Positive psychology

The Essential Ingredients of a Good Relationship

Ron Johnson appreciation, emotional maturity, Feelings, marital, Positive psychology, relationships, Self-Awareness

I suspect you have some ideas of what a good relationship looks like. Certainly, you would identify love as a central ingredient, and perhaps things like honesty, commitment, trustworthiness, or family connections. You might think a good relationship should be composed of good communication, lots of play, or lots of work. I agree that a good and developing relationship needs to have all these things. It takes a lot of love, honesty, and all the rest to have a good relationship, and without these ingredients, no relationship can mature into something great. However valuable these very positive things are in a relationship, they often take a lot of work. It might not take “work” to fall in love, but it takes work to stay in love. Likewise, it is easier to be honest and open in the initial stages of a relationship, but it takes work to keep open and stay honest as the relationship grows. I think that a good relationship has a good mix of work, play, talk, and graciousness all in the context of being loving and honest.

Deb and I often say to couples that “they were married for the wrong reason: they loved each other.” We say this somewhat tongue-in-cheek not really believing that there is something wrong with loving your partner. What we mean by this “wrong reason” is more about the lack of what we believe is the right reason for marrying someone: understanding that person. Frankly, it is easier to love someone than to understand that person. Love comes from the heart and it is gift that we need to receive with gratitude because we can never earn someone’s love. If someone loves me, I didn’t deserve it, I didn’t earn it, I can’t pay for it…but I need it. So, I’m all about loving someone. The problem with loving someone is that “love is blind.” And so it should be. I don’t love someone because; I just love someone. We might justify our loving someone by saying all the things we like about that person, extolling that person’s virtue, intelligence, or kindness, but these are not the ingredients of love; they are the ingredients of liking. Love does not a good marriage make….or any relationship. Love is good? Yes. Valuable? Yes. Essential? Maybe not. I think you can love anyone if you understand that person because I believe that when I really understand someone, I understand his feelings, his nature, his passions, his loves, his losses, his hurts, and maybe his soul. But love is not enough. You need disinterest, disagreement, and dislike. At first glance these three things must seem “negative,” but however difficult they are, they are also essential in any maturing relationship. Let me explain.

Disinterest

Simply stated, two people cannot be interested in the same things. Granted, couples find each other through some common interest. They might meet in a bar with a penchant for having a few beers watching a football game or a glass good red wine after work; they might meet at a co-ed volleyball game, a biking event, a volunteer group, hiking the canyons of Utah, or in church. People that start a relationship on this common ground have a leg up on people who find each other physically attractive or good sexual partners, but may not actually have anything in common. Whether a relationship began with some common interests and/or sexual attraction, people soon discover that they are not interested in the same things. However obvious this fact is, it can be of profound importance in a developing relationship. For instance, Deb and I share a great deal of common interest in psychology, theology, traveling, reading, working on the house, and writing as well as many other elements of life. Each of us, however, has interests that the other doesn’t have, like Deb’s passion for nature and flowers that I don’t share, and my passion for basketball that she doesn’t share. I just don’t care much about flowers although I certainly enjoy seeing them from time to time. I just don’t have the deep appreciation of Mother Nature that she has. After knowing Deb for 42 years and knowing for most of these years that she is a person of the earth, it was always a stretch for me to appreciate her appreciation for nature. In our recent trip to the Netherlands in the height of the spring flower season, I had what seems to be my first glimpse into appreciation of flowers as we perused the Keukenhof gardens and the acres of tulips, hyacinth, and other spring flowers. It might not seem terribly important that Deb liked flowers and I didn’t care much, but this difference between us is actually quite profound because Deb’s sense of the world, the universe, and God is centrally related to nature. Consider how it has been for her to live with me, whom she loves and appreciates dearly, when I didn’t really give a hoot about the likes of tulips. In a similar fashion, Deb has little interest, and certainly no passion in playing basketball. She kindly asks me how my game went after Tuesday and Thursday morning games and Sunday night games, but she doesn’t really care about the game. She cares about me.

A good relationship needs to acknowledge the fact that we are not interested in the same things…nor should we. But if I say that I am bored when I hear Deb talking about flowers or she says she is bored when I talk about a pick and roll, we would unnecessarily hurt one another. It’s nice that I have some recent history with appreciating flowers, but I most certainly will never spend the hours she spends with them, nor am I capable of finding God in a new rose. A rose is, well, just a rose. Someone once said that, I believe.

