Be Happily Married- Even If Your Partner Won't Do a Thing Page 2
It’s not about the time in your day, it’s about the mind in your day!
It’s about your emotional resources; your mental capacity to handle “one more thing.” Your willpower has just drained out and there’s no gas left in the tank for sex, dinner with friends or going to the gym.
Having an awesome relationship is all about incorporating new skills that become habits. Effective communication is a skill, listening is a skill, patience is a skill, and self-confidence is a skill. When you practice these skills over time, they become healthy habits and ways of being in your relationship. But creating habits takes time.
How much time? How long does it actually take to form a new habit (in this case, having the habits you need to create an amazing relationship)? The answer is from a woman named Phillippa Lally. She’s a health psychology researcher at the University College London and is the bomb-diggity when it comes to research on habits. Her extensive studies show that it takes an average of 66 days to break/create a habit.1 Since this is the average, I tell folks to give themselves three months.
Right now, I need you to ask yourself, “What am I going to take off my plate for the next three months so I have the bandwidth to work on my relationship?” This could mean hiring a cleaning person (or using one more often or asking them to also do the laundry), asking someone to carpool your kids to school, changing your work schedule to leave at 3:00pm, getting a gardener, having groceries delivered, telling the school you need to bow out of the yearly bake sale, hiring a dog walker (or making your kids do it) or saying “no” to anything that gets asked of you over the next three months.
You’ve really got to do this if you want to be successful. You can’t just add “working on my relationship” to your already-overflowing to-do list and expect it to work. It’s got to be a priority for the next three months and you need to make a commitment, which means getting other things off your plate.
Right now, I want you to identify the three things you’ll take off your plate for the next three months:
1.
2.
3.
Reason #2
You Haven’t Been Successful Before:
The next reason why this can be the last book you’ll ever read about how to have a happy relationship is that I’m not only giving you a fish (this book), I’m going to teach you how to fish. Every chapter will have Action Items at the end. These are specific and easy-to-apply techniques to incorporate each of the ten keys into your daily life. There’s no journaling for five hours, long date nights where all you’re thinking about is the pressure to have sex later, or costly things to incorporate.
The Action Items are all the best tools that I’ve been using with my clients (and myself) for years. These are the ones that work because they’re easy to understand, don’t take a lot of time and are super effective with lots of bang for your buck (when you end up having more sex because of these tools, you’ll see how there’s a great pun in there).
For those of you overachievers out there (or those who get bored easily), I’m also including bonus tips that you can access on my website at www.abbymedcalf.com/bonustoolkit
Reason #3
You Haven’t Been Successful Before:
The last reason this can be the last book on relationships you read is because, if you bought this, your focus is in the right place: YOU.
I’ve been working with couples for decades now, and I noticed something amazing about seven years ago. Although I’ve had incredible success with couples when they come in together, I’ve had the same level of success, if not higher, with individuals who come in alone because their partner has refused to come or do any work! What?!?!?
Yes! You can completely change your relationship, even if your partner won’t lift a finger, read a book, go to counseling or admit they have a problem. Let me tell you why you can transform your relationship into a connectivity, passion-generating machine even if your partner won’t do a single thing.
Have you ever walked down the street and saw someone coming at you that caught your attention in a bad way? The person didn’t necessarily say or do anything, but you noticed yourself focusing on them and could just feel some negative vibe coming off of them? Maybe you ended up crossing the street or keeping your eye on them because you could “just tell” something was off or something bad could happen?
This is because you’re picking up on that person’s intentions. This is just like when your partner comes home and you can tell they’re in a bad mood before they say anything. Your unconscious mind is powerful and it’s picking up what the other person is laying down!
Research shows that your conscious brain processes information at a rate of approximately 50 bits per second (don’t ask me what a “bit” is). Meanwhile, your unconscious mind processes information at a rate of 11 million bits per second. That’s not a typo. That’s 50 versus 11 million!!2 Your unconscious mind is on the job and it’s affecting what your conscious mind is processing all the time.
When you get into a head space that you’re going to change your relationship, even if your partner won’t do a thing, you start sending out very different signals, both consciously and unconsciously. Your partner picks up on these signals (both consciously and unconsciously themselves) and the results are astounding! Your partner will start reacting differently even when they don’t realize what’s changed. I’ve seen it again and again.
This is going to be so empowering for you. Instead of feeling resentful and irritated with your partner, you’ll start to feel confident, self-assured, patient and compassionate. You’ll focus each day on yourself and what you’re doing, instead of what they’re doing. The focus on what your partner is doing is what leaves you feeling frustrated, hopeless and resentful. You can’t build a loving relationship on any of these emotions. You are where your attention is!
