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OCTOBER 29, 2015 | The Jewish Home
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FEBRUARY 3, 2022 | The Jewish Home
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OCTOBER 29, 2015 | The Jewish Home
Dr. Deb
When Your Partner Puts Obstacles in the Way By Deb Hirschhorn, Ph.D.
“S
he’s so flighty. Why can’t she just come down to Earth and do what needs to be done?” “He will not listen to my feelings.” “She is one of these go-getters, and I’m easygoing. She’s six feet ahead of me when we’re out walking.” “He has no time for fun. It’s all work, work, work.” Isn’t it funny how the very thing that attracted you when you were dating turns out to grate on your nerves? But that is exactly how couples are. The easygoing one is attracted to the organized one, and the organized one wants the easygoing one in her/ his life. The doer is attracted to the beer and vice-versa. The roll-up-yoursleeves-and-dig-in one is attracted to the one who communes with the stars. The morning person envies the one who can burn the midnight oil. The scaredy-cat envies the socially-smooth. The planned person wishes they could be a little more spontaneous. Why is that? Because we know/feel/sense that
we are incomplete without this other element to us. Or, to put it the way Arthur Aron, psychologist and researcher on falling in love, put it, we choose partners that help us to expand ourselves. He calls this the desire for “self-expansion” and says this is an innate desire of human beings. We can see it in babies crawling around, trying to make sense of their environment. We want to grow in many ways, but since we may not have a particular skill or characteristic, we find it in someone else. We love that. When we fall in love, that different-ness is exactly what we want. Like taking a vacation in a foreign culture, it’s exciting, new, glossy, wonderful. Then it gets old. Why is that? Because it’s awfully hard to keep stretching yourself. See, the original attraction was a good thing. We do need to stretch. We need to expand our capabilities. We need to see the world a little differently. But it is work, too. Right? Just like the gym is work.
“Do ten more reps!” Let’s face it: if you’ve avoided emotions your whole life, then being with a spouse who feels things can be a strain. By the same token if you’ve been the type to feel too much, and you become attracted to someone who bravely marches on, that’s great. For a while. Then there comes a time when you no longer want to march. You want to stop. For many couples, that’s when the fights begin. Or the freeze begins. What begins with being attracted to something opposite in the other person turns into wanting a clone of yourself. Or close enough to it. I’m here to say: go with your first impressions. You were right the first time. Except… Except for this one thing: since you were both right when you both were attracted to each other, what that means is that no one can pull the other person all the way over from where they are to where you are. That would be unbalanced. And meeting in the middle is not the answer either because that would
make no one who they really are and no one who the other one is, either. A parve blend. That’s not the way. The way is not about changing who you are. And it’s certainly not about changing who they are. It’s about admiring. See, when you are you and happily so, you can expand yourself just enough to admire your significant other. Here’s the key. It lies in the words “when you are you and happily so.” To be able to admire the other person fully, you have to first be grounded in who you are. And happily so. This, precisely, is why I separate couples in the beginning of working with them. Most people approach marriage from the opposite direction. They are not happy with who they are, so they get a huge boost from the fact that someone else – someone wonderful and attractive – sees them as special. But since that “specialness” comes from the very qualities we lack that our partner has, we’re treading on flimsy ground. Sof, sof, we don’t ad-
