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Advice from Will Bowen
What can you do if you and your spouse start to grow apart? Will Bowen shares his advice:
There is an old maxim I regularly share with couples when they come to me for premarital counseling:
A man marries a woman thinking she will never change.
A woman marries a man thinking she can change him.
They are both wrong.
Everyone is always changing. Everyone is different in any given moment than in any other given moment. People may or may not change to our liking, and if we think we can direct the course of this change without resistance, we are mistaken.
Change is ongoing and inevitable—for ourselves as well as others. We are never standing still. If we celebrate the change, our relationships deepen. If we focus on change as something to be marveled at rather than seeing it as a threat to the relationship, it creates new areas of exploration within the relationship. Rather than needing to go outside the relationship to find new experiences, new connections, new meaning, and new growth, we can find it within our existing connection.
Oftentimes people explain the end of a relationship by saying, “We have grown apart.” Although most of our body parts cease to grow once we reach the adult-sized version of our physical selves, our spirit grows as long as we are alive. As it does, it reshapes who we are. We are different people. When people “grow apart” it’s likely they have begun to focus on their differences rather than on what attracted them to the other person in the first place. And if some of those attributes that originally drew them to each other have transformed, they may not be open to appreciating the new and wonderful things about the other person. When asked about his relationship with his wife, photorealist artist Chuck Close said, “I’ve been married for forty years. It’s not one marriage—by then you’ve had four or five totally different marriages. And you hope that you evolve in similar ways, in compatible ways, and that you now have new reasons to be with them. But it’s going to be different from the previous reasons to be with them.”
When a man selects a tie he first looks at the suit he wishes to wear. What subtle colors and shades are woven into the suit that he would like the tie to draw out? He then looks for a tie that is compatible with those aspects of the suit—a tie that draws out those colors. Does every color in the tie have to match every color in the suit? Of course not; in fact, that makes the combination look contrived and unappealing. It becomes forced, stagy. The colors and patterns of the tie should complement the suit, not be redundant with it.
Imagine a tie/suit combination that a man selects and wears to work. In the early afternoon he glances in the mirror and this time, rather than his focus being on the colors in the tie that complement the suit, his focus shifts to the colors that clash. Even though there may be far more colors that complement the suit than do not, if his attention is on how the pairing doesn’t go together more than how it does, he will not be as content with the relationship between the two.
Our relationships with others change because we change and they change. When this happens, we can focus on what no longer matches or we can instead look more deeply at what seemed to make us compatible in the first place. We can look at the colors in the suit/tie combination that still go together. Moreover, we can look for new compatibilities that we had not seen earlier because they had not existed…
In your relationships, what is your focus? Are you asking yourself questions that draw you to the other person or that repel you from him or her? Are you asking what you like about the person or what you dislike? Are you asking what you appreciate about the person or what you would like to change? Are you asking how you can make the person happy or why he or she is not making you happy?
Relationships are an expression of what we relate to ourselves about another person. What directs this relating or telling? The questions you are asking yourself about the other person.
Are you asking yourself why some of the colors in the tie don’t match the suit or are you asking yourself which colors complement the suit and, in so doing, enjoying the pairing of the two?
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Copyright © 2009 by Will Bowen From the book COMPLAINT FREE RELATIONSHIPS published by Doubleday Religion, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc. Reprinted with permission. |
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