Your new intention, which I’ll talk about a lot more in Chapter Five, will set the tone for your relationship and everything will change from there.
You have the complete power to
change what you’re doing and thinking, so you have the complete power to change your life and your relationship.
Imagine communicating, laughing, feeling appreciated and having a sense of kindness and compassion in your relationship. All these things are possible, and you can do it in the next three months if you make it your priority.
* * *
1 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ejsp.674
2 https://www.amazon.com/Sweet-Spot-Accomplish-More-Doing/dp/0553392069
Chapter Two
Just How Committed Are You?
Marriage. Long-term relationship. Life partner. For some, these words bring feelings of warmth and longing and, for others, feelings of terror and thoughts of running far away. What’s up with marriage? Why are we still doing it when there’s a divorce every 36 seconds, adding up to a little over 800,000 divorces a year?!3
The divorce “rate” (and this is a hotly contested statistic) is most commonly cited as hovering somewhere around 50% (and the divorce rate for second and third marriages is even higher).4 As if that’s not bad enough, just quoting divorce rates is misleading because it doesn’t even take into account the millions of couples who stay together but are miserable. In his book The Science of Happily Ever After, psychologist Ty Tashiro5 notes that only three in ten married couples stay in “healthy, happy marriages.” It seems that happy long-term marriages are becoming the stuff of folklore and myth, like spotting Bigfoot: “I’ve definitely seen one; I don’t have any proof exactly, but I’ve seen it.”
If being happily married was a business, it would have somewhere around a 70 percent failure rate. Knowing this, doesn’t it seem crazy that anyone would ever apply for a job there? Yet, each June, the most popular wedding month of the year, some 13,000 couples will say “I do” in the United States.6 Hopeful men and women will stand
in churches, synagogues, fields, court houses, backyards and parks committing to a lifelong relationship.
People still get married because, despite all the doom and gloom written about marriage and long-term relationships, research has shown over and over that marriage still brings many benefits. For example, married people7
Enjoy better health (they’re less likely to have strokes or heart disease and they heal more quickly),
Have more sound mental health (they have less depression and better responses to stress),
Have more money and assets (divorced women have the highest poverty rates among women in the US),8 and (shock!),
Enjoy better sex lives than folks who remain single.
And here’s something else really cool. The longer couples stay together, the more “in love” they eventually become! Eminent marriage researcher Dr. John Gottman says, “The surprising thing is that the longer people are together, the more the sense of kindness returns. Our research is starting to reveal that in later life, your relationship becomes very much like it was during courtship.”9
The big question you’re likely asking right now is, “That’s great, but how do I get from where I am, to way over there?” How do you get to that warm fuzzy “in love” place again (or for the first time)? And how do you do it if your partner refuses to get off the couch or read this book?
With over 60 years of hard research and thousands of studies, there’s actually some good news. There are some consistent themes identified in the research, some “keys” to staying happily married for the long term. If you do these things, you’ll see the nature of your relationship change. Your partner will start reacting differently to you, because you’re acting differently!
Think about if you’re in a bad mood or snap at your partner. Doesn’t this change your partner’s behavior? Don’t they maybe snap back at you, ignore you or act disgusted or angry? You change your partner’s behavior all the time without even thinking about it! It happens the other way, too. Maybe you’re in a great mood, but then your partner comes home and is surly or makes a nasty remark. Doesn’t this change your thinking and actions? Of course it does! In this book, you’re going to learn to harness this energy and use it to improve your relationship instead of hurting it.
From the research and my own extensive, hands-on experience, I’ve identified ten keys to being happily married. In each of the ten chapters, you’ll learn the research, get a Real-Life Example of how it works, and then be taught specific, simple Action Tips for operationalizing the keys into your life. Ideas are great, but if you can’t figure out how to use or apply them, they don’t do much good. I’m all about having actionable tools you can use today to improve your relationship and start seeing results. The kicker: none of the tools requires hours of work. All of them can be incorporated in just a few minutes a day (really!).
If you haven’t read the chapter before this, you need to go back and read it now. It explains why you’ve failed before to improve your relationship, and why this time can absolutely be different!
I want to say one last word about commitment before we jump in. There’s a quote on the wall in my office that says, “The difference between involvement and commitment is like a breakfast of ham and eggs: the chicken is involved but the pig is committed.”
I’ve got it there because a lot of people over the years have come into my office fed up with their relationship and ready to leave. They say things like: “I’m going to see how the therapy goes and then decide whether I’m going to stay in the relationship.” I tell them right then that they might as well not come to therapy because it’s not going to work if that’s their thinking.
