What I struggled with the most in my marriage
I will tell you right now: it was the imbalance of labor.
Specifically, it was the imbalance of emotional labor.
What do I mean by “emotional labor”? I am talking about my sensitivity. My ability to read the room. My super talented ability to calm myself down so that I can tend to his emotions first.
Fuck, I was resentful about it.
Like, why do ***I*** have to be the one who has to calm down first?
Why do ***I*** have to be patient first?
Why do ***I*** have to be the one to listen to him first??????????
I was like, there is no way this is going to be sustainable. Which is why I asked for divorce several times while we were monogamous.
But there was such a deep, strong part of me that knew that divorce was not the answer. There is a reason I fell in love with this man. I love this human being. It would break my heart to part ways with him permanently.
I just kept wondering how I could address this resentment until it all came to a head when we started talking about opening up our marriage.
The stakes were much higher.
The amount of emotional labor required was unprecedented.
I had to ask myself this question: Am I going to indulge in my resentment towards Dan, or am I available to interrogate where I am refusing to take responsibility for my own experience of our marriage?
What a rude fucking question.
I finally admitted to myself, fine. Indulging in my resentment is not going to get us anywhere.
It was not going to get us to where we both wanted to be: an open partnership that was more loving than ever.
That meant I started looking at the assumption that I was actually putting in more emotional labor than he was.
Because, one thing I know is that when we think we are better than anyone, that judgment often comes flying on our face in a disastrous splat.
The place where I thought I was putting in more emotional labor than he was was where I thought I was listening better than he was.
Boy, was I in for a rude awakening.
The literal definition of listening is “to give one’s attention to a sound.”
Was I giving attention to the sounds that Dan was sharing?
When Dan got elevated, he shared a number of sounds: noises of elevation, the silence in his elevation, words of elevation.
But instead of giving attention to those sounds, I responded with my own elevation because I thought his elevation was a problem.
And when I became elevated, that was another problem.
I had found for myself two dandy fucking problems in my hands at that point.
So instead of giving attention to any sounds that Dan was sharing with me, I was giving attention to my own elevation, and my brain was running a mile a minute thinking of ways to resolve my own elevation.
In the middle of all that shit? Of course I was not really listening.
And the reason I was not listening was that I believed that our elevation was a problem.
Is our elevation really a problem, or is it a natural part of our humanity that tells us something about what we care about?
Sure, the elevation can become a problem when we use the elevation to make someone else responsible, but even this is something we can often skillfully relate through - a whole other discussion. In any case, the elevation itself is a feature of our humanity that doesn’t have to be a problem.
But, because I made the decision that both Dan’s and my humanity is a problem, I was in problem-solving mode rather than in listening mode.
Neither one of our humanity was being honored.
The very first step of skillful relating is to recognize that our humanity is not a problem.
When I recognize that neither of our elevation is a problem, the only thing I am left with is curiosity.
Which is how we grow our capacity to set aside our own judgments, assumptions, and expectations so that we can follow our curiosity of the other’s experience.
One surefire way I found out that I was not listening was that I came out of the conversation not knowing anything more about what he really cared about.
I did not inquire around what his elevation was telling me about what he cared about.
I had not engaged in listening or relating in any skillful capacity.
Much to my dismay, I was actually not as competent as I thought I was in relating to Dan. I was *not* putting a disproportional amount of emotional labor the way I thought I was.
What I was doing instead was doing exactly what Dan was doing that I was frustrated about: not listening.
This is the cold, hard truth that took me a while to accept (I might still be actively in the middle of accepting this right now): my partner’s ability and capacity for skillful relating is a reflection of my own ability and capacity for skillful relating.
We are more likely to agree to listening when we first feel like we are listened to. Especially when we are the ones bringing to the conversation the desire to be heard on something.
“But Angela, I think it is still deeply unfair that I am the one who even thinks about these things. Why am I the one who wants our marriage to be different? This is still fucked upppppp.”
Yes, 10000%.
