, or something equally as indulgent. Your husband walks in the door, sits down and turns on the sports. He has some nerve. Can you feel the resentment?

Of course, the simple way to handle this would be to just hand the baby to your husband. Give him a hug and go enjoy a shower, but that is not what we do. Instead, we begin recounting our day. A day that offered no break because the baby didn’t sleep more than 15 minutes at a time and would not stop crying. And don’t forget to mention the massive blowout. This day was exhausting. I’ve had some experience with this.

So why is it so easy to go there? Well, because the alternative is to consider that maybe you just want a break and maybe your husband does too, and maybe no one is more deserving of it than the other. So then what?

Now of course we know better than to be selfish. We’ve been taught a time or 1000 about putting others needs ahead of our own. Guilting people into getting our way works, but it doesn’t feel good. You aren’t going to enjoy that break when you’ve had to work so hard to convince your husband and yourself that you deserve it more than he does because you know what? You don’t.

My suggestion is just to decide that we really don’t deserve anything. What determines whether we deserve something? Now I’ve mentioned this before, but my favorite reason to do anything is just because you want to. That really is a good enough reason, and it’s the best reason.

Think of it this way. What if both of you made it your own responsibility to speak up for what you each wanted, while agreeing that wanting things didn’t make you selfish or uncaring?

Because along these lines you both also have the freedom to say no. This is an option, by the way. What follows is you just deciding it’s okay to want things and not making that mean anything negative about you, because it doesn’t.

We’re supposed to want things decidedly selfish. Things like showers, sports, and adult conversation. If not, there’s a serious design flaw because we all want those things. 

It’s okay to want. It’s also okay for wants to go unmet. Sometimes it’s really not a big deal. As long as we don’t make it mean anything about us or anything about our spouse. Just live in integrity by liking your reasons for whatever you do and there will be no need for resentment.

This brings us back to our roles. Do you like the roles that you take on in marriage? At least recognize that you are choosing them. Nothing will make you feel bad faster than viewing yourself as the victim of your situation. A victim is powerless and completely reliant on changing external circumstances in order to be free. That is a super lousy approach to anything, and it’s funny because we tend to give people that power all the time.

Here’s what I hear:

“I can’t even think about divorce because I had to drop out of school to stay home with the kids so he could finish.”

“I have to spend every Sunday dinner with her family or she’ll be ticked.”

“I have to keep the house clean because it really bothers him for it to be a mess.”

“I can’t leave this job because my wife is freaked out about a salary decrease.”

I’m going to call BS to all of that. Own the decisions you’ve made. Don’t ever do anything because you’re telling yourself “you have to” for your spouse. This is the quickest way to resent them and it’s always a lie. As a grown adult, no one has the power to make you do anything, and thinking that way just feels terrible.

If you stop going to school to raise kids, it’s because you chose to. I don’t care whose idea it was first. I don’t care if there was some encouragement. Ultimately, you made the decision to leave school. Just like you can choose to create whatever you want in the future.

Focusing on all the ways you’ve been wronged sure justifies your current situation, but feeling justified doesn’t do much to move you forward.

Don’t ever go to Sunday dinner because you have to. Go because it’s important to her and you want to be the kind of husband that supports your wife. Sometimes even when it’s for things you don’t really want to do. And if you can’t get to that place, don’t go to Sunday dinner with her family. It’s okay for her to be ticked.

Now the same goes with keeping the house clean. Find a reason you like to clean it or don’t clean it. If it really bothers him, he can do it. 

And of course, leave the job if you like your reasons. It’s okay for your wife to be freaked out. Everything is going to be fine.

I don’t say any of this to put you at odds with your spouse. In fact, it will have the opposite effect. Because remember when you don’t have a loving reason for doing something for them, you won’t feel love. You’ll feel resentment. Owning your choices not only empowers you, it relieves your spouse from being in control of your emotions. No one wants to be in charge of someone else’s feelings. Think how hard it is just to handle our own.

So, what roles do you play in your marriage? Do you like those roles? Do you like your reason, at least, for choosing them? Here’s a simple way to check. What emotion drives your actions? Is it guilt, pressure, or frustration? When you don’t like the emotion driving your action, you’re going to get lousy results every time.

