How to Talk to People - When Can a Marriage Be Saved?

Episode Date: June 20, 2022

Romantic relationships often show us the deep divide between expectations and reality. For any relationship struggling to overcome conflict, the first step to starting over may be identifying how your vision of marriage is out of step with your partner’s.  In this episode of How to Start Over, we explore why some marriages can withstand conflict, why most couples struggle to validate their partner’s needs, and how to think about when a breakup is in order—by better understanding why the relationship is struggling.  This episode was produced by Rebecca Rashid and is hosted by Olga Khazan. Editing by A.C. Valdez and Claudine Ebeid. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado. Engineering by Matthew Simonson. Special thanks to Adrienne LaFrance, executive editor of The Atlantic.  Be part of How to Start Over. Write to us at [e-mail]. To support this podcast, and get unlimited access to all of The Atlantic’s journalism, become a subscriber. Music by FLYIN (“Being Nostalgic”), Monte Carlo (“Ballpoint”), Mindme (“Anxiety [Instrumental Version]”), Timothy Infinite (“Rapid Years”), Sarah, the Illstrumentalist (“Building Character”), and Gregory David (“Twist One”). Click here to listen to more full-length episodes in The Atlantic’s How To series. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Follow Myled Hybrid SUVs, stylish, spacious, and designed to move you safely on every road at every turn. Go the extra mile in a Volvo Myled Hybrid SUV, part of our fully-electrified lineup, contact your local retailer to learn more or visit VolvoCars.com slash US. Join Uber 1 and Save. $0 delivery fee and percentage off discount subject to older minimums and participating scores, the taxes and other fees sell apply. In a moment, one of these pairs will begin to handle their conflict constructively, working toward a solution for their differences. The other couple will let the conflict handle

them, so that hostility mounts, and a solution, is farther away than ever. My boyfriend and I have been together since 2010, so that's what is it? That's a dozen years. And I have been writing down the things that we get in fights about and they're all extremely stupid. So the big one is recycling, which is that I don't recycle. You don't recycle Olga?

I don't recycle. I have to fess up that I don't recycle. Bold. Yeah. He gets really mad at me for that because he loves the earth as people should. But I also get really mad at him for stupid stuff, arguably more stupid than recycling. One time I bought this nine pack of flosses from Amazon because I felt like we weren't flossing enough. And then I put them all around the house in places where I would think if you have a spare moment, you could floss. And then I got home from this long work trip

and I went to go try to find a floss that I thought I had like strategically placed all around the house. I couldn't find any of the flosses that I had distributed. In my like insane, exhausted brain, I decided it was because my boyfriend had found all the flosses and thrown them away or destroyed them just despite me. I went ballistic. I was like, I can't believe that you would find and destroy all the flosses. Like, I'm going to go broke

buying floss at this rate. My perception that he was not cooperating with me about the floss was just so enraging. And I remember I wrote down in my journal, I actually said, I don't even know why we ever got together in the first place. Oh my God. What's going through your head when you're having that reaction?

Do you feel like it could be indicative of something deeper or do you really take it at face value? Like is it really just about the gentle cleaning or about the floss? There's kind of like always a moment, at least for me, where you're like, is this a sign that is all wrong? Is the floss like a sign that we weren't meant to be together and that this whole thing has been a mistake? I've wasted all my childbearing years on you. I'm like going further and further down this horrible trajectory with this floss destroying ban because I'm not insane and we're both on the mortgage together. I don't

break up with him over that stuff. We calm down and count to 10 and do our yoga and like have a conversation about how I'm gonna pause and think next time about whether someone would actually destroy nine flosses. Inventionally, yeah. Clearly you're still together, so you're able to resolve the flossing and dental and recycling issues pretty well. How do you do that? Uh, how do we do it? Hi, I'm Olga Hazan, staff writer at The Atlantic. And I'm Rebecca Rashid, a producer at The Atlantic.