This business of being passionate about some things but not others has to do with our value system. Deb values flowers, and I value basketball, but the value that each of us has in these matters runs quite deep and is quite passionate. Yet it is hard for couple to grant to one another these differences as well as the disinterest one partner has in the values and passions of the other partner. However difficult it is to admit to disinterest, it is even harder to admit to disappointment.

Disappointment

An unavoidable phenomenon and an essential ingredient in a good relationship is disappointment. Let me explain. Disinterest is difficult to accept in a relationship, but disappointment is much harder to accept. I am disappointed when my partner does something or says something to me that is hurtful and unexpected. We will unavoidably disappoint each other from time to time. I think it happens every day in every relationship. The difficulty is that most of us are not equipped to deal with disappointment. If I come into a relationship primarily because I love that person, it is likely that I have seen a good bit about the person that I like. And I probably have come to understand a lot about this person that I have come to love. It is also likely, however, that I do not understand enough of the person to know that he or she is like me in some ways and different from me in some ways. We might say that “after the honeymoon phase” of a developing relationship there come times of disappointment. I begin to see that my partner and I are different, perhaps substantially different. This can come as a shock to someone who is madly in love with his/her partner because of the “love is blind” thing that often operates at the beginning of a relationship. So, how do I get disappointed?

I get disappointed when my partner doesn’t live up to my expectations. I may not have even known that I had expectations, but when I am disappointed, my partner has not lived up to my expectations. Very often these expectations-come-disappointment are surprising and even shocking because I didn’t previously see my partner in all situations of life. If we come to live together not having ever lived with him/her, I might be surprised and disappointed that he always throws his underwear on the floor when undressing for bed. Or it might be something that is not so offensive, like using a knife and fork in a way that does not fit with your kind of manners. There are many others, of course, some minor, some egregious. And they all lead to disappointment. There are also some disappointments that are those that erupt out of a misunderstanding what a relationship is. In summary, some of our disappointments are minor, some major, some unforeseen, some obvious, and many self-created. Sometimes, however, the feeling I have about my partner goes beyond minor disinterest and minor disappointment: I actually dislike my partner is some way. Wow.

Dislike

You might be able to find ways to be disinterested in what your partner likes, or even disappointment when she doesn’t do what you would like her to do, but it a larger step to admit that you actually dislike something about her, like the ways she speaks or acts. Unfortunately, dislike is also an essential ingredient of a good relationship. I often say it this way: “When you first admit that you don’t like something about your partner, the dislike seems huge, but over time the dislike tends to diminish if never really disappearing.” I might name something that I dislike about Deb, and she certainly dislikes things about me, but I will use some discretion in being specific except to admit that there are things about each other that we simply dislike. Some of these things might be old habits that are not so good, but some of these things are simply unavoidable and even necessary. Consider your children.

Who “likes” waking up for the third time in the middle of the night with a hungry screaming infant? No one that I know. You could say that you “dislike the action but not the person,” but I think these are just nice ways of saying you don’t like the person…at least at the moment. I don’t think there is a real distinction between dislike the infant’s crying from disliking the infant…at the moment. Furthermore, I think there is nothing wrong with that feeling. It passes. Disliking something about your partner, however, is much more difficult, and it can lead to disliking the partner himself. The way to avoid coming to that dreadful point in a relationship is to admit that you don’t like something about him. You might not like the way he eats, sleeps, or talks. You might not like the way he walks or sings. You might not like the fact that he works a lot or doesn’t like to work at all. All of these things are behaviors or mannerisms of someone you might dearly love but not actually like all the time.

What do we do with feeling dislike, disappointment, and dislike?

We feel these feelings. We admit to them. We see these as honest feelings. And most importantly, we understand that when I am disinterested, disappointed, or disliking, I feel sad. Why do I feel sad? I feel sad because I have lost something, which is what sadness is always about. You have lost interest when someone is talking about something you really don’t care about. You have lost the hope that your partner forgot your anniversary or came late to dinner. You lost the feeling that you love “everything about” your partner when you discover that she isn’t perfectly like you, and as a result, you just don’t like something about her.

It is very hard to let the feelings of disinterest, disappointment, and dislike be there along with the accompanying sadness that always accompanies these feelings. We Americans are not particularly good at simply being disappointed or sad, and we are certainly not good at being wrong, even if the definition of “wrong” is in our own eyes. So, the first and central ingredient of being disappointed is to own up to it, to call it “disappointment,” and to allow the sadness come along with it. Deb and I have written (The Positive Power of Sadness) about how sadness ends. To have sadness end, one must feel it, feel it, and finally finish it. This “feeling it” is difficult, and no one wants to feel sad, much less disappointed, but it is the only way to finish feeling sad. And it is the only way to finish the disappointment, as well as the easier feeling of disinterest and the harder feeling of dislike, that often cause sadness. Too often, people try to fix something in the relationship before they have admitted to feelings of dislike, disappointment, and dislike.

