00:00 

Hey there. Welcome to Intentional Living with Tanya Hale. This is episode number 389: "The Partnership of Marriage." Welcome to your place for finding greater happiness through intentional growth, because we don't just go into the life of our dreams...we choose to create it. This is Tanya Hale, and I'm your host for Intentional Living. 

00:21 

Alright. Hello there, my friends. Welcome to the podcast today. So glad to have you here, and I am glad to be here with you. A couple of things. If you want some free coaching, come to my Talk with Tanya. It's this Tuesday, December 9th at 2 o'clock Eastern, 12 Mountain. You can go to my website, tanyahale.com. You can go to the group coaching tab, and there will be a place where you can sign up for that and get the link. It is just a free Zoom call, and you can come on. We can talk about anything. We can coach. We can do all kinds of stuff. We have some great discussions. I think last month we talked all about adult kids and Thanksgiving and invitations and all the things that that entails. And we had such a great coaching talk. And I hope that you will take advantage of that. 

01:11 

Also, I want to let you know that in January, I'm going to be starting two classes. I still do not have my date settled in for those yet, but the classes are going to be great. The first one is going to be called Should I Stay or Should I Go? This is for those of you who are in such difficult marriage situations and you're contemplating divorce and you're just trying to figure out...this is the most difficult decision of your life. We are going to talk about all the ways that you get yourself in alignment with your values. How do you start showing up? How do you make this decision in a way that you're not going to be looking over your shoulder for however knows who long, just trying to, you know, you don't want to be feeling regret over this decision. It's a big one. So that's a six-week class. And I want you to keep that in mind if that's what you're looking for. 

01:59 

The other one is going to be called the Ultimate Date Night. And this is going to be for couples. Now, it is not going to be for couples in crisis. I do work with couples in crisis, but only the couple and me. I don't want a whole class of couples in crisis. I think that would be a little much. But this is for couples who are in a pretty good place, but they want to up-level. They want to move into deeper vulnerability. They want to figure out how to be better, how to communicate better, how to not get so angsty with each other. We're going to be talking about all that kind of stuff. Again, a six-week class. 

02:35 

So if you're interested in that, both of those, make sure that you're signed up for my email. You can go, you can get on that just by going to tanyahale.com. The first pop-up that will come will be one that will have you sign up for my email called the "Weekend Win." And then you'll be one of the first people to find out about these classes. They will both be limited in number because I don't really want huge classes at this point in the work that I'm doing. So anyway, I think that that's going to do it. Can you believe it is full on second week now of December? So let's jump in. 

03:13 

I can't believe this year is almost over. We are talking today about the partnership of marriage. So there are times when a topic for a podcast just keeps popping up for me. And then I realize that, okay, this is something that I need to share some thoughts on. And this is one of those times. The concept, I realized as I was making up the list of podcasts to put in the show notes that go along with this, there's a long list today because this just keeps being a part of the discussions that come up with me and my clients and in things that I see around the world and in other podcasts that I listen to. And so when something like that just keeps showing up, then I kind of see that as a spiritual prompting to put this content out there and to share some more thoughts. So here we go. 

04:04 

We're talking today about just being married or being in a married partnership. So from what I observe, I think there are far too many of us who are just married. We have a piece of paper and we are legally bound together and this impacts our  finances. We have children together. We have in-laws and maybe grandchildren together. We share a house and cars and we go on trips or not. We are sharing a space, but not a life. We are living what is sometimes referred to as parallel lives. We are living two lives, each of us our own, but our paths don't really cross that much. And this can be referred to also as being married roommates. We share a living space. We may co-parent, we may eat our meals together, and our laundry may get done at the same time in the same machine. We may share a mortgage and split the chores, but we don't have any semblance of emotional or sexual intimacy. And even if we are having sex, it may feel as though we are just keeping our spouse happy or doing our duty to manage their emotions, but we're not engaging from a place of desiring connection or seeking deeper intimacy. We talk about the day-to-day to-dos, lots of surface stuff about the kids or finances or schedules or things around the house that need to be fixed, but we don't delve into topics that stretch our minds and our hearts. We don't discuss vulnerable topics that open our hearts to one another. 

