We found this posted on AliveByNature and thought you’d enjoy it…
Do you recall seeing this commercial? Mom, Dad and Baby are at the breakfast table when suddenly each parent looks at a watch and races for a briefcase, leaving Baby Booing at the table. They meet at the door. “I thought you were taking him,” cries Mom. “I thought you were…” Dad echoes. “Ha, ha ha,” they laugh, realizing their mistake. They eye each other with great affection and agree, “We need a vacation.” In the next scene, they’re enjoying Disney World.
I wanted to slap them both.
Here’s how that scene might play out at my house: My husband and I meet at the door and realize our mistake. “I told you I had an early appointment,” I’d hiss. “You did not!” he’d insist in his most peeved and put-upon tone. “Besides, you know I have a staff meeting on Tuesdays.”
In “Reality World” we’re faced with the incessant, seemingly unstoppable presence of stress. Paradoxically it’s both a positive and a negative force. Stress is tension and struggle, yet it’s also a key ingredient in all growth, all effort. This ability to push ourselves toward our potential is at once a unique strength of humans and a heart-wrenching weakness. Example: Imagine you’re trying to create “an old-fashioned Christmas.” If you decorate every corner, home-cook every morsel, wrap every gift in lace, have the kids write an original skit, you’ll probably have an outstanding celebration. You may also be too tired to enjoy it, and no one will like you because you’ve been so irritable all week.
Not only does stress take a toll on us individually, it’s also today’s single greatest threat to the well-being of marriage. We can’t avoid stress, but in order to triumph over it, we need to know how stress harms love:
• It saps us of the strength we need to renew our love.
• It turns us from allies into adversaries, as we blame each other for not being helpful enough.
• It makes us hostile competitors for each other’s sympathy.
Physical, Emotional and Spiritual Fatigue
Through an accumulation of too tired-to-make-love-nights and too-testy, too-rushed mornings, stress slyly erodes our passion, while our never-ending parade of chores uses up the energy we once had for loving gestures. We find that the effort it takes to sparkle or even to smile is sometimes beyond us. So is the emotional energy we need to straighten out a misunderstanding or the physical strength to take a walk Worst of all, stress drains spiritual energy to keep on in love, even when it isn’t e way we had envisioned it.
Stress = Need as Anger
No matter what creates our stress, stress makes us needier. We then look to our mate for help. After all, love means making life easier, right? But as reasonable as this expectation may be, it isn’t always met.
Occasionally we do get that loving sympathy and support we crave, but not with any reliability or always at the moment we need it. Sometimes our spouse is oblivious to what we need, or he may simply refuse to give it. Often he’s the cause of our stress.
Every time there’s a gap between what he might have done to ease our stress, and what he did, that gap is filled with anger—and anger makes loving feelings harder to renew.
The Stress Sweepstakes
Many couples fall into an “I’m-more stressed-than-you-are” competition. The rewards to the winner are potentially great: more sympathy, more complaint time, more respect and permission to carry a lighter load at home. After all, “Look at how much stress I’m under!”
During one very demanding period in our lives, my husband and I became masters at this contest. We jockeyed back and forth in a daily stress-sufferers’ race, without the slightest awareness we were in it.
Mornings began with one of us telling the other (in great and boring detail) how badly we had slept. The other might then mention unpleasant events anticipated in the day ahead. Or we might draw attention to some physical ailment. He often wondered aloud about whether he was “coming down with something.” I merely made agonized faces, reminding him of my bad leg, without having to say a word.
At the end of the day we presented each other with an assortment of sighs, grumpy moods or slumped torsos in an effort to reestablish stress dominance. Occasionally we even escalated to more dramatic demonstrations. I favored taking to my bed for a day, while casting reproachful glances at my husband. He tended toward outbursts of fury over small upsets, signaling me that he had been pushed to the limit and I would be insane to expect one more thing from him.
When a couple is caught up in this game, love is squeezed out of play. How could you offer support? You’d be giving a point to the other side.
Shoring Up Love
To safeguard your marriage from stress, consider these strategies:
• Stress Management. You’re probably already familiar with the traditional stress-management techniques such as exercise, yoga, massage, meditation, visualization, setting priorities, learning to say “no,” scheduling time for yourself and organizing your
closets and your life. They all work. Just choose those that are right for you and use them regularly.
The fundamental idea behind all stress-management advice is that you are in charge of making yourself feel better. You—not your mate or your mother—are responsible for your emotional and spiritual well-being.
It’s easy to see how that shift of responsibility reduces the negative effect of stress on your marriage. When you take charge of reducing your stress, you develop resources beyond your mate. As a result, you depend on him less, and are less disappointed when he fails to meet your needs.
• Permission to Complain. Sometimes nothing is so soothing as an uninterrupted whine, followed by a warm bath of sympathy. You can increase your chances for sympathy by eliminating the subtle criticism that often accompanies complaints.
For example: Suppose you’re suffering over a miserable boss. Your husband hates to hear about it because, to him, it’s saying that if he were more successful, you wouldn’t have to put up with the situation. Even if you’re not saying that, his interpretation of your plight can make him avoid, interrupt or otherwise fail to sympathize with you. And when your complaints are directed at him for having disappointed or infuriated you in some way, sympathizing with you would be for him the same thing as an admission of guilt.
You and your mate can get clear of these communication traps by openly awarding each other complaint time. One couple I know takes turns. Another responds to specific requests. (“I need a good whine. When is a good time for you to listen?”)
The ground rules generally allow the complainer to say whatever is on her or his mind while the partner listens, then responds sympathetically. This is not a time for defensiveness, discussion or a reasonable observation that these complaints are totally unreasonable. You just grant each other an attentive audience, then respond with warmth and utter sympathy.
• The Open Competition. One good strategy is simply to acknowledge the competition between you. Things improved for my husband and me when we started scoring each other aloud. If he related his hour-long battle with a customer-service agent who couldn’t correct a billing error because “it’s in the computer,” I’d listen appreciatively, then announce: “Honey, that’s at least seven points for you!” He did the same for me. We still complained to each other, we just didn’t take it so seriously.
Other couples shift their focus from winning the contest to appreciating each other’s playing style. If one relates a truly dreadful-day story, the other bestows victory laurels: “No question about it, Dear. You’re the absolute winner of the foot rub tonight”
This combination of gentle teasing and true appreciation not only interrupts the underground contest between you, it also allows you to react to the other’s complaints in a more positive way. In fact, it just might make you laugh.
• The Best Medicine. Yes, laughter is the single best safeguard for a marriage against the toxins of daily stress. Once you learn to manage your own stress level, give each other permission to complain and call attention to your stress contest in a lighthearted way, it will have the same effect as one great shared laugh.
That’s right, go ahead and laugh! “We’re doing way too much, at way too fast a pace, and we often ask too much of each other. It’s a goofy way to live—but it’s home.” When you laugh, you remind yourselves that you’re in this thing together.