What is it Like to be Married to You?
Your brain wants you to focus on your partner's impact on you. It wants you to feel like your partner has to change for you to be okay.
Your brain does this because it's optimized to survive childhood, not to thrive in adult relationships. When you were young, your survival depended on your parents' level of investment in you. Your brain was designed to track that investment and respond accordingly. When your parents weren't invested in you, you were motivated to try to do something about that.
If your parents weren't very invested in your wellbeing, you really did need them to change for you to be okay. There wasn't much you could do to directly impact the way the family system worked. All you could do was try to get them to change.
As an adult, that's no longer true. You have just as much power and influence in your relationship as your partner does. That means you can change the nature of your relationship by changing how you show up in it. That was not true when you were a child.
Your brain will try to convince you to focus on your partner's influence on you, even though that doesn't do you much good as an adult. All of the things your partner is likely to do this year are things you can handle, because you are an adult and not a child. You are capable of taking care of yourself in a broad range of circumstances, so most of what your partner does will probably fall within your circle of okayness.
When you were young, that was not true. There were a lot of things your parents did that were more than you could handle. You had good reason to feel overwhelmed, powerless, and even afraid.
When you focus on your partner's impact on you, your brain is focusing on inbound energy — what it's like for you to be married to your partner. It's not thinking about outbound energy — what it's like for your partner to be married to you.
Helping your brain learn to focus on outbound rather than inbound energy is a lifelong task. It does not come naturally, but it's one of the most powerful things you can do to improve your relationship. Here are some questions you can ask yourself to accelerate this transformation:
What is it like to be married to me?
What is it like to be on the other side of the energy I'm bringing into my relationship right now?
Am I making my partner feel worse, or better?
Is my anxiety impacting my partner?
How does my partner feel right now?
As an adult, you can measure what kind of person you are by measuring the impact you have on the people you care about the most.
If you ask me who I am, my answer will be: I am the impact I have on my wife. After that, I am the impact I have on my children. After that, I am the impact I have on my friends, clients, and family members.
But most of all, the best definition of who I am is the impact I have on my wife.
If you want to know who you really are, figure out what it's like to be married to you.
