THAT'S MEN:Couples who have been together for a long time often judge each other negatively but that can change, writes PADRAIG O'MORAIN.
A YOUNG couple sit at a candlelit table looking into one another’s eyes. They are infatuated. Five minutes pass like five seconds.
They get married. A few years pass. You ask them to spend five minutes looking into each other’s eyes. They ask you if you’re joking.
One of the things that has happened is that harsh judgments of each by the other have entered the story, based on experience, expectations and let-downs.
It’s like that great McDonald’s ad in which the guy reflects on how lucky he is as his infatuated girlfriend goes upstairs to slip into something more comfortable. When she reappears they have, apparently, been living together for years, and she lays into him for being a lazy slob and useless around the house. I’m no cheerleader for McDonald’s, but if you haven’t seen the ad, look up the extended version on YouTube. It should be played at all pre-marriage courses.
Needless to say, there are two sides to every story. She sees him as a lazy, uncaring slob and he, no doubt, sees her as a nag and a pain in the neck.
Actually, there is a good chance that both judgments are true. He really would rather play with his X-box than do housework (who wouldn’t?) And she really is being a nag and a pain in the neck as she does her spirited impersonation of a chainsaw.
Negative judgments are lethal when they become the only way you have of seeing the other person, and when good judgments are driven out.
In a new book called ACT With Love (the ACT stands for acceptance and commitment therapy), Australian author Russ Harris advises that couples working on their relationships need to become very aware of their judgments and of the toxic effects negative judgments can have, if given free rein.
If you imagine, as an exercise, that your hands are your thoughts and you hold them up to your face and then try to look around, you can see how your thoughts obscure your view of the reality around you. Judgments are very dynamic thoughts and their power to obscure reality is very great.
I think this is especially true of negative judgments. They seem to have a strength that positive judgments just dont have – possibly because, as human beings, defence is a major psychological preoccupation and this may lead us to pay more attention to the negative than we do to the positive.
Harris suggests you think of your mind as telling you “bad partner” stories and labelling them as such.
When your mind wants to hook you into a “bad partner” story, it might tell you that your partner is a nag or a slob; is too selfish or too domineering; isn’t affectionate enough or doesn’t take enough responsibility; watches too much TV or does too little tidying; lacks consideration and so on and so forth, ad infinitum.
When you spot one of these judgments in full flow, tell yourself: “Ah, it’s the bad partner story again.” You could be more specific if you want: “There’s the lazy slob story again”; or “there’s the narky bitch story again”.
What’s the point of this? It’s not to deny the judgments but to loosen them up, reduce their hold over the relationship, perhaps to allow some “good partner” stories a little space in your head as well.
Why would you want to do this? Because most of the issues between you as partners are never going to change. That’s the way it is, even in the best of marriages. So if you’re going to stay together, you have to decide whether to let the bad stories take centre stage for the rest of your lives as a couple.
That applies to all of us and not just to the pair in the McDonald’s ad.
There is a great deal more to Harris’s book than this. The ACT approach urges us to take life as it is, instead of demanding that we be happy all the time and his book (published by New Harbinger Publications) is based on that philosophy.
Russ Harris has a website at thehappinesstrap.com
Padraig OMorain is a counsellor, accredited by the Irish Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. His book That's Men, the best of the That's Men column from The Irish Times, is published by Veritas