treat my partner with love and respect, even in my worst moments

This morning I was upset with him about something, and I felt myself getting to that point that usually signals that things are about to get really bad really fast… but instead of recognizing it and then just rampaging ahead anyway, as I usually do, this time as soon as I recognized it I calmed down, stopped myself from yelling, and remembered to be reasonable and try to understand. By the time he left for work, I had actually listened to what he said and come to the conclusion that there wasn’t really a problem, and I was kissing him goodbye. I kind of couldn’t believe it – so it is possible for me to get myself back to the love and respect even in those moments.

I don’t know what exactly was different this time – maybe it was the talk we had the other day – but somehow, I just tapped into some self-control and did it. It’ll be interesting to see if I can continue doing this the next time my resolve is tested….

There’s a certain pattern of behavior we’d been falling into in recent months that I always knew was destructive – even though I was always instigating it. I just didn’t know how to stop – and I still don’t, really, but at least now I have a plan.

Having taken some time to think about this particular issue – and having been inspired by a training at his job, which is social work with families – my fiancee wanted to discuss it with me. What he said was kind of a wake-up call for me. It was good, because he told me that what had been happening wasn’t acceptable to him and he wanted me to work with him on coming up with a plan for how we can do things differently.

It was helpful for me, hearing him take a stand about it – it kind of brought home to me that I really just need to change what I’m doing, no matter how hard it is and no matter how much I hate it in the moment. It also made me realize how long I’ve been indulging a really bad behavior – pursuing people I’m angry at and continuing to, like, bait them rather than giving them space and letting our tempers die down. Basically in the end, I have now agreed that if I get really angry I’ll leave the house – either just go outside or go somewhere else for a little while.

I think it’s a great idea, and I’ll do it, but it’s not going to be easy… I’ve just never done things that way before.

But it’s time for me to stop telling myself, and others, “I can’t help it” – as if there’s something outside of me that’s forcing me around in life. I can’t control how I feel, really, but I can control what I do and say. That’s within my power – all my faculties are perfectly intact and capable. To claim otherwise is just plain dishonest. If I don’t control myself at times, it’s simply because I’ve decided it’s too much effort and chosen not to.

Well, that’s just lazy, and lazy is not the kind of lover I’m going to be! Since day one, I’ve been carefully making sure that I never start down that path. I don’t ever want to lower my standards for myself in my relationship. That’s exactly what this goal is all about.

My fiancee’s new job has killer benefits, including eight free counseling sessions per year. Anyone in his household can use them, not just him, or you can do couples counseling if you like. Since he knows how I feel about the way I act towards him sometimes, he suggested that we try the counseling.

I’m open to it. We did have one couples session with a therapist a couple of years ago (she actually writes the relationship advice column for our local paper – it’s a terrible paper, but her column is great!) and it was actually really helpful. We didn’t feel the need to go back again, and couldn’t really afford it either, but now that we have the opportunity, it certainly couldn’t hurt to check it out.

I have a hard time not belittling myself for going to therapy – as I pointed out to my fiancee, I have a very fortunate life, I’m functional in society, and I doubt any psychologist would diagnose me with mental illness, so – I feel like I don’t need therapy. Which is true, of course – I get along fine without it, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t help. I do want to figure out how to be a better partner and I definitely don’t want to be controlled by the whims of rage forever. I could really use some new ideas.

I’m not the kind of person who just needs to have someone listen supportively, as it’s called – I know a lot of people find that helpful, but personally I can’t stand it! It makes me feel much better when people respond to me and make suggestions – when someone just listens to me silently or only says things like “that must be hard for you” (which is exactly the type of listening that’s supposed to be most supportive, right?), I feel kind of anxious and despairing, like I’m trying to communicate with another person but my words are just echoing back to me. I like being given advice sometimes. I like to hear new ideas, even if I don’t like any of them; for me it’s reassuring – it reminds me that there are still things out there to learn about, to try, to consider. That’s pretty much what motivates me in life – seeing it as an exploration… a learning experience.

Well, we’ll probably end up taking advantage of this and making an appointment with someone, so I’ll see how it goes. Hopefully it will be helpful!

I’m still “working on” this goal, to put it very gently. I think I’ve had some insights, intellectually, but they haven’t translated into any change in my behavior yet. I haven’t found a way to control my temper.

I realized today (after failing at this yet again) that I feel incredibly overwhelmed by my life right now, and that I sometimes blame my fiancee for “making” things that way. When we got together, I quickly went from having very few responsibilities to having a lot, and some of them difficult ones. He’s older than I am and had already made most of those transitions – I kind of had to sink or swim (at least that’s how it felt). I didn’t give myself much time to adjust to all the new roles that I ended up in – I just took them on and was determined to succeed at them. I’ve always kind of felt like it was sort of “what I deserved” for having slacked off in my teen years – like it was time for me to grow up, ready or not.

But often it feels very, very overwhelming… I just look around at all the things that surround me, think about all the things I want to do or need to do – the dishes need to be washed, the plants need to be watered, the boxes sitting in the living room need to be gone through, my homework needs to be done, the dishes need to be washed again, I need to go pick up my stepson, oh, and I wanted to study Japanese and practice my music and work on my novel today – it’s like everything I see or even think about is late, dirty, broken, missing, not finished, or not even started. I don’t even take time to appreciate the few things that are actually completed because I’m so busy working on the next thing.

A suppressed yet insistent part of me longs, really longs, to escape from all this responsibility. And that same part also believes that it’s kind of “his fault” that I’m so overwhelmed. I know I chose this freely – I didn’t know what I was getting into. But I also know that we have something truly great together, and there’s no way I would leave it now.

I think this is just a really busy time – we’re working through a lot of old disorganization and neglect and putting out a lot of fires. I just need to keep hard at work and take one thing at a time – someday I’ll get on top of it all.

Until then, I guess I just have to live with it and try not to take it out on him when I get that overwhelmed feeling… just take a break and do something fun instead for a little while, maybe. I’ve been so determined to be utterly productive lately that it’s been wearing me out. I know I don’t need to be quite as hard on myself as I am.

For, like, two days after my last entry on this goal, I did really well. Then on Friday night I was horrible. I was basically crazy and abusive. And I was even thinking that in the moment – what am I doing, what’s wrong with me?! And yet I didn’t stop. Well, I did, eventually, but I went through far too much craziness before getting control. If my fiancee wasn’t as eternally loving and patient as he is I’m sure my behavior would have destroyed our relationship long ago.

It’s interesting – over time, I’ve managed to make my raging episodes shorter and get back into my ‘right mind’ more quickly – but what happens during them has become worse. My control over what I do and say has gotten looser and looser. It all points to me getting too comfortable, knowing that he won’t leave me… and as a result, caring less. I can’t let that happen. I don’t want a jaded old relationship in which the couple has just kind of settled into their bad patterns and stopped trying to do their best. I really want ours to be different. I want to stay in love, I want to always feel like we’re giving each other our best efforts. My fiancee is doing his part toward that and I want to do mine.

I really don’t know why I have such a power complex! I know that’s what’s happening almost every time I get upset… they’re power struggles. Like I said in a previous entry, I tend to have major emotional reactions against being overpowered, even in totally trivial contexts (I mean like right down to how many avocados we’re buying at the grocery store).

And I had a great childhood and have had no major traumas in my life, so it’s not that. Well – actually, I was an only child and tended to get much of what I wanted – perhaps that contributed to it. I’m not sure, though. I wasn’t totally spoiled or anything, and my issue seems bigger than that.

And it seems to have something to do with being female, curiously. On a visceral level, it makes me angry to think about how most of the men out there (including mine) are more physically powerful than I am. I just imagine how they could throw me like a rag doll, no matter what I tried to do. I mean, I’m pretty strong for my size, but there’s only so much you can do when you’re a 120-pound, 5’6.5” woman. And getting mace or a gun or learning martial arts might help me defend myself, but it wouldn’t change the way I feel. I’d still be angry knowing that I could be overpowered with just the brute strength of someone else’s body.

Isn’t that kind of weird? It almost makes me believe in reincarnation, like I must have been some kind of hulking Mongol warrior in a previous life or something. Like I’ve actually had physical power before – I’ve just been unfairly stripped of it! (OK, I did say almost.)

It just shocks me to see how furious and aggressive I can become, within seconds. I’ve always thought of myself as nice... but the truth is, it’s more complex than that. There are a lot of possibilities within my “personality” – I don’t even think that’s a helpful term, really. After all, how can I describe my personality? There are opposites in it. I am indeed naturally kind, but I’m also naturally cruel. I’m sometimes lazy, sometimes very active – sometimes hopeful and positive, sometimes very pessimistic. There are a few things that are pretty constant, but even with those, there are exceptions.

I guess I just have to figure out what to do with the Mongol warrior part of me. Is there some way I can change the way I feel about ‘power,’ having it vs. not having it? Or do I just have to wait for those feelings to go away with time and maturity? That seems more likely, knowing me. In the meantime, how can I keep them from affecting the way I act with loved ones?

I’m not sure how to answer those questions yet, but in the 341 days until our wedding, I think I’m going to make huge progress on this.

For the past few days, I’ve been feeling unusually guilty about my progress on this… I just don’t think it’s been very good. I haven’t done anything extremely terrible, really, since setting this goal, but I’ve been constantly indulging myself in minor annoyances, complaining about things that don’t really matter, saying careless things, etc. It feels like I’m hardly even trying – like a part of me wants to just “settle” and not change my behavior – just call it good enough.

Well, everyone else (including my fiancee) may think it’s good enough, but I don’t. He deserves the best I can do and I know I can do better… so that’s all there is to it.

I think for now I want to just be way more careful about what I say – after three years I’m so comfortable around him that I just open my mouth whenever something comes into my mind, pretty much. I’d like to just shut up a bit more and before I speak, think about whether I’m being sensitive in what I’m saying. I’ve been meaning to do that lately, but I haven’t – I’ve just been saying whatever I feel like saying, whenever I feel like saying it.

But starting right now, I’m going to promise that I will make a sincere effort to be more thoughtful about what I say to him.

How funny is it that you spend months and months learning to truly let your guard down and be yourself around someone and then when you finally succeed, you have to go the other direction and relearn tact? Seriously!

Sometimes I think of this goal as being, naturally, a very hard thing to do. But other times, like today, when I think about how much I – well, what I’m going to describe – it seems crazy to me that I’d have any difficulty with it at all.

We fell in love fairly fast, my guy and I did, and fairly madly. I thought we might lose it, it might just fade away or we might have some big fight that destroyed it – but we never did. Oh, we had the fights, all right, but no matter how bad they were, we always came up feeling even closer, even more… well, everything.

Today, love doesn’t even seem like an adequate description anymore. I look at him and I can’t say anything that feels like enough because, well, it’s not something that can be said. I feel like it’s something that will take my whole life to express. A whole lifetime of feeling it and giving it.

Maybe that’s why a wedding seems like such a powerful experience to me. I mean, it’s the best way we have to communicate to each other, in one moment, that kind of love. It can do that better than words can. It can show your partner, your family, your friends, that you have that kind of love that you can’t describe, that will be your magnum opus, that if you make it one of your life’s devotions, you can sketch out just a little more of it every day and not be finished until the very last moment of your time together – the moment of death for you or him, you or her.

My getting angry at my fiancee is not truly about him or anything he does – I know it. He could be perfect, and it would still happen – and to me he is perfect, 99% of the time when I feel like I’m in my right mind. Maybe the problem is that I don’t see myself that way. I like who I am, pretty much, but like everyone else I criticize myself – I get afraid that I’m not good enough, that I’m not doing the right things, that I won’t be OK – all that. And of course, he’s the one who is in my path when I get that way.

What if I could see myself the way I see him – what if I loved myself that much? Because it seems like maybe I don’t. I know that he is good enough (way more than good enough), is doing the right things, will be OK – I wonder why it’s so hard to believe that about myself – and if I did, how differently I might behave….

In the last few days since I adding this goal to my list, it’s been pretty hit-and-miss. I just don’t have a good strategy for controlling myself when I feel angry or annoyed at him. I try to think about how much I love him and should just keep my mouth shut until my feelings return to normal, but for the most part that hasn’t really worked. That thought doesn’t translate into a feeling of love in those moments… my anger is just stubborn and won’t let anything penetrate it. Also, sometimes it comes up so suddenly that I don’t even have time to try to deal with it in a positive way.

I suppose a good step for the moment would be to just figure out what kinds of situations between the two of us tend to bring out the worst in me. I can already think of a big one:

Times when I perceive that he is 1) trying to show me a different way to do something that I think I already do decently, 2) “taking over” a job that I’m working on, or 3) “fixing” or redoing a job that I think already done decently.

