I once got so mad at my husband, I jumped out of the car when traffic was backed up on I-24. I don’t remember what we were fighting about, but whatever it was, the inside of the car was too small to contain it. I ran down a hill, crossed a parking lot, and ducked into a furniture shop, where I wandered around until my heart-rate slowed down. Then I called a cab to take me home.
Fortunately, being cooped up with my husband at home during the pandemic is going much better. We each have our private space, and we come together to walk and eat and occasionally watch a movie. But we’re both flawed human beings, and now there’s a higher probability that we’ll grate on each other simply because we’re spending more time together.
A lot is being written about how to get along with your spouse during this protracted time of enforced togetherness. A lot of it is stuff we’ve heard a thousand times, like respecting each other, listening to the other’s point of view, and apologizing when we mess up. I’d like to add three lesser-known strategies that have helped my husband and me.
“We start noticing the good things about each other again, and the list grows, getting us back on track. ”
For no apparent reason, we I occasionally fall into a downward spiral of negativity. All we notice about each other are the intrusive or annoying or hurtful things: the clothes on the floor, the late dinner, the constant interruptions, the poor listening. The negativity usually goes away on its own, but the few times it hasn’t, we did this thing called positive tracking. We each have a piece of paper on the fridge. When he does something I like, however small, I write it down. He does the same with me. We start noticing the good things about each other again, and the list grows, getting us back on track.
As much as we love each other, our relationship has been stormy at times. I’m American and he’s Polish. We have cultural differences and misunderstandings in language on top of the usual female-male thing. We once saw a family therapist who said something that sounds weird, but that I’ve found to be true. One of the greatest gifts you can give your spouse, she said, is to let them blow up. She didn’t mean that we should put up with emotional or physical abuse. She was talking about run-of-the-mill anxiety and anger. The idea is to stand back and let your partner vent, rant, blow their stack, decompensate, whatever. It’s amazing how quickly the storm blows over if you just stand there and watch it. If you don’t get sucked into it, you won’t escalate it. The situation calms down faster, and you can talk.
My husband and I haven’t actually used the last strategy because I only found out about it last month. Neil Jacobsen, a psychologist based in Seattle in the 1990s, discovered that the couples who did the best after marital therapy had an evening ritual that he called the stress-reducing conversation. The couples shared what had gone well during the day and what hadn’t. They asked for more detail about situations and feelings. They talked about their worries, but only about those unrelated to the marriage. And they didn’t try to solve each other’s problems. (Italics mine.) They just listened, and they did it every evening.
My husband and I have adopted this ritual. Although our days aren’t as varied as they were before the novel coronavirus burst upon the world, we’re sharing them every evening, not just every now and then. We refrain from trying to fix each other’s problems. We just listen, like friends.
My husband and I fighting. Okay, so he's in drag as the Princess Carina Capella, and I'm all gussied up as the Lady Bianca Barbarella. And we're forty years younger. And we're fighting over a man. So what if it's a staged fight in a British club in West Africa? Nobody posts pictures of themselves when they're actually fighting.