This is How To Start Over. Today, we explore what makes marriage work, why some people struggle to compromise, and how to start over in marriage, whether that means ending your marriage or revamping the one you're already in. To really have a person in your life who you trust more than you trusted anyone before it's magic. I mean before I met my husband okay wow I haven't cried in an interview in a long time this is good. Before I met my husband I never had that. In school I met the woman that woman that would eventually be my ex-wife and my son's mother and she felt like a good choice. And I actually don't think that she was a bad choice, despite the fact that we're not still

married. I didn't quite execute my part of it very well. We're going to sit down with two people to hear about their marriages, to help answer our burning question. How do you know when it's time to break up? We're going to talk with Heather Havrleski, an author and advice columnist, and Matthew Frey, a relationship coach and author, who have had two very different experiences of marriage. So why did you marry Bill?

I married Bill because I was in love with him and We had great sex and he was an adult with a job which was amazing and unbelievable to me at the time and Every time I tried to not marry him I would sit around in my house thinking If I break up with this guy, my friends will never talk to me again. This is Heather Heverlesky, the author of Foreverland, a memoir about her marriage, which warts and all is going strong. She's also an advice columnist for Ask Polly on Substack. You land in this place of, uh-oh, I can't walk away from this because

it's obvious that I'm supposed to be with this person. It's just crystal clear and every time I meet anyone else I'm just going to think too bad you have to date this guy because you screwed it up with that person who was perfect for you. And I mean of course perfect you know I mean often in what that ends up meaning within a marriage is, this is the perfect man to torment me for the rest of my days on Earth. It's not really that easy to capture a marriage without being reductive. Even when you say, my marriage is happy right now, or we're getting along great right now, really all you're doing every time you say anything about a marriage is you're taking a snapshot of either

an idea or a belief or a point in time that is about to change. With Bill, when I met him, I was very clear about the fact that I was going to show him my flaws in addition to my qualities. And so when we were emailing back and forth before we met each other, I sent him this email that basically said, I'm a bossy, demanding woman, and you just need to know that upfront. If that doesn't sound good to you, then you should just move on, because that's who I am. Apparently, I can't change it. So it worked for us. That story reminds me of I had an ex-boyfriend who one time told me the thing I like about

you is that you're not anxious at all. And I'm probably the most anxious person who's ever lived. And I told my mom this, I was like, he thinks I'm not anxious. Isn't that so great? And she was like, you better slowly start introducing him to your real personality or else, he's going to freak out when he figures out what you're really like. So I think that a lot of people think the main threats to marriage are things like cheating. But you talk about a lot of like day-to-day stressors that can really test people, for people

who haven't read the book. What were some of those lower level BS stressors that can really test people for people who haven't read the book. What were some of those lower level BS stressors for you? I mean some of the things were really, you know, caused by me, created by me. Our biggest conflicts were sort of more created by very stressful emotional circumstances. Like I leave for the first time and he has the baby. And when I get back, he's holding the baby on one arm and the baby's limbs are dangling over a boiling pot and he's stirring the boiling pot with his other hand. And I say, what am I looking at right now?

Like what am I even seeing? And he's like calm down, you know? And then I'm like, woo, like freaking out. Yeah. Immediately angry. So the situations where we disagreed about something that was happening and the kids are there. Those were the situations that were the hardest for us and are the hardest for us.

When we're both feeling like we're failing, what are the primary challenges of a marriage is when you feel like you're failing, do you blame your spouse or do you say it's okay we're in this together you know I've got your back. I grew up in a small town in Ohio conservative religious I grew up in a small town in Ohio, conservative, religious, I grew up going to Catholic school for 12 years. When you're from the town I'm from and raised in Catholicism the way that I was, what you do is around your college years, you're trying to find the person you're going to marry. This is Matthew Frey, a relationship coach and author of This Is How Your Marriage Ends.

In his article for The Atlantic, called The Marriage Lesson That I Learned Too Late, Matthew implied that his wife left him because he sometimes left dishes by the sink. I grew up in an environment where my friends and I would sort of playfully mock each other. We'd call each other names. We didn't mean them. I love my friends almost the way that I love my family. Now, it was a very sort of like locker room thing to do, playing football, playing basketball. And I brought that same sort of sarcastic, playful mocking

to my relationship. And one of the things that she asked me to do was not do that to her. And given that my intentions were pure, and that I thought it was ludicrous that I sacrificed if you will single dumb and the rest of my life to say, I want to be with you. Like I choose you over everybody else for the rest of my life. You're my person. That to imply that I intend to harm or that this is actually a bad thing for me to be doing,

I thought she was the one that was inappropriately or unfairly complaining about some benign behavior that really wasn't bad. And I'm like, why should I have to change like who I am and what I do just because you're interpreting it the wrong way? How old were you when you got married? I was 25. Okay, so pretty young. And how long were you guys married? We were together for 12 years, total married for nine of them. How would you describe to someone, you know, a total stranger, why your marriage ended?