After recognizing and admitting to feeling dislike, disappointment, and dislike, and hopefully finished the sadness that resulted from these feeling, you need to think clearly. Importantly, you cannot think clearly if you are still sad, much less angry or afraid. If you try to think when you have these emotions, you thinking will not be clear-headed because it will be infused with some kind of residual emotion, usually anger at the top and sadness underneath. However, this “finishing” of sadness is very difficult. By the way, finishing sadness doesn’t mean that disinterest, disappointment, and dislike go magically away; they don’t. These feelings never “go away;” they diminish. Small disappointments diminish over time, and even huge dislikes can diminish over time, but they never go away. If you’re one who uses your knife and fork in what we might call a “European style” with knife in right hand and fork in the left hand, but your partner never moves from the American way of knife and fork, you will never be pleased with his handling of utensils; you just won’t be very disappointed very much, and you won’t be sad anymore because you will have come to accept your differences.

What about change?

You might think something like, “Well, what about someone maturing, growing up, or simply changing” what he or she does? Shouldn’t we all mature? Yes, we need to mature, grow up, and get better. Some of our maturing can come at the hands of our partner’s feelings of disappointment or dislike, but ultimately, any kind of maturing or change has to come from the individual because the individual finds it valuable to change in some way. You can never change your partner and you should never try. You can carefully express your feelings of disappointment or dislike kindly, and then see if your feelings change or, over time, you partner’s behavior changes.

I know of a man who gave up a vibrant part of his recreational life to please his wife who simply said that he shouldn’t be involved in those activities anymore. She said that if he really loved her, he would give up his sports. He did. He never recovered from the loss. She got what she wanted but lost what she needed: the person she married. Now he was doing what she wanted, not what he wanted. There are other examples of expectations that come along with a newly established relationship. I am reminded of one of my favorite cartoons, Kathy. After a couple of shots with Kathy being disappointed in Irving, her boyfriend, she said, “You’re not the person I was pretending you to be.” Many people do a lot of pretending. There was a book written some time ago entitled, “I Love You the Way You are; Now Change.”

My encouragement for you is to know how your feel as I have written so many times in the Feelings Blogs. Knowing the feelings of disinterest, disappointment, and dislike starts you on the road to loving better, and even liking better.

 

 

Feelings X: Let Me Tell You About My Feelings

Ron Johnson Feelings, mindfulness, Positive psychology, relationships, Self-Awareness, social esteem

Remember Far Side cartoons created by Gary Larsen? They were often with animals having some sense of human feelings, often a deeper sense than many humans actually have. Or, Larsen would have a group of people allegedly thinking or doing something that was an exaggeration of some human tendency. I miss Far Side. The cartoons made me laugh at myself and humanity without derision. I remember one in particular that has to do with legs.

The “leg cartoon” as Deb and I refer to it has led to our rather frequent expression of “legging” and “leg people.” The cartoon is one picture of several folks in a bar setting. Everyone in the bar has evidently been in some kind of accident and has had some kind of amputation. Hence, all these people have some kind of peg replacing their lost appendage. There are several people with peg legs, of course, which is what we normally think with some kind of amputation. There are also people with peg arms, peg hands, peg feet, peg ears, and the like. There is also someone with a peg head. This is a barroom scene, so people are evidently talking about the accidents or illnesses that caused them to lose part of their bodies. Seems reasonable.

There is only one caption at the bottom of the cartoon, evidently a statement being spoken by one guy at the bar to another guy at the bar. The inference made from the caption is that the guy with the peg head has just explained how his head had come to be amputated and replaced with a peg head. The guy speaking has a peg leg; the guy listening in the one person in the bar who has a peg head. The caption reads, “That’s nothing. Let me tell you about my leg!” Get it? The guy with the missing leg thinks that his loss of his leg is more significant than the guy who has lost his head!

Do you know “leg people,” i.e. people who always want to tell you about their “legs,” i.e. what is going on with them, what they think, what they feel, or what they did? I know many such people, some very particularly. Perhaps more importantly, I notice that I have “legs” that often seem more important than the peg legs or even the “peg heads” that the other person is talking about. In such circumstances, I want to tell my story. I want to have air time. I want someone to hear my feelings. But in that moment I have run over my friend’s leg story, arm story, or head story. It is a challenge to listen while I have my own legs while hearing my friend’s legs.

