Misunderstanding Breeds Chaos

I turned on the television today and Marriage Boot Camp was on. For those of you unfamiliar with the premise of the show, they take couples who were previously on the show Bridezillas and allow us to peek into their marriage (because, let's be honest...we all want to know how many of these horrifically portrayed couples actually stay married). What struck me was just how many of these people had been married less than one year and how much their struggles were due to a history of misunderstanding and hurt. I experienced this struggle myself in my marriage, especially during the first year.

For those of you who know me and my husband, you know that we communicate very differently. If you ask me a question, you should be prepared and have time for an in-depth response. Seriously. I'll take you from A - Z to make sure you understand me. At the other end of the spectrum is my husband. If you ask him a question, you better be specific or have a follow up question prepared. He will answer exactly what you asked him. So there I was, in my first year of marriage, knowing that my husband isn't a talker - he's a listener. Every day that he came home from work, I asked him how his day was. And every day, his answer was the same - fine. That's it. No more, no less. I'd ask follow up questions and I'd get one word answers. After about three months of this, even though I knew that this was exactly who I married, I lost it. I woke up one Saturday morning, sat in the silence, looked over at my sleeping husband, and started bawling. I mean, bawling - big, nasty, runny nose tears. I took it to the bathroom so as not to wake my husband and have to give answers for a situation I barely understood... I could barely verbalize why I was so upset. As I sat crying in my ever melodramatic state, I envisioned that this silence epitomized the years to come - years in which the only voice I heard would be my own because my husband didn't talk to me. Stimulating conversation is like air to me - it keeps me alive. Couple his silence with my trust issues & melodrama and we had a ticking time bomb on our hands. If I may be completely honest, where there was silence, I managed to fill in the blanks of what his thoughts simply must have been... definitely not conducive to a healthy relationship. Well, when the soap opera melodrama that is my mind calmed down a bit, I thought logically through the whole thing. I figured that if he knew just how much this really bothered me and could understand why it bothered me, he'd be open to any suggestion I threw out to make it better.

The next day, I sat him down and told him that his silence made me feel like I was married to a stranger. I felt like I never knew what he was thinking and I simply came up with thoughts that I imagined must have been his. My words were met by confusion and hurt that I simply did not understand at first. Apparently, he thought he talked to me a lot! His perspective was completely different from mine! This was something I never imagined (which in hindsight was silly). I thought that he simply had to know how silent he really was and that he was just being who he always was when, in reality, he was making an effort to share with me more than he'd ever shared with anyone! My speech diminished his efforts and showed a lack of appreciation for them (meanwhile, I was thinking, how can I appreciate something I don't know I'm getting?). {I also later understood that I was asking him to be someone he never was, which ultimately can make someone feel like you don't really love them as they are, but neither of us discussed that at that moment.} After we got past the hurt and talked for a while, we discussed that he was accustomed to writing more than talking. I asked him if he'd be open to carrying a pocket sized notebook and jotting down thoughts to share with me in the evenings. That way, I could read them if he didn't feel like talking and he could remember them if he did feel like talking. He was open to the idea and so we tried it.

I'd love to wrap this post up by saying that idea solved all of our communication problems and we lived happily ever after, but we all know that nothing is that simple. Communication starts with understanding your spouse's perspective and committing to love them for who they are, but it continues with knowing what, how, and when to share to avoid much much bigger issues than this minor situation and that was something we were still learning. We'll save that for another post though.

Getting back to Marriage Boot Camp, it became clear to me that these people were so overwhelmed with months and years of feeling misunderstood and the hurt that accompanies it, that they were unwilling/unable to understand their spouse's perspective, which just created more misunderstanding and hurt. After spending many evenings feeling like my husband didn't/couldn't understand me, being hurt that he "didn't want to share his thoughts with me", getting sad, angry, frustrated, scared, etc. I decided to share all of these feelings. His (merciful) ability to listen through his own hurt kept that situation from degenerating into something far worse (that day anyway, lol).

~*CAT8*~