05:33 

And this is when a lot of people feel married, but lonely. I remember being in this place in my previous marriage. I don't think I've ever felt lonelier in my life than when I was married before. We didn't share a friendship. We didn't share a connection or a desire to spend time together and to become closer. We were too scared, both of us, and rightfully so, to be vulnerable and open. We were mostly just living together, walking on a lot of eggshells. I know I was doing all the things. I was checking all the boxes, partially because that is what I understood what it meant to be married, but also partially because I didn't feel safe sharing vulnerable things with him. And partially because, let me be honest, it allowed me to take a one-up position and to prove to myself and to everybody else that I was better than him and that he was awfully lucky to have me. And by the end of my marriage, my goal wasn't usually to create connection or make his life better. Rather, it was to prove that I was better than him. Isn't that just horrible? It wasn't all the time, but that came up for me more than I am glad that it did. 

06:48 

And yet, I'm going to say, as bad as it is, I really am not alone in that marital dysfunction. Like many of you, I was feeling disconnected and so lonely, so fearful of being hurt and even feeling hurt and unwanted and feeling undesired. I felt that he wanted sex but no emotional intimacy. And from things that were said, I think that he felt that I wanted financial security with no physical intimacy. We were married on paper. Other than that, as I look back, we shared a living space. We shared children and finances and sometimes sex, but we were not partnered. We didn't have a sense of having each other's backs. In fact, we were probably more likely to throw each other under the bus in front of other people than we were to be protective of each other. We were both desperate to be seen and heard, to be understood, and our personal insecurities created a lot of tenderness, not good kind of tenderness, but tenderness where we made the things that the other person was doing all about us, about them not loving us, about them not appreciating us, caring about us, or loving us. 

07:59 

In fact, I believe when we got married, we probably did so with the idea that the purpose of marriage was to have someone to love us, someone to validate us and agree with us and make us think that we were the best thing since sliced bread. And that is a very rom-com concept of love. And it's a very immature concept of love and marriage. I love to propose that we don't get married to have someone love us or to have someone to save us or even complete us. Those all sound very lovely and though they just walked out of a Hallmark movie. But what if our reason for getting married wasn't quite so prone to victim mentality? Let me explain that a little bit. 

08:44 

One piece of victim mentality is when we are dependent on the other person to be or do something in order for us to feel good. We expect the other person to show up in a certain way or to change certain behavior, and then we will feel loved. Then we will feel happy and content in our marriage. But anytime we are dependent on someone else to behave a particular way for us to have good feelings, we are in a victim mentality because we don't have any control over how the other person shows up. And when we make our happiness, our ability to feel good reliant on somebody else, we will always be in a one down, helpless victim position. 

09:31 

Instead, if we want to be the hero in our marriage story, we get to start relying on ourselves for feeling happy, for feeling fulfilled, for feeling loved and appreciated. This necessitates that we develop our own strong sense of self. When we are strong inwardly, we don't need outward validation of our worth. Now, that's not to say that we don't love validation. I'm pretty sure being that loving validation from others is a human thing. But the difference is that we don't need other people's validation to feel happy, to feel as though our lives are important and that we are valuable. When I make my worth or my happiness or my value dependent on whether or not my spouse is doing things for me or saying the right things, I am in victim mentality because let's be honest, no spouse is able to be there all the time to shore us up and tell us things that will make us feel good, even if they love us so, so, so much. 

10:33 

So many of you are probably asking, then why get married? If it's not to have somebody to love us, why do we do it? And that is a great question. I believe one of the greatest reasons we get married is so that we can have somebody to love, so that we can learn how to love in a more clean way, to learn how to be vulnerable and open and to learn how to create a partnership, because it doesn't come intuitively. But when we get married with the expectation of being loved and our spouse doesn't measure up because they're human and are bound to disappoint, then being vulnerable and open with them is really difficult. Everything in our primitive brain screams protection and we lean out instead of leaning in. When we get married to have someone to love, we set the stage for allowing for mistakes and failures of our partner, for developing grace around our spouse's humanity, for learning to accept another person who can sometimes be so different than us. 

11:40 

When we get married to have someone to love, all of the expectations reside within us, with how we are treating them, with how we are showing up, with how we are feeling toward them. When we get married to have someone to love us, all of our expectations reside in the other person, something that we have zero control over. And in this space, they often have to change in order for us to feel better. And we all know how well it goes over when we try to get our spouse to change in order to meet our expectations. To be clear, it just doesn't work very well. And that is what puts us in victim mentality, needing them to show up a certain way for us to feel better or to be happy. 