Listening

Deb and I have been working furiously on our most recent book project, tentatively entitled Let Me Tell You How I Feel. If you have read some of our blogs over the past year you will notice that we have written quite a bit about “feelings.” I suggest you review these, particularly the one on hearing feelings. In brief review “feelings” would be a central ingredient of a person, closely aligned, or perhaps a representation of one’s “inner self.” We think (abstractly) of a human being as composed of concentric circles: God or godlike at the core; then “core self” (some people talk about inner self, spirit, or soul); then the next concentric circle is the gifts and abilities we have, some natural, some learned, some enhanced; this third circle is followed by an expression of these gifts, often in words but with an orientation that is physical, emotional, productive, or cognitive. Our focus in the book is to help people express themselves (this would be the third concentric circle) and take the consequences of this expression.

First of all, note that all these terms are abstract and representational. Furthermore, none of these terms is definable. We note that all the really basic elements of the universe, like time, distance, and mass, are undefinable. Velocity is defined: distance over time, and weight is defined: mass times gravity, but time, distance, and mass are not defined. Likewise, many elements of the human experience are not defined, like love, mind, and even life. We put “feelings” in this category of undefined elements of life. We understand time, life, love, and feelings by observation and effect. What is the effect of time, love, etc.? How do we experience such things? This is how we come to understand feelings: observation and experience. Then we do the hard job of communicating this undefined important matter.

The communication of “feelings” is fraught with danger, not the least of which is the danger of thinking that I can communicate feelings precisely. I cannot. But that does not mean I shouldn’t make an honest attempt to communicate my feelings. I just have to keep in mind that I am not an ET of the 1980’s movie who could just “beam” his feelings to someone else. We are not ETs. We have to use words. Or perhaps other means of communicating like play, work, art, music, or dance. But most of us use words, which is implicitly challenging.

Challenging as it is to express and ultimately communicate feelings, it is much harder to hear them. Hearing someone express feelings causes a host of challenges for the listener, not the least of which is his/her own feelings. (By the way, we make an important distinction between feelings and emotion understanding that emotion is but a subset of feelings, but this is not the time to discuss that important matter.) The important factor in our present discussion is to note that when someone expresses feelings, the person listening will have feelings. If the listener is working to understand the speaker, he must know his own feelings, value these feelings, and keep his feelings to himself. Otherwise, he will be talking about his legs. Nothing wrong with legs, but they intrude on the listening process. This containing one’s feelings while listening is no easy project because everyone has legs.

What I have come to do is simply listen to the “legs” of the person talking to me, and do my best to understand my friend’s story. The more difficult task is when I am speaking about my story and my story is interrupted with the other person’s legs. Painful as it is for me to stop telling my story, I am often required to do so. I like to think that this is an act of grace on my part, but I sometimes render this grace with less than true graciousness, and maybe a bit of resentment. I have come to believe, however, that the person with the legs needs to tell me about her legs, and let it be. Thank goodness I’m a therapist.

Further Reading

Previous blogs on feelings

Forthcoming book on Feelings, probably available in a few months in manuscript form

The Best of Times. The Worst of Times

Ron Johnson appreciation, emotional maturity, Feelings, mindfulness, morality, Positive psychology

This is a quote from the first page of Charles Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities, and it represents a profound statement of a good portion of life, namely that there is always a combination of good and bad to every experience we have in life. Dickens was speaking, now 200 years ago, about the good times and bad times in post-revolutionary France where the country was trying to find itself as a new democracy with all the good and bad about such a political system. Certainly, Dickens was speaking about the value of the French revolution that transformed the country from a royalty-dominated society to one governed democratically with “the people in control.” Dickens was also speaking of the abuses of the French revolution, or any revolution for that matter, which always has excesses and abuses, not the least of which were the frequent use of the guillotine as leaders of France shifted from left to right. Napoleonic rightwing excesses occurred after the leftwing Revolution as many Frenchmen came to want the authority that had existed under the nobles but had been lost in the creation of a democracy