I would say, I spent 12 years of our relationship, nine of them married, not allowing my wife to think and feel the things that she thought and felt. Any time I disagreed or that they became inconvenient for me on some level. Anytime she made a request for change and I didn't intellectually calculate that the problem was a severe she was making it out to be. Or if I didn't sort of organically empathize with the emotional experience she might be having, I always chose me over her. In your article, you highlight that you left dishes

by the sink, you talk about how it was indicative of larger problems. Can you talk a little bit about your household's approach to dishes and why you were kind of leaving them by the sink and why that became a problem for your ex-wife? Yeah, the dish by the sink was actually a drinking glass by the sink. I would drink water to take vitamin supplements and things like that in the morning.

And I just left the glass there because it seemed so inefficient to put it in the dishwasher like over and over again. And she just, so what if you did? What if you just did? Like for me. And I refused. I fought like a child, because I thought my preference

that the glass should be there was equally valid to her preference that it should be in the dishwasher. My brain was like, this is not a harmful thing. This is something she's definitely sort of like over-dramatizing, but that in and of itself is disrespectful. And it was painful. So these are two people who both experienced the petty BS that comes up in a long term relationship. With Matt, the glass he left by the sink became something his wife couldn't ignore, and perhaps something indicative of other, deeper issues.

Meanwhile Heather saw her husband holding the baby while stirring the pot, but they were somehow able to work through it, because they decided to see it as a problem to tackle together, rather than something to blame on each other. So you can see how this common problem, my spouse isn't doing what I want them to do, led to dramatically different outcomes. But it still doesn't explain how to act on these sorts of issues. Why are some couples able to overcome these petty grievances, but others can't? In Heather's eyes, a strong marriage requires a willingness to be open and flexible, and

maybe pay less attention to your partner's quirks. Marriage is not static. I mean, I think you have eras where things feel a little flat and different eras that feel sort of like, oh, we're rediscovering each other. This is fun or we're better friends now or we found a new activity that we really enjoy together and it's kind of bringing us closer.

But if someone's like, you know, I feel like we're in a rut, things aren't going that well, do I break up? Do I work on this? You know, are there ways to actually work on a relationship without just totally ending it? There are lots of ways to make a relationship better. It's mostly just a question of, do these two people really, really want to stay together. And I think that when two people really want it, and they're both capable of not change at an essential level, but just growth or openness, or just to appreciate and make space for the particular emotional folds of the other person's experience. We talk about like he's got to do more housework, she's got to make more money.

A lot of times with marriage, we end up talking about these really concrete economies and whether they're functioning and how many resources do we have and who's in charge and who's the CEO and who's the manager. But really, it's the mood of a marriage that matters the most. When you know that you're not bringing good things mood-wise to the other person, when you know that you're not showing up and asking them to tell you what they really love the most and what they really dream of and what they really long for. If you're not capable of doing that, if you can't make space for someone to feel the most like themselves or feel loved, then you have to ask yourself, what kind of a partner am I that I can't do that? Why can't I try?

You've written that marriage requires amnesia. Do you feel like most people judge their own relationships or their own partners like to critically or like not critically enough or maybe the trick is not in like being critical or not critical but in just like forgetting the person's flaws. I wanted to describe a day where you're just allergic to the person you're with and on this morning where Bill was walking around the kitchen and he had a cold and he was just making the most revolting awful sounds. Non-stop, there were two sounds a minute and so I started to write down the sounds and I started to laugh and I wrote the first part of this chapter about how weird it is to

share a house with someone for the course of your entire life and to have to hear their particular sounds for the stretch of your days on Earth. Once I was done with it, I gave it to Bill and he laughed and we thought it was really funny. The amnesia part is just like, you know, you need a mute button, you need a fast forward button. For people who are hyper critical, which I would sadly put myself in that category, you have to learn to not observe so closely. Just let someone be. You want to shove your partner into that fantasy realm

