The Spousal Collage

Assumptions are more often wrong than right.  They’re like a broken clock in that they can be right, and have been right, but very infrequently.  Think about the assumptions you may have towards your spouse when there is conflict.  How do you think your spouse will respond?  How do you think they’ll present their case?  Do you assume they’ll listen to you or understand where you are coming from?  Do you perceive them as always needing to be right or that they have to win or have the last word?

Our brains are amazingly good at remembering these negative behaviors of our spouses.  We remember negative events far more acutely than positive events.  This is by design.  Historically, positive experiences don’t kill you.  You have to watch out for those negative events because they will bite you.  That really bad fight, those really hurtful words screamed at you; or the storming out of the house, slamming the door so hard artwork falls from the wall; those events tend to linger in memory.  Gotta make sure those events don’t happen again—they really hurt.

Each of those events and moments and outbursts; the worst examples of our spouse’s behavior get cut up and pasted together at the craft table in our minds.  We piece together an image of our spouse with all these horrible qualities pasted together.  It’s this image we see in our mind’s eye at the hint of conflict.  It’s this image that becomes our rehearsal partner in preparation for a fight.  It’s this image we compare ourselves to, quite favorably, I might add.

And this is not the person standing before you before the fight bell tolls.  Oh sure, all those images you’ve collected have happened.  They’re not figments of your imagination.  And none of those memories occurred in a vacuum.  What is the camera not showing you in those images you’ve collected?  

Good artists have a way of manipulating the scene to deliver the desired emotional response.  What’s the response you get from looking at the collage you created?  Also, there are two artists with cameras pointed in opposite directions.  There are two collages, and two emotional responses resulting.

Let’s acknowledge the collage we’ve created of our spouse.  It’s scary or mean or just icky.  To improve the marriage you have to courageously poke through the collage and look at the person standing before you with an open mind and heart.  Believe me, you didn’t marry the collage.