From our marriage/parenting contributor, Mary Carver.
Mary Carver, from Giving Up on Perfect, is truly the perfect voice for our marriage & family section of our site. I never had the right words to say on these topics, but what I love about Mary is that she has the *real* words to say on family & marriage. It isn’t easy and we all know that. I know you will want to share her posts with others as soon as you read them. I am thrilled she is sharing her heart here!
I have a newborn who doesn’t believe in sleeping through the night yet – or sleeping more at night than during the day, actually. And while I’ve heard of moms who can feed their babies while vacuuming or fixing lunch or knitting, I’m not nearly that coordinated.
All I can manage during those late-night feedings is to hold my phone and scroll through Facebook. Which means, of course, that I’ve taken every “What [Disney princess/Friends character/Muppet/arbitrary object {WHAT?!}] Are You?” quiz that exists.
{In case you’re wondering – and of course you are – I’m Lady Sybil from Downton Abbey, Leslie Knope from Parks & Recreation, Jessie from Saved by the Bell, Jerry from Seinfeld, Leonard from Big Bang Theory, Princess Leia, Hermione and Rumpelstilstkin. Don’t even ask me what that last one means. I don’t want to talk about it.}
Most recently I took the quiz asking which celebrity couple my significant other and I are. According to this highly scientific test, my husband and I “are” Barack and Michelle Obama, the powerhouse couple.
Ummm, okay?
Politics and pretend psychology aside, the definition of our spirit celeb couple had one good point:
Despite being two individual powerhouses, you make a perfect team.
I still don’t know about the powerhouse thing, but I do know that we’re at our very best as a couple when we function as a team.
Two years ago my marriage faced some major challenges. When crying and yelling about everything didn’t work, we spent our 13th wedding anniversary with a marriage counselor. I won’t tell you that we have a perfect relationship now, but we’ll celebrate our 15th anniversary in a few months in a much better, healthier, more loving place than we could have imagined two years ago.
And what changed us most was a lousy counselor and cheering for the same team.
At first our counselor seemed nice. But eventually we came to the conclusion that, as a counselor, she was actually kind of terrible. She asked bizarre questions, focused on the least important part of our discussions, and assigned us ridiculous homework. And each time we met with her, we had to remind her about our background, our problems and our progress.
So the counselor we saw wasn’t great. Coming to that conclusion with my husband, though? Kind of great.
See, throughout our relationship what has glued us together is the mindset that we’re in this thing together, that we’re on the same team. And we’d forgotten that.
Being on the same team means we fight together, not each other.
After years of unmet expectations and disappointments, we’d unknowingly worked ourselves into a combative relationship. It was me against him, and neither of us was winning.
But when we took time to reflect on our relationship – the good parts, too, not just the bad ones – we remembered that the times we’ve felt the closest are when we worked together on a project, when we faced a common “enemy,” when we cheered for the same team.
And nothing changed our attitudes about each other and our relationship faster than realizing THE TEAM WE NEEDED TO CHEER FOR WAS US.
At first simply attending counseling appointments and doing our homework together was enough to nudge us into the mindset of us-versus-the-world (and our problems), instead of me-versus-him.
Then, as we realized that neither of us liked our specific counselor (but we were determined to stick it out and glean what we could from our sessions), we remembered we were on the same team, facing down a weird therapist and a whole host of marital mountains we needed to climb together.
We started talking more, problem solving and coming up with ways we could fix this mess together. TOGETHER – that was the key word. The moment we abandoned our posts in the war between us and starting fighting FOR us instead, life changed. WE changed.
I’m not telling you that everything was roses and sunset walks after that. No, it was certainly a process – one that we’re still working through – and a strategy that even now, we have to remind ourselves to use instead of falling back into old habits and turning on each other at the slightest provocation.
We have to remind ourselves which team we’re cheering for.
I’m thankful for that counselor, even though she was far from what we initially hoped for. I’m grateful our sessions with her reminded us that we are in this together – and that we are fighting for this, for us, together.
What helps you remember that you and your spouse are on the same team?
{Photos by istockphoto and chase_elliott}
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