that you created that you were imagining, that you were kind of like savoring by yourself. You want to put them in there too and see if it works. Instead of always saying, my fantasy is this precious, perfect thing. And my reality is this high definition, snarly, smelly man. This person's weak spots are actually beautiful too. And they're lovable. And the stuff that's really gross, I'm just going to try to not notice as much as I can. And you're like, quote unquote, day job, you're an advice columnist. I'm sure like a lot of people have written into you wondering if they should leave their partner.

What are some of those typical, I maybe want to get divorced or break up feelings. I've been running Ask Polly for 10 years and sometimes people are just adding up all the traits of a person and they're sort of saying, I want someone who's more educated or I want someone who's more fun or you know more adventurous like my boyfriend since we're in a home too much or my boyfriend's always working. I want someone who has different ideas about how to raise kids than this person has. I want someone who has different ideas about how to raise kids than this person has. Those are hard letters to answer because a marriage is built by two people. It's not just like a combination of two people's traits. And when two people are committed to each other and they're really in it, they can create

anything they want from that in many ways. Obviously money is a giant stressor and can be extremely limiting when there's not enough of it. Having different groups of friends is one of the things that typifies this relationship is not assigned. It's a sign that the relationship might not work. I wanted to talk about the blowback to your book, which I really love the book. I thought it was actually like a really positive view of your marriage. It seems like they are upset that you said anything negative about your marriage. And I think a lot of people do only talk positively about their spouse. Yeah. And kind of where you think that blowback came from. Why do you think people have this rosy or sweet view of marriage typically?

Well, I think people want to keep marriage in a very clear binary where there are good marriages and bad marriages. And if your marriage is good, everything should be easy. And if your marriage is bad, it's doomed and you should get divorced right now. A lot of married people understood, and a lot of married people were like,

that's not how I run my marriage. My marriage is perfect, and I never have feelings of anger or rage, never ever ever. I'm never disappointed in my wonderful, perfect, glorious spouse. I mean, the thing is, maybe some people really do have great,

really effective rose colored glasses that they always use with their spouse and that's what works, you know, and they have the best sex in the world because they're always looking through these filtered lenses of this beautiful person. I mean, in some ways they're basically saying the same thing, which is I prefer this filter. It helps me to love my spouse more when I reject the idea that there is any hatred in any marriage except a bad one. Well, and I'll always care, someone who lights your way, each and every day. Don't know what you love is everything, so we can celebrate the joy it brings. It's so much to protect in our lives, that's why Nationwide is on your side.

Nationwide Mutual Insurance Company and Affiliates come up as Ohio. When you're on the road, you'll be glad you chose T-Mobile, the network that covers more highway miles with 5G than anyone. And when you're on the side of the road, with a flat tire or their dreaded check engine light, know that help will be there soon.

Because AAA also chose T-Mobile to be their exclusive wireless partner, connecting their AAA-owned fleet of vehicles across the country. See why the companies you trust depend on T-Mobile to be their exclusive wireless partner, connecting their AAA-owned fleet of vehicles across the country. See why the companies you trust depend on T-Mobile and learn more about our network at t-mobile.com-slash-coverage. I take Heather's point. I think it's easy to fall into the trap of believing there's one perfect person out

there for you. Assault mate, if you will. When we're trying to decide whether it's time to end things, it can be easy to see any conflict as a sign that this is not the perfect person, because if it was, the marriage would be smooth sailing. Psychological research suggests that this belief in soulmates can actually impact whether we think our relationship is capable of change or if it's doomed. I often go back to wedding vow. I mean, people can almost sort of recite it off the top of their head.

Spike W.S. Lee, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, spoke with me about the concept of love frames, and how different perspectives of love can determine how well your relationship can weather conflict. Specifically, people who see love as a journey tend to take the good with the bad. One of the traditional forms of the wedding vow, you know, I take you to be my wife or husband to have and to hold from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and health. I mean, so it talks about all of these ups and downs in a relationship. And so difficulties are expected. They are part of the process.