12:25 

Another thing that I see people do that keeps their marriage from being partnerships is that they do what they want to do without considering the relationship. What they want is paramount, and they just expect their spouse to go along and not complain or have any wants or needs that conflict with theirs. They seem to have this idea that the relationship is there to serve them rather than them being there to serve the relationship. What I am saying here is that the relationship needs to always be considered. This person that you have chosen to be with needs to be considered. This is the person that you have said that you want in your life. We have to start treating them as though we want them in our lives. 

13:17 

So what I'm not saying is that every decision needs to be 100% agreed upon by both spouses and that neither spouse should have activities that they enjoy that they stop doing because their spouse doesn't like them and won't do them with them. But if you just want to do what you want to do and have no interest in considering another person and your relationship with them, then you have no business being in a relationship. You don't have the emotional maturity to be in relationship if you cannot and do not want to consider another person. Being partnered requires effort and energy. It requires consideration and cooperation. The very definition of relationship talks about how two people are connected. 

14:07 

And if you're not interested in doing your part, note partnership, notice that that's part of the word. If you're not interested in doing your part to help create that connection, you need to get out of the relationship. You will be much happier on your own only having you to worry about. If you just want to be left alone, then go be alone. Seriously. If it's always about you, stop dragging this other person through a disconnected, lonely relationship. This is the type of relationship that is a marriage on paper only. We don't have, nor do we want, an emotional connection because it requires too much from us. Too much time, too much energy, too much honesty, and too much vulnerability. And this is the space where a person can be married and be so, so lonely. And as I mentioned before, I don't think I was ever lonelier in my life than in my previous marriage, especially those last few years. 

15:12 

So how do we create a partnership rather than a paper marriage? How do we really create connection and a shared life rather than just a shared living space? I believe one of the most important things we get to learn how to do is to really start looking outside of ourselves to consider the other person, thinking about what they want, what they need, what they like, looking for opportunities to make their lives better. This includes making them a priority in your life. That's not to say you can't enjoy an activity that your spouse doesn't like, but do you prioritize spending time with them? Do you consider how your individual wants are fitting in with the relationship? You get to want what you want, but if you are demanding it at the expense of creating connection with your spouse, you are not stepping into partnership. How you engage with your spouse  has the opportunity to let them know you care about their well-being as much as yours, that you want them to be happy and that you care about their comfort, or it has the opportunity to let them know that they aren't a priority to you, that their happiness and well-being doesn't matter to you. 

16:28 

And so many of us get into this space of deprioritizing our spouses, of neglecting our relationships in such small incremental moves that we don't even realize we're doing it. Little by little, we have started leaning out of the relationship rather than leaning in. Meaning, over time, we stop investing time and energy and effort. We stop thinking about our spouse as a priority, and we become dismissive towards them and anything that they may want. Part of the goal of getting married is to be a partner, to be a witness to someone else's life, to learn to be someone who will stand by another person and support them and accept them, even in all of their ridiculous and weird humanity. 

17:13 

Another part of the goal of getting married is to have a partner, someone to be a witness to our lives, someone who will stand by us and support us and accept us for all of our ridiculous and weird humanity. I love to ask myself in my own marriage if Sione's life is significantly better because I'm in it. Because this is my goal. Every night, I want him to lay his head down on his pillow and feel as though he is the luckiest, most blessed man in the world to be married to me. I want his life to be so great that he can't imagine his life without me. 

17:51 

Now, I understand that I don't have control over his thoughts and feelings, but I do get to put things, my actions, into his circumstance line. And depending on what I put in there can make it easy or hard for him to believe that I love him and that I care about him. When we care about our spouse's happiness and life satisfaction as much as we care about our own, we show up differently in our relationships. It can be super easy over time to become dismissive, to overlook what is important to our spouse, to neglect doing things for them that will make their life easier. 

18:30 

And yet, these are some of the very things that make the biggest difference in our showing up as a partner. This is us leaning into the relationship rather than leaning out. Leaning in requires emotional energy. It requires showing up sometimes when you're tired and have things on your mind. Leaning in means that we intentionally do things for the other person just because we want their lives to be better, even if it requires time and effort on our part. Creating a partnership requires that we invest in the relationship. And when we do it with clean motivations, we are doing it because that's who we want to be in the relationship. We do it because we want to be loving and kind and compassionate. We do it because we are choosing this person. We love this person and because we want to make their journey in this life easier. When I can show up this way, I am growing in my own capacity for love and grace. My self-respect grows and my sense of self-strengthens and I feel more content and happier internally. 