The commitment needs to come first. Commit to stay together and do the work. When you have one foot in and one foot out, you’re not going to have a successful, long-term outcome.
If you were at a job with one foot in and one foot out, wouldn’t people pick up on your energy? Wouldn’t you be acting a certain way and viewing things differently than if you were completely committed? Would you expect raises or promotions with this kind of attitude and focus? Do you see the parallel? It really is the same with your partner.
In his research, Dr. Karl Pillemer of Cornell University found that in successful marriages, “People really had the mindset they wanted to stay married. They regarded their partnership as less like buying a new car and more like learning to drive. Marriage is like a discipline. A discipline is not reaching one happy endpoint.”10
Commitment is like training for a race. Training doesn’t guarantee you’ll win, but you still get a whole bunch of advantages and value out of it, even if you don’t.
“When people say, ‘I’m committed to my relationship,’ they can mean [different] things,” says Benjamin Karney, a professor of psychology and co-director of the Relationship Institute at UCLA.11 In studies at the Relationship Institute, they’ve found that those couples with a deeper level of commitment and a willingness to make sacrifices for the sake of the marriage have lower divorce rates and report fewer problems in their marriages. This mindset works even if you’re the only one who seems committed and the only one doing any of the work.
Another researcher at the Relationship Institute says it well: “When we’re under a great deal of stress or when there is a high-stakes decision on which you disagree, those are defining moments in a relationship. What our data indicate is that committing to the relationship rather than committing to your own agenda and your own immediate needs is a far better strategy.”12 I’m going to teach you how to do just that in this book.
If you want a happy and satisfying long-term relationship, you need to start with your commitment.
Now, you might be saying, “But my partner isn’t willing to make any sacrifices. They won’t do the work!”
I say to that, “It begins with you.” Someone has to take these concrete steps first and stick with them!
You might be saying, “But I’ve tried so many times, and although we initially make some headway, we eventually fall back into old patterns and nothing ever sticks!” First, I hear your pain. Second, I’m going to ask you to really think about these changes you’ve made in the past.
Here’s what usually happens. You make some changes, maybe you’re nicer to your partner, maybe you start paying attention or maybe you start doing more things for them. Whatever it is, your partner sees the changes, but doesn’t trust them. They’re thinking (either consciously or unconsciously) something like, “Oh, now s/he’s being nice to me. Let’s see how long that lasts.” So, your partner doesn’t seem like they appreciate the changes or doesn’t make any changes themselves because they don’t trust what’s happening. They think it’s going to go away soon, so why bother getting their hopes up or putting in any effort? You see or feel this response and say things like, “See, nothing works!” Then, you stop with your new behaviors and the two of you are back to your old, negative cycle.
This time is different. This time, you’re going to stick to your changes for three months. No matter what your partner does or doesn’t do, you’re going to stick to your plan because you’re committed. For these three months, there’s no back and forth, no wavering, just full-on commitment.
Let me ask you something, have you ever tried to lose a little weight? You diet, grocery shop, exercise and do everything right but the needle on the scale doesn’t move at all? Sometimes you even gain weight initially!?!? This is just like that. You know that if you had stuck to your plan for a longer period of time, eventually the weight would have come off, barring any underlying serious medical problems. The issue is that you wanted to see immediate results and you didn’t commit to the long-term goal for long enough. We all like to see immediate results for our labor and can give up when we don’t see progress right away.
It’s the same here. You’ve just got to stick with your behavior and thought changes, even if you don’t see any
immediate results, because, eventually, things will change. They might be small, incremental changes, but they’ll eventually add up.
If you continue to eat well and exercise, eventually, the needle on the scale will start to move in the right direction. If you continue to change your behaviors with your partner, eventually the needle on that scale will move in the right direction, too.
Success is usually about choosing between what you want right now and what you want most.
You’ve got to stay motivated to stick to your goal. How do you do this? When you feel like you want to quit, you’ve got to remember why you started. Pain motivates us more than pleasure, so I want you to take a minute right now and list three pain points you have in your relationship. These are the three things that, when they’re resolved, you’ll feel SOOOO happy and great in your life and relationship. These are the things that you hate the most about your relationship. These are the things you complain about, that keep you up at night and that motivated you to buy this book.
Write your three pain points here:
1.
2.
3.
Now, I want you to close your eyes and think about that first pain point. That first issue that you’ve just got to fix so you can feel happier in your relationship. Think of having that issue totally resolved. How would you be feeling? I want you to write down three sentences about how you’ll feel when this is no longer an issue in your relationship. Imagine the freedom, happiness, ease, relief, laughter, fulfillment, confidence, joy or whatever you’d be feeling and write three sentences about that here: