It’s important to achieve balance in your marriage. I’ve been married for nearly 42 years. While my wife and I share common values and goals for our marriage, we have considerable differences in our personalities. She’s detail oriented, I’m a big picture kind of a guy. I’m a morning person, she’s more of a night owl. I enjoy meeting and talking with people, but she is more of an introvert.
For the most part we have learned to live with these differences. As an example, though I may have been up for a couple of hours in the morning and have run through a hundred thoughts in my head, I agree not to barrage her with these thoughts before she’s had a chance to wake up and enjoy her coffee. When we want to tackle deep cleaning a room, she understands that I will flit from thing to thing as she closely focuses on items in a specific drawer to sort out. Over the years, we have come to take these differences for granted. We typically don’t really even think about these things, we just do or accept them.
My wife has gone out of town for a few days with our soon to be married daughter. I woke up in our bed this morning alone and discovered that all the covers were on my side. That struck me as odd at first, since that is not the case when we sleep together. It occurred to me that this was very indicative of our marriage relationship. In a typical night we play tug of war with the blankets. It’s not a conscious thing, but rather just a natural reaction. When we are together our marriage is in balance. If I roll to my side, she naturally just pulls the blanket back to her side and vice-versa. I feel this is really a beautiful thing that has developed over the years. While she is gone, nothing feels right. I don’t have her counterbalancing me.
We have worked with many couples that complain about how their partner behaves in their marriage. When we dig down a bit, we discover the real issue is their partner does not think or act like they do. In a sense, that is ironic because people fall in love with another because of their appealing differences. We’ve heard engaged couples express the notion that “She completes me”, meaning that he appreciates the strengths she brings that he may lack. But something happens in the first years of marriage. Couples go from being intrigued at their differences and grow frustrated that their partner is not more like themselves.
It is important to understand that in a marriage, there is no way to achieve balance with just one person. Nor is there balance if both partners begin to act as one person. I encourage you to continue to appreciate and optimize the differences in your marriage. Understand that when you achieve this over time, your marriage will be in balance. And you won’t end up with all the covers on one side of the bed!