Ideally, we want to be taking action from the emotions, love, hope, empowerment, and determination. You can’t go wrong when you like the feeling you’re acting from.

Now you might remember that in Episode One I introduced you to my husband Joseph. I thought it would be fun to bring him on for this episode to talk about his experience because we’ve had a lot of changing roles over the course of our marriage. We’ve gone through periods where he worked from home full time, while I worked at the office full time, and then we switched and he was at the office full time and I was home with kids full time. And we’ve kind of done a lot of different things in between. I thought it might be fun to hear from his perspective the way he’s handled his ever-changing roles.

Welcome back, Joseph.

Thanks for having me on.

So I wanted to talk to you a little bit about some of the roles that you’ve taken on in our marriage. What do you do in our marriage?

I was wondering this today. Clearly as little as possible.

That’s what you got married for, right?

Yeah, somebody take care of me. Isn’t that how this works? 

Okay, so what are some of the roles that you feel like you’ve taken on?

Roles is an interesting topic because it does seem like no matter where we come from, we all have ideas based on our whole experience growing up. If we had two parents at home, we had division of labor. It seems like our setup is much different than anything that my parents or their friends had.

And is it safe to say your mom might have some opinions about our division of labor?

I don’t know, maybe so.

I love her.

But yeah, I do most of the cooking. I put the kids down for bed most nights and those are two things that I really, really enjoy. Boy, I mean I guess my dad was generally in charge of the finances. If I never had to pay a bill for my entire life, I would be okay with that. And Natalie has done a great job of taking that burden from me.

Yes I do “handle the finances.”

So yeah, we have some differences there. The whole “rules thing” is kind of interesting because it does seem like no matter how you choose to live life — living in the modern world and everything that it requires — your roles were going to change all the time, just to kind of get through a day. It seems like maybe one of the keys is just being open to constantly shifting roles and sloughing off any expectations so you can kind of just pick up and move forward.

Okay, so my question for you is when you think about your roles, do you feel like our division of labor is equal in our marriage? 

No, I do way more. We don’t really keep any kind of tabs like that.

So, I guess with the holiday weekend on Saturday I wanted to do absolutely nothing. And from the second you woke up until bedtime, you were just going hard cleaning the house and doing all sorts of stuff. I think earlier in our marriage I would have been very guilty about that and I would have thought like, “jeez, what do I need to do now to kind of like do my side of the bargain, blah blah blah.”

And then on Saturday I really didn’t feel any guilt at all. I was just like, “I don’t want to do anything today.” And so I did nothing, and it was everything I hoped it could be. 

I noticed.

An then we have days where it’s kind of the reverse. Where I’m going after stuff and you’re much more chill. It all works out I guess.

Yeah, I can think of days in particular when I was pregnant. And man, there was a lot of days where I just felt like I could do nothing but lay on that couch. I didn’t really do much for quite a while except grow a human. But in all seriousness, we have changed our roles a lot over the years. And have you ever found yourself feeling resentment?

There were certainly times when I was in grad school and you were working full time and trying to balance those two things was tough. I sometimes felt like I didn’t have what I needed because I was being pulled in another direction. 

Now, you’re working a lot on this cool business and it’s going well for you, and it’s just been interesting because I’m trying to focus on some of my own creative projects. I was like, okay, the one time that cannot be touched by anything is if I get up at like 4:30 and just work until it’s time to go to my day job. It’s funny how that time is getting eaten up as we work together on this stuff. 

But it is interesting because I do feel like maybe it’s just age. Maybe it’s just mellowing out in life. Or maybe it’s just the fact that there have been so many opportunities to kind of swap roles and just know that things are constantly changing. I’m not saying that it doesn’t bum me out or make me resentful at times, but it’s just like, okay, this is what the next chapter is. And then we’ll figure out where to go from there.

Yeah, and I appreciate that because I’ve definitely had some moments where I’ve noticed when you’ve had some anxiety or you’re just tired or what not, but I always have to remind myself to stay in my head and not try and solve any of that for you. 

And so when I say, “Are you sure you don’t mind editing my pod?” And you say, “Yep, it’s fine.” Then I have to really practice staying in my own head. But then when you come on my podcast and mention that that’s the thing that causes resentment, I’m having to do some thought work right now…

That’s the thing that I think that we have gotten a little bit better with in our marriage, and certainly we can always do better. In the early years of marriage, it was really easy for us to take on the mood of each other. And try to get into each other’s head and assume a lot — sometimes assume the worst. 