If you find that you are the one who wants things to be different, you might almost feel cheated on because you’re the one who is doing all this research and labor to see how you can make changes in your marriage.
The resentment may also come from the fact that you have been often made to feel wrong for wanting more.
I can’t stand this either.
Which is why I have an invitation for you to consider an alternative story:
What if you were designated to have more and different desires in your marriage to raise the standards of relating for everyone?
Chances are, the reason your spouse is not doing the kind of research and labor for a more loving partnership is that they already think the partnership is sufficiently loving.
They probably believe that the partnership is sufficiently loving because their standards are largely inherited, and they don’t really see a reason to revise the standards.
Perhaps they don’t find revising them as interesting as you do.
They may be interested in something else that you are not interested in at all.
Could be anything, like career advancement, expertise in their industry, pickleball, or collecting a multi-truckload of vinyl records.
And what they are doing with their desires is expressing it so that they can feel like they belong in the world.
Chances are, their expression of their desires is benefitting someone in the world.
Whether it’s because they are so good at what they do - they might make an incredible leader in their field.
Or whether it’s because they are very talented in collecting those vinyl records - they are participating in the lively culture of enjoying and preserving music in their own unique way.
Similarly, your desires for an evolving, open, and loving partnership in your marriage is alive because the curiosity that sparks the work to create that result is benefitting not just your marriage but the people who get to witness it.
Starting with your own children, I would gather.
Now, this is not to excuse deadbeat dads who try to weasel their way out of skillful relating because they are “busy being an industry leader.” (Which, by the way, “being an industry leader” becomes much easier and more sustainable when we expand our relating skills.)
In the end, a loving partnership is still a partnership.
It requires the equitable participation of both partners.
Your only additional contribution to the loving partnership is introducing this work into the partnership. Your spouse is responsible for partnering with you to raise those standards to sustain the partnership with you.
Which is where skillful relating comes in.
This is where both parties take responsibility for making the loving partnership happen by connecting with one another to know one another more.
We often believe that gargantuan projects that require skillful relating, like opening up our marriage, is not possible because “the other person is not as open as I am.”
False.
Their level of openness is a reflection of my own openness.
Which means, if I want more openness from my partner, I start asking myself where I can be more open.
But I find this to be excellent news because it means that we have more power than we think we have.
Like, holy shit, my partner’s openness is going to be the direct result of my openness? Two birds, one stone.
Some questions to consider as we reflect on our own openness:
How will I take responsibility for my own emotions without making it someone else’s problem?
What is one thing I want to know about my partner, and do I have capacity to actually listen to them by suspending my own wants and needs while I listen?
How will I be resourceful in what I want when I cannot get what I want from my spouse?
Where am I committed to being right about my own judgments about my spouse than I am committed to pay attention to what they are saying?
Every time you find space and capacity to ask these questions, you are raising the standards for how human beings relate because your humility will be reflected in the way you relate to others.
You are raising the standards in how we experience our individual and collective humanity.
*
Listen, doing this work all by yourself can be a bitch.
I mean, sometimes we need that space to ourselves to reflect.
But if you’re thinking to yourself, I need a place to breathe where I don’t feel so wrong about all this and don’t feel like I am doing this all by myself, I created The Opener for exactly this reason.
Opening up your marriage is not only a lot of work, and it is the kind of work that a lot of people just don’t understand.
We have such a shortage of support for those of us who are trying to open up our marriage and raise the standards of human relating.
The Opener is a virtual speakeasy (hosted on a Discord server, a cooler version of Slack) where I teach you skillful relating to open up your marriage, and we practice together.
We are building a community of people who care deeply about loving on their own terms so that they can experience love with the kind of intensity, frequency, and magnitude that our ancestors could not even fucking imagine.
There is no topic that is off limits, and we practice consent, safety, and responsibility at the highest level.
There is no chance you will ever find yourself incompetent at relating through opening up your marriage (or anything else) once you start practicing with us.
Join here: angela-han.com/opener