It Starts With Attraction
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It Starts With Attraction
Accepting Each Other Changed Our Marriage COMPLETELY
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Have you ever felt superior to your partner or viewed them through a critical lens because of their struggles? This episode could reshape your perspective. Today, I'm joined by my wonderful husband, Rob! We begin by unpacking the profound importance of true acceptance in marriages, sharing a poignant story of a friend's failing marriage to illustrate the corrosive effects of seeing a partner as "sick" or lesser. Through this narrative, we emphasize the necessity of meeting your spouse where they are and fostering a relationship built on equality and mutual respect.
Next, we delve into the insidious nature of contempt and how it can dismantle the foundation of any relationship. We'll walk you through real-life scenarios where partners viewed each other as fundamentally flawed, leading to the erosion of respect and emotional distancing. By discussing the impacts of perceived intelligence and educational disparities, we reveal how overcoming these superiority complexes can pave the way for personal growth and healthier future relationships.
Finally, we explore the bridge to full acceptance, drawing on insights from experts like Dr. Joe Beam and Dr. John Gottman. From navigating high-stress environments to rebuilding trust after deceit, we share our personal journey and highlight the gradual yet essential process of achieving mutual acceptance. We'll also touch on the critical role of intimacy in relationships, using the Triangulation of Love model to dissect how intimacy, commitment, and passion interconnect. Through personal anecdotes and practical advice, we offer a roadmap to fostering a strong, enduring marriage. Join us as we share our experiences and insights to help you navigate the complexities of acceptance in your relationships.
Your Host: Kimberly Beam Holmes, Expert in Self-Improvement and Relationships
Kimberly Beam Holmes has applied her master's degree in psychology for over ten years, acting as the CEO of Marriage Helper & CEO and Creator of PIES University, being a wife and mother herself, and researching how attraction affects relationships. Her videos, podcasts, and following reach over 500,000 people a month who are making changes and becoming the best they can be.
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Many years ago I had a friend who was in a dying marriage. Things were not going well. They were separated, they were headed toward divorce.
Speaker 1:This friend was standing for his marriage, but one thing he kept saying over and over and over about his spouse was that she was just a sick person.
Speaker 1:And when he said it he sounded compassionate, almost like he felt sorry for her.
Speaker 1:And when he said she was a sick person he was referring to the fact that she had depression, she had anxiety, she had like a form of celiac, she had many other things, and so she really struggled in life at the time with just kind of getting her act together. She was a good person, but he kept saying heart, as a sick person, nothing was really going to change for the better, because he's fundamentally failing to accept her truly for who she is and he's always going to see himself as the responsible one or the one who has his act together or the one who you know. This person would be lost without me A bit of a savior complex, which he admitted to. And so I guess that brings us here in our episode about acceptance. How do we go about fundamentally making sure that we don't view our spouses in a light that inadvertently causes us to not accept them? How do we change our perception of our spouse in a way that causes us to have that positive acceptance of them, not a fake acceptance.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know, I think it's the opposite side of the coin of contempt. So when one of the things we talk about a lot at Marriage Helper is that when I, if I believe that I am better than you, if I'm superior to you, that's contempt, and I will then treat you in that way, like, oh, rob's just stupid, he can't make decisions for himself, rob's just sick, he can't think clearly for himself, or whatever it might be. That's just the opposite way. What will happen if I think that way of you is? I therefore think I am more high, I think of myself more highly than you, so I am always right, you're the one who's broken and wrong, and that is the opposite of acceptance, whereas acceptance is I can love and meet you and accept you where you are, no matter what you have done or what the situation is, and I don't view myself as better than you.
Speaker 2:It's kind of a way of like coming down to be on your level, although we shouldn't even have to come down, we should just like start and stay at the same level as each other. So contempt ends relationships, especially marriages, because ultimately and the research shows it you don't want to be around someone who's constantly treating you like you're less than, and your health begins to fail. People whose spouse treat them with contempt are so much more likely to have immune system disorders, get sick all the time, all of those things, whereas I don't know that there's been research or data on this, but when you're in a relationship where the other person treats you with love and acceptance, I can only imagine you're going to have a healthier, more vibrant life. When that's the case, so, in terms of, like, going back to your friend, what? What should he have done? What does acceptance actually look like?
Speaker 1:Well, you, you bring up a really good point, that what he was practicing was a form of contempt. What should he have done? Well, there's a million different things he could have or should have done differently. I suppose I want to go back real quick, though. There's a million different things he could have or should have done differently. I suppose I want to go back real quick, though.
Speaker 1:There was a text message thread that, as things were falling apart, he shared this with me, with his partner, and when we go back to him, viewing her as a fundamentally sick person, so he has contempt, as a fundamentally sick person, so he has contempt. I imagine an unspoken thought that one would be forced to kind of have is well, how can my spouse, who's just a sick person, how can they really have a valid logical argument or say anything that's really valid, logical, et cetera, especially when you view them as a very illogical person. Oftentimes, in marriages, men view their wives as very illogical because women do tend to display more emotion. We sometimes wrongly assume that thus they must not have any logic, which isn't true. Everyone, when flooded, everyone when overwhelmed with emotion, is going to display lots of emotion and very little logic in the moment. That doesn't mean they're illogical people. And so in this text message thread, his wife soon to be ex-wife he had said to her I think you should go to X location in the world, you would love it.
Speaker 2:He said to her. He said you should go on a trip.
