The other day I read a post in a group where a lady was asking for help and advice about her troubled marriage.
Her story was pretty sad, and maybe not uncommon today with the economic and financial realities being what they are.
The quick of it was that the both of them worked long hours with a young daughter to care for on top of that.
This had gone on for years with neither of them having much of a break from the grind. The husband basically works and crashes from working when he’s not working. She’s busy doing her work-from-home job and keeping on top of the household upkeep. Whenever they did see each other, it turned into blame-filled arguments.
She came in there looking for advice on how to fix their relationship problems.
True to form, she got heaps of Do This fix-er-up advice, salted with the typical and useless in-group sniping from men blaming her and women blaming him.
Stories like this are tragic because you can see where they’re going to end up, and none of the Do This fix-er-ups can fix it.
To her and to all her well-meaning advice-givers, the problem is simple. He’s a jerk who needs to behave better. She’s an insensitive clod who needs to be more grateful to have a husband.
Besides the eye-rolling recriminations these disagreements always turn into, what I see is a clear prejudice for problems of communication and information.
They need to know more stuff, find better tools to communicate more gooder, and fix it right up.
If you have experience in the fitness world as a coach, trainer, or under-motivated person who never “gets it together” to get results, does this sound familiar to you?
It oughta.
It’s the template for every workout plan, diet, and nutritional supplement marketed to you. If you fix this one thing that’s been missing, you’ll enter paradise on Earth.
Misunderstanding and miscommunication are symptoms and only rarely the true cause of difficulties.
Here’s what I told her:
You’re both living stressful days from long hours at work.
You aren’t in each other’s presence but occasionally, when you’re both exhausted in body and soul, which leads to your every interaction coming from a place of anger, frustration, and tiredness.
This to me is almost too obvious to say, which is a reliably strong signal that I ought to say it:
You aren’t going to have a healthy, loving, and emotionally-connected relationship if all your energy goes into work, and your personal interactions get the leftovers of exhausted resentment and anger, every day in perpetuity.
For starters, fatigue is no place to respond in a clear and healthy way.
I know I get grouchy as all get-out when I’m tired.
Some years back I discovered a link between what I’d long assumed was severe depression and physical and emotional tiredness. That gloomy storm-cloud of existential despair that used to take control and hurl me into the abyss could be banished with a 10 minute nap.
My point in this:
If you’ve taken an axe to your lower leg, and then run around in a screaming panic looking for a band-aid after seeing the blood, you’re going to bleed out.
Communication and education are fine things in conditions where there is enough energy and time to do anything with them.
If you’re a long-time reader, you’ve heard me more than once talk about systems thinking. System dynamics are a key part of my thinking and my tool-kit.
This story is about as perfect a case-study as you can find.
This lady and her husband have real problems. They’re both contributing to their marital meltdown. But as I told her, the behaviors are all symptoms. Fix them or don’t, it won’t change the elementals.
Turns out they were caught in a lifestyle trap. They couldn’t cut back hours or take less-stressful jobs because they needed the income.
They can’t dial back because their monthly expenses won’t allow it.
If they can’t dial back, then they stay in the behavior trap. If they stay in the behavior trap, there is no solution on Earth or any other planet that can fix what is happening to them.
That’s ain’t a problem to resolve with clever hacks, better communications skills, or more information.
Systems thinking teaches that structure influences behavior.
The conditions of your life influence how you behave.
The landscape determines how the water flows.
What looks like a problem of interpersonal communication, when seen from a systems perspective, becomes a problem of energy and fatigue caused by lifestyle.
Their problems begin in the way they’ve structured their lives.
She won’t do it, because they never do it, but the only path that might rescue her marriage is for them to rethink how they live, cut back expenses so that they don’t have to live like methed-up rats harnessed to a treadmill, and give themselves space and energy to live like real people.
There may well be personality dysfunctions on display here, no doubt of that.
The point is that personality isn’t independent of sources of energy and causes
of fatigue in our surroundings. Resentment, fear, guilt, shame, and anger often come from places that are not obvious to the conscious mind.
The psyche is no different from any other organic process. Feed it, nourish it, give it the conditions it needs to grow, and it will flourish. Deny it those things, and it will suffer, wither, and in the extreme case, die.
I have my suspicions that a lot of the social disorder going on right now is due to psychic starvation caused by economic pressures, among other forces. Whatever the case, the structures and systems we live in do a whole lot of work in shaping what we do. This is as true for health, physical condition, and eating as it is for romantic relationships, or anything else in your life.
If something ain’t acting right, look for a pattern of behavior.
If you see a pattern that isn’t working, looking for the structure causing the pattern.
Those two ideas can save you lots of grief.
Matt Perryman