I would dare say that there is no period of time, no country, no experience, no person, no relationship, and no idea that has not also been “the best of times” simultaneously with “the worst of times.” We tend to live in a society where people want things to be black or white, right or wrong, good or bad. This desire for there to be some exact right or wrong is a seeking of safety and security in the absolute. We currently see the absolute working itself out in the current political climate where, for instance, President Trump is seen as some kind of anti-Christ by some people but by many Trump followers as a person who just speaks what he believes and does what he wants, which is certainly right in his eyes and in the eyes of his many followers. I wrote a blog some time ago written about the “power” element of morality, borrowing from Jonathon Haight’s fine book on morality. The power of morality may seem like contradiction of terms, but it is not. Just ask Trumpers, many evangelicals, or the many people who follow dictators on many countries. There is nothing wrong with valuing power, but the danger of power is in its excesses: absolute power corrupts absolutely. Yet people yearn for the right person, the perfect person, the right morality, the perfect morality because it would be so nice, and so secure to have such a thing. But it doesn’t exist.

I was raised in the “best of times and the worst of times” with my family of origin. My household was libertarian, which means “do what you want and take the consequences of what you do.” I didn’t know it was libertarian at the time, but I knew both the “do what you want” and the “take the consequences of what you do” parts of my family. I was rarely punished but I suffered the consequences of my behavior many times. I took it as a matter of course that I would take the consequences of what I did. The best of times was that I was not criticized, castigated, demeaned, or threatened. I just did what I wanted and took the consequences. The best of times was the “do what you want” part; the worst of the times was taking the consequences. I recall missing the bus to school one day. We lived seven miles from school. So I came back home from the bus stop and told my mother that I had missed the bus. “I am so sorry, Ronny, that you missed the bus. That is too bad.” That is all she said. She didn’t berate me for my lifelong inclination towards tardiness. She didn’t threaten me. She didn’t say anything about getting out of bed earlier so I could catch the bus. She just said that she was sorry. But I knew what that meant, and I didn’t have to ask. It meant I would walk to school. Seven miles. I did that once. We never talked about it again, and I never was late for the bus again. The best of times and the worst of times. Great to have freedom, but not so great to take the consequences of freedom when you are tardy. This situation where I was never criticized or shamed gave me great self-confidence. I simply thought well of myself, not particularly better than anyone else. But this self-assurance did not play well in many circumstances because was perceived as arrogant. I wasn’t arrogant, i.e. feeling better than anyone else. I just felt good about me. Much of my self-esteem was developed in the trial-and-error nature of a libertarian atmosphere where you take the consequences of your behavior, good or bad, and are not inclined to blame anyone for your errors. This was the best of times. The worst of times is that this attitude of self-confidence did not play well in the real world of America where everyone and everything is criticized, blamed, or shamed. I wasn’t prepared for that part of life and it took me some time to understand the “best of times and worst of times” with having confidence.

In addition to the “best of times” in my libertarian family, I also had the privilege of saying whatever came to mind. Some of this was that both of my parents were extraverts, as I am by nature, but it was more than that because we had a household of everyone saying whatever they wanted to say with very little governance. We didn’t yell and swear at one another, but we would express our feelings and our thoughts without restraint. It took me decades of trials, and many painful errors to learn to govern what I say. Like, some places you can talk of God as a real entity in your life, and in other places you can use curse words seemingly using his name in vain. But I didn’t discriminate in my expressions of “God loves me” one moment and “godamnit” the next moment. The best of times was freedom of expression; the worst of times was the emotional damage that did to me, which in turn led to be being emotionally damaged by people whom I had hurt or scared But enough about me.

I would like you to consider the “best of times/worst of times” in your own life. This might be any of the following:

  • Love your job; don’t make enough money at it
  • Hate your job, but you make lots of money
  • Lover your spouse, but don’t like her
  • Like your spouse, but really don’t think you love her
  • Love your kids; hate the fact that they are so demanding
  • Love to eat junk food; hate the fact that it’s bad for you
  • Good to have a family; not usually good to be with them
  • Good to be alone, but it’s often lonely
  • Fun to watch TV, but don’t feel so good after 3 hours of TV drama
  • Love your sports car; don’t like that you can’t drive it in the winter
  • Love God; don’t like what God seemingly allows
  • Lover your political persuasion; don’t agree with much of it at the same time

There is much to be said to allow yourself to have these paradoxical thoughts and feelings. We are living in a time when people want simple, exact, and perfect answers, but it is equally likely that humankind has always wanted such things, like “always right” or “always wrong.” No such luck. We have to contend with these paradoxes of life. I have found that the more I admit to these mixed feelings, the best and the worst, the paradoxes of life, the more it becomes clear to me what my correct course of action should be.