I think I know why these situations drive me crazy… basically, they confirm my fear that I’m totally inept, the whole “I never do anything right” complex. And admittedly, I like to be right and feel like I know what I’m doing. I don’t like feeling naive and clueless—I want to be seen as a capable person. It can be hard for me to let him be the wiser or more experienced one in a given area.

He often tells me that it’s “not a competition” and it’s not about who’s right or wrong. I agree with that, of course, but I know that I am a bit competitive, even with him. I don’t feel the need to be better at things, but often I’d at least like to be equally good. For instance, that’s one of the reasons I quit doing karate, which we used to do together. He was almost a black belt and I was just starting. Everyone told me I was making great progress, but I just got so frustrated watching him and all the other strong guys at the dojo knocking over the bags that I could barely budge. I felt like I’d never be as powerful as they were and for some reason, I absolutely can’t stand the thought of that.

I wonder how I can stop being so competitive with my fiancee, of all people. It’s really ridiculous.

By the time I marry my fiancee next year – June 13, 2009 – I want to feel like I’ve truly learned to do this.

I love him very much, of course, but for me, really loving someone involves more than just feeling the feelings and treating the other person well when it comes easily.

I trust my fiancee enough to live with him, to share almost everything I have with him, to marry him and combine my life with his. And I only feel that kind of trust because, having gotten to know him very well over the last three years, I’m certain beyond all reasonable doubt that we’re really committed to each other and he’s really the guy I want. I wouldn’t make this commitment to someone who didn’t deserve to be treated right, so… I want to treat him right.

For the most part I know I do treat my fiancee with a lot of love and respect—and 99% of the time it comes quite easily because, well, I really do like him! I’ve asked him how he feels about this and he says that he’s totally content with the way I treat him, that he does feel loved and supported.

Most people who meet me also have quite a positive impression of me and see me as a loving, gentle, mature sort of person. I definitely have that side to me, and I think I’d say it’s the dominant side. Therefore I think most people would be quite shocked if they saw the way I can absolutely rage at my fiancee. Despite how even-tempered I genuinely feel most of the time, it’s like there’s anger inside me somewhere just waiting to be set off, and when it is – sometimes by really insignificant things – it escalates so quickly that I feel like I lose control of it. I devolve into a childish, crazy, downright scary person and say awful things that I later wish I could take back.

Now, this doesn’t happen often, thank goodness, and it’s never happened with anyone but my fiancee (I was quite shocked myself to discover that I had this side)... but the problem is that it happens, no matter how rarely. I know that each time, somewhere in there, there’s a moment in which I decide, however unwittingly, to throw aside my love for my fiancee and attack him.

That’s a terrible decision to make… I want to work on recognizing those moments of choice and choosing differently.

I know he never deserves to be treated cruelly, much as I may feel, in the heat of the moment, that my rage is totally justified. He says he sees those moments as anomalies that don’t really represent me; therefore he doesn’t think they’re a problem. My fiancee is extraordinarily forgiving, obviously, and in many ways very emotionally mature. I love him all the more for that! But I’m not yet satisfied with the way I treat him. I’m proud that I’ve made a great deal of progress since the beginning of our relationship (it is the first and only long-term relationship I’ve ever had), but I know I can make even more.

Shouting, insulting him, cursing him out, trying to passive-aggressively “get revenge” on him, and being physically aggressive are all behaviors that are totally unacceptable to me. They’re pitiful attempts at defending myself from a person who isn’t even trying to hurt me. Sadly, all of them are also things I’ve done and will probably do again if I don’t take action against them. Anger just consumes me and I go into attack mode, even as that little voice is desperately telling me that I really love this man, that he’s not my enemy. And then I feel horrible later, when the anger wears off. I don’t want to be like that anymore. I won’t check off this goal until I’ve gotten rid of those behaviors completely—until I’ve found a reliable way to deal with my feelings more appropriately.

So those are my worst moments – but I also want to watch out for the many little ways in which I let things degenerate slightly at times – how I let myself get annoyed by minor issues and take it out on my fiancee. Of course, I’m not going to crucify myself if I get slightly crabby with him every once in a while. It’s bound to happen with just about anyone one lives with. But it shouldn’t happen every day. Or even every other day. It should be occasional and mild. I think I’ll be quite content if I can achieve that.