I think that we do a lot better now at taking things at face value and so I can say, “Oh my goodness, the last thing on earth I want to do tomorrow is edit your podcast.” And that can be okay because that can be 100% true, but it doesn’t mean I’m not going to do it. And it doesn’t mean it’s not going to be totally fun next week. It doesn’t mean anything other than “Man, I’m just not in the mood for that.” And that’s alright, I think.

And that’s totally alright for me too. By the way, what about some of the other roles that you’ve taken on that were a little bit more unexpected? For example, when Amy and Erin came into our lives a few years ago and suddenly you found yourself as a step dad.

Just to give a little bit of background, because surely not everybody knows what we’re even talking about here is that I had twins that I placed for adoption when I was 20. Their names are Amy and Erin and, three years ago, we found each other and we’ve been really involved in each other’s life ever since.

What was that like for you?

Yeah, that was one of the definitely one of the bigger role changes in life for sure. I kind of was always a little bit apprehensive about these two young women who were somewhere out in the world and basically really a little bit fearful, saying, “Oh, we’ve got these kids at home. What’s the impact going to be? Are these girls out there making rough decisions in life? How’s that going to impact our family?”

All of these kinds of things that were just a whole lot of, to use your terminology, fear-based. So, it’s been interesting, and it’s been a fantastic blessing in my life personally and in the family’s life. They’re both amazing young women and our younger children adore them. 

There were definitely some growing pains. All of a sudden, a lot of emphasis and attention was placed on people who weren’t even a part of my original circle, so I had to figure out my new role. How do I parent the kids who are younger and try to help them make sense of all of this while their mom is spending a lot of time with half-sisters that they don’t even know? It was an interesting time, and it continues to be an interesting time. 

Taking on that role has been something that when I was coming at it with a lot of apprehension, and just flat out fear, I couldn’t have anticipated it being such a positive role that I could play in my life, but I’m I’m actually very, very grateful for it.

Yeah, thanks. I appreciate that perspective. Now, I work with people that have been married for decades and people that are newly married. So what advice would you give to any newlyweds that are trying to navigate life together with another person?

This is just one man talking, but I think the number one thing I would throw out there from the things that I have gathered in my years of marriage is to be 100% open to constant change in your role. If things are really firmly laid down with who does what when in the home, it might end up being really problematic and potential source of resentment. You tend to create mental checklists that you might not even be aware of, but you have them. If instead, there’s the desire is to create a team and that’s the end goal, I think you’re in a better position to find happiness as a couple.

I think that with the challenges of the world we live in, how fast paced it is, and just the difference that I see between my dad working at the same place for 40 years and now me and most of my friends all have at least two jobs…It’s a different world. If you can be flexible and just keep that end goal, whatever it is, in sight, it can be the opportunity to, you know, have the roles draw you together instead of divide you.

Thanks for sharing that. Thanks so much, Joseph, for being on the podcast. We will talk to you again in a future episode.

Thanks Natalie.

So, just as a quick reminder, own the roles that you take on in your marriage. None of those roles are forced on you. Really. You are choosing them.

And again, if you’re feeling some resentment in your marriage, take a look at your roles and see if there’s something you decide you don’t want to do anymore, or maybe something you do want to do. There are always ways to be flexible when we decide we’re working together as a team to figure out what works best for both of us as individuals. But you take that responsibility on fully yourself. That is your responsibility to be in charge of your emotional well-being. That’s when you get to feel empowered, regardless of your roles.

Also, just keep in mind that there is no right and wrong way to function as a married couple. Have fun with it. Figure out what you both like doing and start from there. There are lots of ways to make it work and it’s okay if your mother-in-law doesn’t love it. It’s okay if your parents have an issue with it. Your obligation is to you and to your spouse, so figure out what works.

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

If anything you heard today resonated with you and you are interested in getting further help from me, just go to natalieclay.com. There is some helpful free information on that site for you, and there’s also the link to tell you how you can work with me in the future. You can also sign up for my weekly email list, Thrive, where I send out free tips to improve your marriage today.