Mike:
In the
beginning of our marriage, we didn’t just have the typical newlywed problems. Such annoyances as where I dropped my dirty
clothes, if I pitched in with dishes, or how many date nights we got were the
least of our concerns. I’m not saying that the other, more mundane things were
not important, but we were focused on bigger things first- like newborn sleep
patterns, paying bills (and have money
left over for food, formula, and diapers!), balancing school/work/marriage/parenthood,
and our own immaturity. One hang-up that really got us was handling
disagreements.
What do we do when we’re
coming from completely opposite sides of a problem and we’re both certain that
our way is THE way? Being married to a creature that is so different than
me was incredibly stressful. We’d grown
up with completely different home-lives, and we were set in how we grew up.
 |
| Us at 17 |
For Mike
what this meant was that he didn’t fight. As we were talking about the things
we wanted to include in this blog post I asked him for about the 12,536th time, “You really don’t remember your parents ever fighting? Yelling? Really…..
nothing?!” He doesn’t. If his parents had any disagreements he sure doesn’t
remember it. It’s baffling to me. Utterly unfathomable.
My head
holds different memories. Like I said before, I was privy to a marriage that
was an unhealthy cycle. That cycle was like Old Faithful. You knew it would
blow, in this case though you didn’t know when. I learned to gage emotions,
body language, facial expressions, and tone of voice carefully and
accurately. Around 12 I learned to be
the calm in the storm with my parents. Admittedly, my immaturity allowed me to
take some pride in my self-control and pleasure in the fact that the calmer I
was the more it would tick them off. I was a teenager and fed up.
Once on a
mission trip in high school I woke up earlier than I needed to and wandered
into the mission’s kitchen. Mike’s mom (his
mom went on mission trips with him!) was already up and working with the
other ladies to get breakfast ready and she let me lay down in her bed since it
was empty and the room was quiet. There was a quilt was on the bed. The cracked
door let enough light in for me to see that it was handmade. I curled up and
stayed awake wondering what it would be like to have someone make me a quilt.
It sounds like such a little thing now that I’m typing it, it was just a quilt.
It was moments like these, just going about a normal day that would sometimes
grip me because of the contrast. Mike’s parents love him so. When he was home
for the weekends from TAMS they would enforce a curfew. I remember him dropping
me off so he wouldn’t be too late and instead of being annoyed, I was envious.
He respected and loved them enough that even at 17, living away from home
during the week, and having his own car, he obeyed. And they loved him enough
to make sure he did. My parents didn’t know when I got home.
Our starkly
different upbringings combined with our immaturity and the suddenness of the
situation made that first little bit very challenging. I knew how to be calm in
the chaos, but with Mike there was no yelling, no chaos…so I became it. And he
shut down. It wasn’t working.
 |
| New Year's Eve 2014 |
Mike:
Like Mandy
said, we figured out pretty quickly that the way we were ‘working through’
things wasn’t actually working. We read
in some of our books on marriage that a good strategy to stop arguments before
they begin is to talk through difficult subjects before they become a problem. We started doing that.
Approaching
a volatile subject on a good day, when everything is ok and we are both feeling
loved and secure is vital to our marriage. We are able to calmly work through
things rather than try to touch on that same subject on a day we are both
feeling frazzled or unappreciated.
Another
strategy that has become our normal (even concerning friends and family) is holding
at the forefront of our minds the belief that your spouse (family member,
friend) has your best interest at heart. I try to approach any sort of
disagreement with the mindset that Amanda may have a different idea, belief, or
opinion, but not that she’s necessarily attacking me. Because we have the same mindset, we were
able to more openly discuss things without walls up. That about-face of our normal thinking was
hard at first, but we found that the walls it brings down in our own minds is
worth the preparation to get there.
 |
| Pregnant with our fourth little love. (Credit: Becky Roberson Photography) |
Our marriage
is not a competition. I’m not in the
relationship to browbeat, dominate, or otherwise rule over my wife. I’m married to Amanda to make her happy in
the best ways I can, and one of them is to decide to approach her, especially
when I may think she’s defensive or wrong on something, with an open, trusting,
and loving heart. This approach makes both of us vulnerable to the point that
we’ve hurt the other from time to time, but more often we’ve come to a deeper,
closer understanding of each other and our relationship.
Amanda:
Amanda:
Ultimately we
really had to go beneath the surface and figure out the ‘whys’. Why would he shut down? Why would I turn into someone I
couldn’t stand? Why would he get defensive? Why would I run away? Why, why, why? What it came down to is
that if we focused first on figuring out the whys then it was easier to switch
our viewpoint.
We went from
attacking or being attacked to coming to a point where we were vulnerable
enough to deal with the issues that were the real problems rather than just our
reactions, or symptoms of the problems. When Mike tells me what he struggling
with and lets me inside his bubble, rather than feeling what I had been 10
minutes before, I feel compassion and gratitude that he shared with me. Also,
when I let my guard down and trust him with my fears and worries, he feels
needed and wants to make things better for me. It took us a while to turn this
new approach to disagreements into a habit. We still fall into the trap of
being guarded and selfish sometimes, but with far less frequency.