And when they arise, when these sort of difficulties arise, you are supposed to hold on to each other and work out the solutions. So in the journey frame, these conflicts become sort of more meaningful. They are part of the growth process. In love fiction, happily ever after really appears only at the end of the novel. It doesn't appear in the middle because after they're happily ever after, there's not much of a story to tell, right? Is the before-happily ever after is all to twist and turn into a conflict that makes the story interesting. Whereas for people who think of love as a perfect fit,

well, when conflicts arise, I just like questioning, I'll be love as a perfect fit, well, when complex arise, I start questioning, are we really such a good fit? You know, did I choose to write partner? They are more likely to think about like, you know, alternatives, who else I might maybe actually be dating instead. And so the proactiveness, the commitment, the engagement in maintaining a relationship, those behaviors are more positive when people have a journey frame than if they have this sort of perfect fit frame of love.

For Heather Haverleski, taking the good with the bad may be the secret to her successful marriage, or at least her ability to see her husband for who he is and not idealize what he should be. But for Matt's relationship, the journey had simply come to an end. For his wife, staying in the relationship was more painful than leaving. How did you guys actually know when it was time to divorce? Because I think a lot of people go through rough patches

and they're kind of like, is this a rough patch? Is it just our relationship? Was there like a final straw moment or what actually happened that led to filing for divorce? Sure. I don't want to speak for her when trust has been eroded in these subtle nuance ways that I tend to talk about. It's vulnerable to a major trauma, a job loss, a health diagnosis, a death of a close family member, a friend, something like really bad happens, and then boom, suddenly this realization sets in that my relationship is not a source

of safety and comfort and reliability for me. So I feel like I want to leave. And so unbeknownst to me, trust had been significantly eroded, and then my father-in-law died out of nowhere one night. My wife's father, and it was shocking and awful. But I thought it was just life happening, his life was always gonna happen. But what I believe happened is that she recognized in that moment, for the, however many years

we'd been together leading up to that nine or 10 years, Matt isn't a safe person, a safe space for me. She said it at dinner one night. Matt, I'm not sure. If I love you, I'm not sure if I want to be in this marriage anymore. I moved into the guest room and patted like a child because I thought she was sort of being unfair and quitting on me, rather than accepting any responsibility for anything I'd done or not done had resulted in her feeling that way. So there was just 18 months of whorliness and no growth. She had to make decision.

I opted out of doing anything. She had to make the hard decision to quote unquote break up a family to sacrifice time with her son for the rest of his childhood, which must have been an incredibly difficult choice to make. So it's like when should people leave? I don't know when that is,? I don't know like when that is and I don't know like how people decide, but I suspect it's that moment when the pain of

staying in the same place feels like outweighs the promise of hope of something different because this is too bad to stay. And I think that's what she eventually decided was it was too bad to stay. So she kind of put you on I don't want to say like probation but whatever. Like she was sort of like made you aware she's unhappy. And it sounds like when she said that she was unhappy you sort of discounted that you said you pouted. Were you opposed to getting divorced like you didn't want to get divorced? Yeah, I know, no, I didn't want to. I wouldn't have characterized my relationship as pleasant and healthy. It was miserable, truly.

But my parents put when I was four, and my parents lived 500 miles apart from my entire childhood. This idea of getting divorced and putting your kids through that was something I was hypersensitive to. And so a huge part of that was like, I'm failing at the most important thing in my life. I'm going to lose so much time with my son. I'm going to be part of putting my son through the same thing that I went through that I thought was really awful as a child.

I wanted her to like magically get back to the person that I married. Like the fun, happy person that the majority of our relationship, at least from my blind perspective always was. You know, I just hindsight. Yeah. So I sent your article to my boyfriend. He was like, yeah, well, you know, this is how I feel about the fact. I'm really bad about recycling.

