Overcoming Gridlock...With Charity (wk 10)

Last week we discussed conflict in marriage, and briefly touched on gridlock, which is when both partners refuse to budge on a situation. Gridlock can leave any couple feeling frustrated and powerless. Marriage researcher John Gottman says that gridlock is characterized by the following signs.

1. You’ve had the same argument again and again with no resolution.

2. Neither of you can address the issue with humor, empathy, or affection.

3. The issue is becoming increasingly polarizing as time goes on.

4. Compromise seems impossible because it would mean selling out – giving up something important and core to your beliefs, values, or sense of self.

Gottman says that gridlock is a sign that you have some dreams for your life that your partner either doesn’t know about or does not respect. These dreams don’t have to be big. It could simply be a dream of having an organized home, where the other person has a dream of feeling comfortable in their home. The most important step in overcoming gridlock is to share those dreams with each other so you can understand why your partner’s position is so important to them. 

After you have heard each other’s dreams, you can move on to supporting each other in those dreams. Because these are deeply rooted dreams, they are unlikely to change, so we have to be able to adjust to and support them. There are three levels of supporting those dreams. The first is to express understanding and be interested in learning more about it. The second is to actively enable the dream, and the third is to become part of the dream. You do not have to go through every level in order to get past the gridlock. For example, I have a dream to always have music to be a central part of my life. I love to sing and participate in choirs, and I always want that to be in my life. My husband hates to sing. It’s not something he enjoys at all. I don’t expect him to become part of my dream in that way, just to support me in it. The most important thing, Gottman says, is to honor those dreams. 

When we are dealing with highly sensitive issues, where we are gridlocked, an important thing to remember is CHARITY. In the book Drawing Heaven into Your Marriage, H. Wallace Goddard had some amazing things to say about charity. “We tolerate imperfections in our partners until they inconvenience us. Then we expect change.” Doesn’t that sound like something that would lead to gridlock? For example, one of the issues my husband and I get gridlocked on is parenting styles. Before we had children, I knew his personal style of dealing with misbehavior was not what I would choose, but it didn’t bother me much. Now we have our own children and I have very specific and personal dreams about how I want to parent. My husband’s parenting style is suddenly very inconvenient for me. So I expect change. I tell him all the ways I think he should do things differently and how he’s doing it all wrong. Obviously, this isn’t super effective. 

Goddard also says that acceptance of our partner is the key to change. It sounds so counterintuitive that to get someone to change, we must just accept who they are but it’s true! When we accept and love someone, they are less likely to dig in their heels and resist influence, and more likely to be open to new ideas and thoughts. Even if they don’t eventually change, they are more understanding of us in the end. 

In my book club this month we read Little Lord Fauntleroy, by Frances Hodgson Burnett. In the book, Lord Fauntleroy is an extremely kind and charitable little boy who sees the good in everyone and never thinks ill of a person no matter how cruel they may actually be. When he goes to meet his grandfather for the first time, he has no idea that this man is very uncharitable, angry, and altogether disliked by everyone. Lord Fauntleroy’s determination to see only the good in this old man eventually changes his heart and he begins to try to live up to the boy’s view of him. 

I thought of this story after I read in Goddard’s book that “the single most promising marriage-fixing effort is not tinkering with our partners’ characters; it is in loving, cherishing, and appreciating them!” He also said that “good marriage partners are likely to exaggerate their spouses’ strengths.”

I felt like that was so powerful. If there is an issue we are gridlocked over, we can decide to focus on our partner’s strengths, loving and appreciating them, accepting who they are, and being charitable. Gridlock can lead to anger, blaming our spouse for the problem, and in the end, major difficulties in the relationship. Instead, we can choose to have charity, to give our partner the benefit of the doubt, to listen to and try to understand their dreams, and accept that our differences are what make things interesting.