19:42 

A true partnership also means that we see the other person as our equal. Now, this doesn't mean that we are the same or that our to-do lists match up. What it means is that I can look at my partner in the eyes and truly believe and say, "you are my equal in every way." That doesn't mean we like all the same things or are good at all the same things, but we don't see ourselves as being more important or better or less important or worse than them. It doesn't mean that we think the contributions we are making are more important than those of our spouse. Instead, we see ourselves as a team. We do different things. We have expertise in different areas, but we both wholeheartedly contribute to the marriage as equal partners. 

20:32 

And not just in the things that we do, but also in the emotional engagement that we choose to share. We have the capacity to see both of us as valuable people, people who are equals and people who treat each other as equals. We bring different strengths and weaknesses. We have differing opinions on things and we don't see the world in the same way. And we create a safe space for all of this to exist. We learn to honor and appreciate the unique gifts and talents and the weirdness that our spouse brings to the table. 

21:08 

Now, does some of this require mind management? Of course it does. It can be very easy to get annoyed by small grievances, and we don't have to. We can just internally smile and remember that's just part of their unique makeup. It's  part of what makes them them. And I'm so grateful to have this person in my life. Some people get so fixated on a small irritant that it grows and grows and becomes unmanageable in their minds. And from this place, the small, seemingly insignificant situations will blow up into huge fights. Many of us have expectations that our spouse should always do things the way that we want or never say anything that is embarrassing or hurtful in public. And they should always dress in a way that we find appropriate and attractive. And all of these expectations are destroying our partnership. Because when we have unrealistic expectations, we start to harbor resentment when they aren't met. 

22:12 

And that resentment, left untreated, will fester and fester until it finally blows. When things blow, our primitive brain puts some more bricks on our productive wall and we lean out just a little bit more than we were before. And when this happens over and over and over through the years, we eventually find ourselves in a place of ambivalence and avoidance, a place where we struggle to care about our spouse and the state of our relationship. We settle into apathy regarding our marriage and we start to feel contempt for our spouse because they're not doing it right. And gosh darn it, we are so miserable and it's their fault. And of course we're miserable. 

22:56 

The whole reason we wanted to get married was to have a person we could share our life with, someone we could confide in, who would care about our happiness as much as their own. And when we find that we are incapable of doing those things for them and that they're incapable of doing it for us, then the connection and the emotional intimacy we had hoped for seems like a distant dream. 

23:21 

It's so important that we learn to assume best intent of our spouse, especially when things are tough, when we can wholeheartedly believe in the goodness of the person that we are married to, when we can use that belief to always have their back, to give them grace when they show up in ways we don't understand, then we are showing up in partnership. When instead we show up in our marriages always assuming worst intent, it becomes almost impossible to offer the grace and compassion that is the hallmark of a beautiful marriage partnership. 

23:58 

I remember in my previous marriage being so confused about why it was so hard. I knew I wanted more and I just couldn't figure out what was going wrong. I thought it was all his fault for not being the person I expected him to be, for not making me happy, for not considering me first. I had become habitual in my belief and assumption that he was doing things intentionally to be hurtful and unkind. I assumed worst intent of his behaviors and motivations almost constantly. And I really struggled to see anything good or virtuous in his behavior. And it's not that there wasn't goodness or virtue. It's that I was choosing not to see it. I was intentionally choosing to look for the challenging instead of the charitable. 

24:46 

And we've talked on here before about how our brains will find evidence for whatever we tell it to look for. And assuming worst intent, my brain found plenty of evidence for worst intent. Come to find out, I was not being the person that I expected me to be. I was not being loving and compassionate and Christlike. I was so focused on him not loving me that I wasn't loving him. And it becomes a tug of war sometimes, right? That I'm not going to do this until they do this. I will not show up loving until they show up loving first. 

25:24 

And listen, I absolutely know that many of you are doing your best to show up as equal partners and you have a spouse who is disengaged and not interested. I believe that when we are married with someone who doesn't want to engage, that we don't have to be miserable. We can be unhappy with the state of our marriage, and we can personally still be happy with how we are showing up. And from this place, a place of strong sense of self, a place of overflow, a place of living in alignment with our values, we can still be happy. 