I like, really, this is gonna get me canceled, but I like really forget to recycle all the time. And he like loves recycling. He like thinks is really important. He was like, well, you is gonna get me canceled, but I like really forget to recycle all the time and he loves recycling, he thinks it's really important. He was like, well you know, you never recycle and this like reminds me how you don't recycle. And so then I like listed a bunch of things that he doesn't do that I wish he did. I think your experience is totally valid

and I could completely see how that would lead to a marriage ending. But I also think some people might say like, look, in any couple you're gonna have fights about like dumb crap. I'm wondering like, how to know the difference between the two? How to know when it's the same fight about the recycling for the millions time versus this person is not being heard and you're in danger of like losing your relationship? I don't think it matters what that thing is, whether it's a dish by the sink or the recycling

of a position of a toilet seat, or anything like that. These so-called petty grievances, I think, are what destroys trust and love in the average relationship. I think our inability to have a successful conversation about it, to repair whatever's wrong, is what's an issue, is what sort of hurts on an emotional level. I just have this strong belief that it accumulates over time. And again, we can have the petty fights, I think, for three years, for five years, for seven years.

And everything seems fine. And there just comes a point where the pile-up of the paper cuts, the pile-up of the lack of validation, and the lack of consideration, for whichever is sort of the more in-paying partners experience or hell. Maybe both of them equally, I just think somebody reaches sort of this critical mass of enough, enough I'm not doing this anymore. Have you come up with any ways to like better get through to each other about how important

this little stuff can be? Yeah, I've tried. And that is, I imagine my son, when he was four, he was a threat to wake up in the middle of the night, crying, afraid of a monster hiding under his bed. Dad, I'm really afraid of this monster under the bed. And all of a sudden, this is stupid. My instinct, intellectual leads to convincing, there isn't a monster under the bed. I might say something like, bud, toughen up, there isn't a monster there.

Everything's fine. I don't have time for this. Please go to sleep. Bye. And I leave. And so important facts. I'm correct. There wasn't a monster into the bed. I love that child more than I love anybody. I would never, ever, ever behave in a way designed to inflict pain on that guy. Ever. But is my son still afraid? He's still sad. He's trying this, except that abandon him to be afraid and to cry alone in the dark. He now trusts me a little bit less. I just think showing up differently matters. And so I want to hug that kid. And I would say, buddy, I don't think there's a monster

in the bed. But I can see that you're really afraid right now. And I've been afraid before. And I am so sorry that that's what you're experiencing right now. So turn the light on and let's make sure there's no monster there. I'm not going anywhere. And even if we can't fix the problem, we're always going to show up. And I think that is the idea that correlates most closely with our adult relationships.

When we're disagreeing with our adult partner, more or less saying there isn't a monster in the bed, you shouldn't think that you shouldn't feel that. Even though we believe so strongly, we're intellectually correct, is this erosion of trust that happens? Same would be true with this like recycling situation, like you knew.

You just have to intellectually agree in order to have a successful relationship, and I would say no. The absolutely not, we just have to validate, and there's a difference between agreement and validation. Is there something you look for from advice seekers to kind of get a sense of can this marriage or relationship be saved versus I'm your last stop before the divorce attorney and you should just go there? Oftentimes two people will be committed not to the other person but committed to the

distraction of fighting with the other person instead of getting out and living their lives. Sometimes when someone's in that state, they just need someone else to say, it shouldn't be that hard. When someone is describing a spouse that sounds pretty awful, but the way that the spouse is being described is a little awful too. Like there's some mutual awfulness in the picture. I really don't like to say, you're better than that guy.

You should dump him immediately because it's sort of like, you too might be a really good match actually. It's just you have to turn this awfulness upside down and find the love somehow. Treat each other's desires as precious for a while, you know, and see how that feels. I went to couples therapy with one boyfriend and I used to come out of therapy thinking, I hate it when he talks, you know, that mom was my complaint. I hate hearing him, his facing making sounds at me, I hate it. And eventually I had to admit, like I really can't stand my boyfriend and I need to break up with him.

But you know, sometimes you don't know that until you're in a room with a third, well, a witness and suddenly you're like, and even, okay, if someone is saying, here's how I feel, you know, sometimes I feel sad and the person starts crying and you're like, I don't care about this person's tears. You know, that's a very bad sign having no empathy.

If you just feel like someone just isn't enough for you, then you can take that at face value and say, I always feel like this person isn't enough. And then be gone. Move on. You just have to make sure that the impatience doesn't come from actually just from being with someone who loves you. Huh.

