Week 7 Turning towards each other

This week I loved the readings so much.  Turning towards each other in a marriage has a lot to do with building on the friendship and fondness that a couple has for each other.  If you aren't fond of your partner, you aren't going to want to turn towards them, and actively listen to their day.  The metaphor that really helped me conceptualize the idea of turning towards your spouse was the emotional bank account.  By turning towards each other, and prioritizing your spouse and the relationship, you are investing in long term and short term benefits.  Long term benefits are likened to a savings account, a safety net that a couple can pull from when times are tough.  Short term benefits of turning toward each other are the enhancement of the immediate relationship by strengthening trust.  I think that the hardest part of this is learning to read a bid for attention and connection when your spouse is frustrated or angry.  I think it is important in a marriage, and any relationship for that matter, that you never take anything personally when things are said in frustration or anger.  In stead, use that outburst as a little window into your partner's mind or past experiences.  Figure out what you can learn about your partner from this instead of taking it personally.  In the talk it out exercise it has a lot of questions that have to do with an individuals past experiences, as a way of helping a person learn more about themselves, as well as their partner's history.  I think that one can learn a lot about themselves by analyzing their reactions to situations, and where that reaction is rooted.  For me, I react very strongly when I feel like I am not being appreciated.  At the beginning of our marriage, I naively thought it was just that my husband was not good at husbanding.  After a while though, and some individual therapy, I realized it was because growing up I felt like I had to do everything for my younger brothers, and I felt that they did nothing.  I even had to clean the bathrooms that they used and it was so gross.  This was the real root cause, and thank heavens my husband had the good sense to know that there was something more going on than him forgetting to pick up his clothes.  

Marriage is a balancing act of knowing when it is something to do with you, your past, or if it really is an issue that needs to be resolved within the marriage.