26:00 

Now, in this place of personal happiness, we have decisions. We have options. And because we're not swimming in misery, it is easier for us to see our options clearly. Often, when we start showing up, leaning into the relationship, caring about our partner with clean love, dropping the expectations, we find that our partner no longer needs to be living in a place of protective fear around us, and they relax and begin leaning into the relationship as well. And then the partnership can be discovered or rediscovered, as the case may be. 

26:36 

Or maybe you start showing up as a true partner and your spouse is unmoved. Maybe they truly have no desire or capacity to engage at an intimate level that will be satisfying for you. When you are in your own space of personal happiness, you can see this situation more clearly, and then you have options as well. Maybe you decide that you can live this way, that the capacity to have a paper marriage is doable for you, and that the consequences of this are a better option than dissolving the marriage through divorce. Or maybe you decide you can't live this way, and that only an intimate partnership will work for you. And that's okay, too. This is why our heavenly parents gave us agency so we could choose. 

27:24 

But the only way to make this decision cleanly is by showing up in true partnership, choosing your spouse and thinking about them in loving and kind ways, caring about their well-being as much as your own, and caring for them through beautiful behaviors. Experiencing this type of relationship with Sione has been life-changing for me. Feeling as though I can share and give and serve and it is received with gratitude and returned tenfold to me is like living in a dream. I know he cares about my comfort and well-being as much as, and sometimes it seems even more than, his own comfort and well being. And I seek to reciprocate the sentiment. Through both of us seeking kindness, serving each other, wanting to make the other person's life significantly better, we are creating a partnership that I could not have even imagined in my previous marriage. 

28:22 

And Sione and I are not unicorns. I believe so many of us are just living way below our privilege in our marriages. So many of us want this type of relationship, but we are acting out of fear and protection. Unwilling and possibly even unable to step into vulnerability, not knowing how to set down our weapons of war, or if that seems too dramatic, not knowing how to engage in loving ways when it feels dangerous and unsafe. But I promise you can figure this out, hopefully in your current marriage, but maybe not. Learning to be a true partner is not for the faint of heart. It requires a lot of courage to step into vulnerability, to be open and honest, to have compassionate, tough discussions, to rock the boat but not create a tsunami, especially when you aren't sure that your spouse will step into it with you. 

29:20 

And I know you can do it. I know you have the capacity to do incredibly tough things and to figure this out. Choose partnership over a paper marriage. It may seem daunting and scary and tough, but I promise it will be well worth the journey, regardless of what information you gather and how your situation ends up. Stepping into partnership is a part of what growing up into middle age is all about. And I love growing up, don't you? 

29:56 

Okay, if this particular topic resonated with you for different reasons, you may be a great candidate for either the Should I Stay or Should I Go class or the Ultimate Date Night class that is for couples. So make sure that you check those out when those become available. And if you would love some personal one-on-one help with me to learn how to step into partnership, to figure out how to do this better, this is what I'm really, really good at. And I can help you see the patterns of behavior, see where your compassion and kindness are breaking down in ways that you can't see them. And one-on-one coaching is a brilliant and beautiful way to step into being a better version of yourself. 

30:47 

And this time of year is a great time to get into coaching. This is a beautiful opportunity for you to reset and step into something better and choose the relationship in a way that you never have before. So if you would like to set up a free 90 minute coaching call and coaching consult with me, go to tanyahale.com, go to the free consultation tab and click on that. You can get on my calendar and we can sit down and have a great chat about your situation. I can help give you some clarity, help you see some areas where you can make some adjustments, and we can talk about what one-on-one coaching will look like for you. That's going to do it for me today. I hope you all have a really, really awesome week. 

31:41 

If this topic resonated with you, go to the show notes in your podcast app. I have a ton of podcasts that have to do with this one. Probably, I don't know, I haven't counted them, probably 15 or 20 podcasts down there that all are going to build upon what we talked about today, how to have this stronger, better relationship. Okay, have an awesome, awesome week, my friends, and I will see you next time. Bye. 

32:10 

Thank you so much for joining me today. If you would love to receive some weekend motivation, be sure to sign up for my free "weekend win" email: a short and quick messages to help you have a better weekend and position yourself for a more productive week., go to townyhelp.com to sign up and learn more about life coaching and how it can help you get to your best self ever. See ya.