Great Relationships Use A Great System

PaulaReyne.com Thanksgiving pic

My husband and I have been married for 12 years now, and I’ve come to really appreciate some of our differences, but I’ll be honest, some of our differences sort of caught me by surprise.

We were married in June, so we were less than six months into our new life together, when one such startling difference came light.  It revolved around our family of origin traditions during the holidays. Family of origin traditions, or beliefs, are the ones that we came to as a result of being raised in the family unit, or environment, we were raised in, and often are so tightly held, or deeply ingrained, that we’re not even really conscious of them or their impact on our thoughts and behavior. They’re like built in assumptions we have of how the world works, or how we believe it should work, and so since we’re really not even conscious of them, they are also prone to crop up at very unexpected times and to generate potential conflict within our relationships.

What happened was, shortly before our first Thanksgiving together, I happened to overhear part of a co-worker’s phone conversation, where he was describing what his family planned to serve for their upcoming holiday feast.  My co-worker (I’ll call him Lloyd), was in a holiday mood, just chatting away on the phone, and I happen to hear the words, “Of course we will not have hamNo one has ham on Thanksgiving!”

His reasoning, which he began to explain, was basically a declaration of solidarity with the Pilgrims. Something to the effect, “Our forefathers did not eat ham at Plymouth Rock, and we won’t either!”

It was said sort of ‘tongue in cheek’, of course, but I was sure that the grain of truth in it all was that his family would not have ham on Thanksgiving, and it was that novel concept (novel to me, at least) which had piqued my attention enough to listen to the line of baloney he was feeding to the person on the other end of the line. I nearly laughed out loud when I heard his basic closing statement, “…we will have turkey with all the fixings, on Thanksgiving, and a Christmas Ham on Christmas…where it belongs.”

Really Lloyd?  Really?!  You would actually have a Thanksgiving meal without ham?  It was such a silly idea to me, that I shared the story with my husband later that evening, thinking we’d both share a good laugh.  The laugh was on me though, because, come to find out, my husband’s Thanksgiving family traditions were pretty similar to Lloyd’s! They had turkey only for Thanksgiving, and ham only at Christmas.  Worse yet, I found out he doesn’t even care for candied yams, and in his family, they served green bean casserole only during the holidays, never at any other time.

I couldn’t really wrap my head around it, to be honest…

Right about now, you may be recalling some similar scenarios that have cropped up in your own relationships.  Every couple has some differences between them (which I believe is part of what makes us more interesting individuals), but in a relationship, those things can also lead to conflict – and even broken relationships – if they’re not resolved in healthy ways.

As a couple, the differences between us can be fascinating, or frustrating, and I believe that most of that depends on how we choose to respond.  Rather than letting our differences become barriers that separate or cause divisions between us, I think there is another way…

A lot of getting to that other way involves just identifying where the conflict is actually coming from – understanding that its root is simply that we can and do often have different preferences and opinions.   If that sounds elementary, it is, but I mention it because often, in the heat of the moment, our differences will catch us off guard, and we will just react without having really thought things through. Like Lloyd, I might one day say (or hear my mate say), “Of course we will not have ham at Christmas. It’s called a Christmas Ham for a reason!”, and before you know what’s happened, it has all become a very cut and dried issue, that things must  go my way (or his), because, after all, that’s the RIGHT way.

Most of the time, it really isn’t a case of my way (or his) being the right way; it’s just the way that feels right to us.  And generally speaking, that’s okay; we certainly all do have opinions and preferences, but when we’re in a relationship, it’s important to recognize that each of us will, at times, have equally strong thoughts or preferences, and they won’t the same.  Just getting to the place where we accept that we each can (and do) have our very own strongly held thoughts and preferences can carry us miles down the road towards moving forward again together.

At those intersections of conflict, when you’re ready to move forward together to a solution you both can embrace, brainstorming can be a great tool for generating possible solutions.

Every idea generated this way won’t be a keeper, but that’s okay since the real goal of such an exercise is simply to inspire creative problem solving. For that reason, during brainstorming time, there really is no such thing as a bad suggestion. Instead, there are just ideas that you’re trying on for a possible fit.

Through such a process, you’ll likely generate a number of ideas, any of which could turn into a real solution, or, at a minimum, could at least provide you with a starting place for a potential solution.  Choose the best one (or at least the one you both hate the least) and start there.

Give the idea a trial run.  Set a date, like a week or month in the future, to revisit the topic and discuss how well it worked. If, when you review it together you determine it wasn’t a great solution, no problem.  You just keep working together this way, like a team, making tweaks here and there, as needed, until you find what works best for you.  And don’t worry that you’ll never find a workable solution, because you will.  It may take some time to get there, but since a marriage is supposed to be a lifetime commitment, generally speaking, you’ve got the time

Great couples aren’t always the ones you might expect to be great.  Primarily, the key to their success is simply that they use a system to build their relationship that works: choosing to value  building and maintaining the relationship more than getting your own way, or winning an argument, is a formula that works. (The alternative is to choose selfishness, and no one wants to be in a relationship with a selfish person.)

We’re all a work in progress, of course, and no one gets it right every time, but we do work at the relationship with this goal in mind, and I can tell you from personal experience that during the years that my husband and I have been married, it has also been one of the determining factors in how effectively we’ve managed the conflicts that have arisen in our marriage.

So, when conflicts in your relationships come up (and they will), take a step back, and consider what your priorities really are. If building the relationship is, or can once again become, your main priority, then you can not only get through it, whatever ‘it’ is, but you can actually grow stronger as a couple, for having walked through such an experience together.

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