Nobody should speak for another person without his or her permission. If you want to comment on your partner’s thoughts and feelings, it is good manners to ask their permission before you do so. Since you do not live in his or her body or mind, you simply cannot know what the person next to you is thinking or feeling.
Questions to ask about your relationship
•How can we remind each other to stay in our own lanes and speak only for ourselves?
•When we start speaking for each other, how can we get ourselves back to speaking only for ourselves?
Relationship skill
Put the topic on the shelf
This skill of not speaking when you feel or think something, but rather when you are ready, is called putting a conversation on the shelf or having a timeout. It involves putting the conversation to one side and picking it up later when you both feel prepared and calm enough to speak about it respectfully.
When you put a topic on the shelf because you are too upset, it is best to not leave it there for more than 24 to 48 hours. Often, it becomes too painful to wait any longer to speak, which becomes disrespectful to each other and your relationship. Your promise to each other is that you will pick up the conversation within the next day or two. The sooner you are ready to talk, the better.
Two practical skills really help couples to put a topic on the shelf. The first is putting a glass jar somewhere visible in your home, and dropping topics for conversation into it as they come up. In this way, you can see when a topic has come up for discussion, which you will need to speak about within the next day or two. Anything from household issues to deeper emotional points can be stored in the jar for picking up later.
The second is stating when you need to put a topic on the shelf or use a timeout – specifying, in that moment of upset, when would be good to talk. You could say, for example, ‘I don’t feel like talking now, but can we speak tomorrow morning at breakfast?’ or ‘I would love to hear what you have to say, but not now. Can we speak about it tonight?’ Each couple must find their own way of doing this. The skill of putting a conversation on the shelf can save your relationship a great deal of exhausting and damaging talking.
If you don’t like the idea of a jar for topics, you can simply indicate your need for talking by asking, ‘When can we talk?’ or, ‘I need to speak to you’ or, ‘When would be a good time for us to sit down and talk?’ Finding the courage to indicate that you need to talk needs to be respected and honoured with the best, most honest conversation you can have.
This is not a skill that you use to avoid conversations. It is a tool for protecting your relationship. It is an essential skill for stopping the damage in a moment of upset and a tool you use for taking better care of your relationship and each other.
The person who calls for a timeout is trying to protect your relationship, because – for whatever reason – the way in which you are speaking is too damaging or upsetting for him or her. You have the right to protect you relationship. The golden rule of the timeout is that the person who puts the conversation on the shelf is responsible for picking it up again within the next day or two.
If your partner indicated the need to talk and you called for a timeout, it is your responsibility to pay attention to the topic and give it the time it deserves. It is disrespectful to ignore what matters to your loved ones; doing so can even be seen as a lack of commitment, respect and love.
Questions to ask about your relationship
•What would be the best way, in our relationship, to put a topic on the shelf?
•What would we prefer to say to each other when we want to put a conversation on the shelf?
•Which ways of putting a conversation on the shelf would not work for our relationship? Why?
Relationship skill
Stop trying to fix, and start trying to understand
Intimate relationships, involving emotions, are different from business and all other relationships. In work relationships, there might be right and wrong problems that have obvious solutions. But you cannot treat your intimate relationships like work relationships, as your intimate emotions and thoughts are deeply personal and influence the way you perceive and feel things.
How you perceive the world reflects your identity – your personality. Work is often about goals, outcomes, productivity, results, competition, money and performance; relationships are about intimacy, connection, sharing, honesty, respect, understanding, individuality and togetherness. Your intimate relationship lives in a very different world from your business relationships, and has different rules of engagement. You cannot treat your intimate relationships like you treat your business relationships.
Personal and intimate relationships are never about fixing things and finding solutions. For most couples, this is difficult to understand. They see a problem in their relationship and want to find a solution to it, to fix what is wrong. The ‘fixing’ of your relationship lies in seeing and understanding each other’s most private experiences. Trying to fix each other and your relationship, rather than trying to see and understand each other’s experience of life, can often feel disrespectful.
Fixing your relationship involves truly showing interest in and an understanding of each other’s experiences of life.
To be seen and feel love, we need to accept each other’s very different experiences as true. What is true for me – my experience – does not have to be true for you. You have the right to your own, and often very different, experience of the same events.
Questions to ask about your relationship
•What is my intention for fixing and finding solutions for each other?
•If one or both of us slip into the old habit of trying to fix or find solutions for each other, how can we support each other in not doing so?
•What does it mean to try to understand each other, as opposed to fixing or finding solutions for our relationship?
•How can we support each other in our attempts to understand each other?
Relationship skill
Accept that you are different
We need to accept that no two people will see the same thing in the same way. We should allow each other our different experiences, and be really interested in how we experience the world differently. In a way, we should seek to disagree. Disagreement means that two or more people have taken the time and courage to share their most important thoughts and feelings, and feel so strongly about them that they refuse to agree. Couples who never disagree may be keeping quiet about what they really think. Sweeping your real thoughts and feelings under the carpet has never proven to be good for any relationship.
If you see the world differently to your partner, and feel strongly about how you see it, no amount of dialogue will make you see the world in the same way as your partner.
So, the secret is to move away from fighting to be right and to accept that you are right for only you. What is right for you may not be right for your partner. It simply cannot be true in a relationship between two people that your experience is the only experience and, therefore, the right one. The reason is logical: you are two people viewing the world, not one. Rather focus on accepting that you are both always right, because your experience is your experience and your partner’s experience is his or her experience. No amount of dialogue or debate is going to change that.
Remember that people have different views and equal rights to express them. If you don’t believe that you and your partner have equal rights to express yourselves or have your own opinions, you will never be truly happy. A