Because if you came from a background where people didn't treat you with that much kindness and that much presence, it can just feel awkward to be with someone who's crazy about you. You know, it's just unfamiliar. So you have to ask yourself, can I make this unfamiliar country that doesn't feel like my homeland at all, because of my homeland I'm starving, you know, can I make this abundance feel good? A question for people out there who are single or maybe marriage skeptics, what's the case for marriage? to really have a person in your life who you trust more than you've trusted anyone before. It's magic. I mean, before I met my husband, okay, wooo! Wow, I haven't cried in an interview in a long time.

This is good. No! Before I met my husband, I never had that. I never had a person in my life who I knew that if I said, I really need your help right now. They would drop everything and give me everything they could. I don't know. It's easy to feel conflicted about everything. You know, it's easy to not trust people because you've never trusted anyone. And it's easy to assume the worst about people because you don't know, ultimately don't know anyone well enough and haven't witnessed anyone for long enough to see how pure most people's intentions

are. I think the benefit of marrying someone with a really pure heart like my husband, Bill, is that it makes you look at other people in new, more compassionate ways. Having a model of a relationship that you can actually improve, what you put in comes back to you basically because you're building something that gets better with effort and with love. People feel embarrassed by so many things and it's a great marriage makes you less embarrassed, you know, it makes you more daring. And you bring that energy to other people.

Marriage is like the powerhouse of the cell. I don't know. Like the mitochondria. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ This pandemic has made a lot of people feel like they want to divorce their spouse. We've spent so much time together and had so many opportunities for conflict.

But for many people in long-term romantic relationships, knowing when to end things may come with a better understanding of why things are going the way they are. Like Spike W. S. Lee told us, the issue may be your perspective of how love should work. If you see love as a perfect fit or a soulmate, you may believe conflict is just not capable of being resolved. If anything, it's a sign that things will only go downhill from there. People who think of love as a perfect fit, well, when conflicts arise, I start questioning,

I'll be really such a good fit, you know, did I choose to write partner. So in the journey frame, these conflicts become sort of more meaningful. They are part of the growth process. In love fiction, happily ever after really appears only at the end of the novel, right? It doesn't appear in the middle because after they're happily ever after, there's not much of a story to tell, right? Is the before happily ever after is all to twist and turn to the conflicts that make the story interesting.

Even some of the best relationships have their ups and downs, though, and many good relationships aren't Instagram-perfect, as much as we want to believe they are. Maybe some people really do have great, really effective, rose-colored glasses that they always use with their spouse and that's what works, you know, and they have the best sex in the world because they're always looking through these filtered lenses at this beautiful person. In some ways they're basically saying the same thing which is I prefer

this filter. It helps me to love my spouse more when I reject the idea that there is any hatred in any marriage except a bad one. For Matthew, hindsight is 2020. He realized that leaving a glass by the sink reflected a broader attitude that left his wife feeling unloved. It's worth considering whether there are small things either you or your partner do that have spiraled into deeper trust issues and ideally work on those before they spiral. I don't think it matters what the thing is, whether it's a dish by the sink, or they're recycling a position of the toilet seat,

anything like that. These so-called petty grievances, I think are what destroys trust and love in the average relationship. I think our inability to have a successful conversation about it, to repair whatever's wrong, is what's an issue, is what sort of hurts. As Matthew pointed out, validating each other's feelings is really important.

You don't have to agree with your partner, but you do have to make them feel heard. As Heather said, remember that relationships aren't just the sum of two people's traits. You have to decide that you're going to love the whole person, not just the best 20% of them. Maybe starting over in your marriage means accepting your partner for who they are. Instead of always saying, my fantasy is this precious, perfect thing, and my reality is this high definition, snarly, smelly man.

This person's weak spots are actually beautiful too and they're lovable and and the stuff that's really gross I'm just gonna try to not notice as much as I can. That's all for this week's episode of How to Start Over. This episode was produced by me, Rebecca Rashid, and hosted by Olga Hazan, editing by AC Valdez and Claudine Abade. Fact check by Anna Alvarado. Our engineer is Matthew Simonson, special thanks to Adrian LeFrance, executive editor of The Atlantic. The opening audio in this episode was provided by a 1960s infomercial called Handling Marital Conflicts.