Are you self-aware?
Do you know what your preferences are?
Do you know what you need?
Can you articulate your perspective?
Are you also a student of your significant other?
Are you aware of their preferences?
Are you aware of their needs?
Are you aware and open to your partner’s perspective?
Love doesn’t guarantee that you will always see eye to eye.
Love doesn’t mean that your preferences, your needs and your reality will always be aligned with your partners. In marriage counseling, it isn’t unusual to talk with a couple that assume that because they believe in the same God, they also expect that they will agree about everything else as well.
Each of us is an interesting, complex human being. We have different backgrounds, different life experiences and different perceptions of the very same event. Learning how to relate to a completely different person is one of the fabulous challenges of marriage.
Being self-aware is insufficient if we don’t risk communicating our awareness to each other. During premarital counseling it’s not unusual for me to ask a young couple about their first argument. When they tell me that they’ve never had one, I’m sad and yet also on the alert.
They have missed a vital opportunity to learn about each other. As a wise person once said, “If you agree on everything then one of you isn’t necessary.”
A marriage without truth is a marriage without passion!
Whenever we accommodate with what our partner wants, without also voicing our own wishes, we strangle the life out of ourselves and end up feeling disillusioned with our mate and with marriage in general.
Have you turned yourself into a chameleon? If you have, you have become your partner’s Revised Standard Version or perversion.
If your most important value has been to “please” your significant other, if every choice is centered around what you think will make your mate ‘happy”, then you are probably making yourself absolutely miserable.
You have devalued yourself!
You pretend you enjoy things that you don’t.
You say “yes” when you mean “no”.
You go along to get along.
You are losing your personal truth.
Meanwhile your partner has never had to face a “no”. Your partner hasn’t experienced the uncomfortable moment when confrontation happens. They haven’t ever had to deal with disappointment. In fact their assumption is that you are in agreement with them.
You and you alone, have robbed your partner and yourself of an opportunity for growth. You have learned to value your mate’s perspective, needs and truth, yet you haven’t given your mate an opportunity to value yours.
You are the one who has made yourself invisible.
You haven’t dared to test your relationship to discover if it’s big enough for two…two people, two preferences, two sets of needs, and two perspectives.
One is crucially important to two!
Until the next Conscious Loving Blog …