Speaker 1:Yes, too, I forget what place it was she had had as a, as a barista at Starbucks. She and, by the way, she's a very well-traveled person, she, she's traveled more places than the average bear. And one day she was a barista at Starbucks and a and a customer was like oh yeah, Rome, you would love it If you ever got to go, assuming that she had never been. And she's like I've been, I've been to Rome probably multiple times, and she was just so tired of people. It was kind of like this low-key condescension you would love it if you ever got. And it's like well, you know what, maybe I would, maybe I wouldn't. You don't know if I would or not. Why don't I be the judge of that. And so she pushed back on that, not on the suggestion to go to that place, but rather the tone being taken, and it's an easy mistake to make.
Speaker 1:I think most reasonable people would agree that if I say in a text message to you, kimberly, let's go to Australia, I think you'd love it. Well, you've already been so. Unless I checked, you did love it. Well, you've already been so. Unless I checked, you did love it. So you probably wouldn't take offense to that. But if people are constantly saying to you, oh, you would love it if you did this, that, and you're like, why don't I be the judge of that? At some point you're probably going to start pushing back.
Speaker 2:Well, the state of our marriage currently is in such that I think, that also the state of the relationship that someone would say that matters.
Speaker 1:The position he took was she's crazy. This is her having an episode of craziness. He sent lots of screenshots to me and he wanted me to validate that she's crazy and I didn't do that. I think that was disappointing. That all comes from a position of contempt. How can a person, how can my spouse, who is beneath me, they're sick or they're just not capable, they're incompetent, they're stupid, lazy, you name it how can they say anything worth my attention, worth my time? How can they make a logical point? Many men will take the position of you know, how can my wife raise a logical point?
Speaker 1:I know of another couple and I, I believe they stopped doing this. I say they, him, uh, this individual, he, he has like a doctorate degree, phd, and his wife I don't, I believe she didn't even have an undergraduate degree. Those marriages can work fine as long as the person with the PhD doesn't start thinking of themselves more highly than they ought. And I recall him making statements about her that she's just stupid and things of that nature. He would often do like a mocking voice of her when she would want something and he's like no, that's stupid. I believe they stopped doing that. Hence, they are still married, they're not divorced. That's good.
Speaker 1:But I feel that contempt is perhaps one of the greatest enemies to acceptance, I suppose. In a nutshell so I can't tell you all the things he should have done besides accept her where she was at, I think he would argue he was doing that. He's like oh well, she's sick, but I accept her for her sickness. And it's like, maybe get out of that headspace. And if you do have a spouse who really is, let's just say they're suffering from mental illness to the degree they have to sometimes be institutionalized. Hopefully they're not harming anyone or themselves. But let's just say they check themselves in every now and again to the psych ward because they're really struggling. I still don't think looking at them as a sick person is going to do you any favors. Looking at them as a flawed person, just as we all are, who happens to have a medical condition and you're going to stand by them through it, I think that's probably a better approach. And, by the way, in this marriage she was nowhere near checking herself into a psych ward. She wasn't harming herself or other people.
Speaker 1:And after their divorce which it sucked, it wasn't great they did make some attempts to reconcile but ultimately divorce. They both went their own way and they both actually flourished quite a bit. She became a nurse she. You know it sounds bad to say that she got her life together, but she did get a lot of things together that were previously and it was tough for her and he also went on to have a stellar career and they both now have children from other folks. So perhaps there was mutual contempt there in that relationship. As you said earlier, it makes people sick. It can cause people to have all kinds of adverse reactions that can translate over into their habits or lack of habits in life. That affects them Constantly being around another person who has contempt for them and from the stories I heard from them, there was a lot of mutual contempt, yeah, which really stinks.
Speaker 2:But it could have worked. It could have. It could have. It was close to getting saved at one point, but for it to it meant both of them had to change the way that they saw and viewed each other change the way that they saw and viewed each other. And acceptance I think it's worth explaining and defining what acceptance means and what it looks like. So acceptance, as we know, is the key to love, because if I ultimately don't feel accepted by you in our marriage, then I will never feel like I can truly open up and be intimate or be vulnerable. Be open, be transparent, because you're never going to accept me for how I truly am and therefore it will keep a wall built between us. And that was a big issue the first two years of our marriage, probably. More specifically, and I mean, I can remember when, on both of our sides like lack of acceptance in different ways for each of us. So I remember when we first got married and I wanted to be super controlling of what you ate. Do you remember that?
Speaker 1:because I was at it, it was just it was a lot of better shape, then yeah, and that made me want to dig my heels in.
Speaker 2:You did, you totally did I got fat. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And if you look at the love path, so the listeners, if they have access to the love path, or you could get on Google and type in Joe beams love path and look at that image and notice how acceptance is a bridge, after you get past attraction and you get past all those things, you find yourself at the bridge of acceptance. And it's a bridge. Even those with the intent to cross it may not fully do so or may fall off and have to proverbially swim back to shore and try again. We did Our first two years. We had the workshop on the front end of our marriage and yet we for the first couple of years still failed to accept one another fully, full acceptance.
Speaker 1:And here's the thing If your spouse isn't accepting you, you can't control that. You can control if you accept them. I believe you probably started just predictive nature of our personality. You probably started fully accepting me first and at some point I believe I started following suit. So and if you look and again, if you're pulling up the image of Joe Beam's love path, I'd Google it or whatever in the middle of the podcast, maybe press pause, take a look at that. You look further down the love path and you will see the joint aspirations, but notice it's on the other side of the bridge of acceptance. You can try on paper to have joint aspirations with one another, but if you don't, fully accept one another.
Speaker 1:Those things are going to start falling apart, you'll see it. You know, there there are these hgtv fixer-upper type shows where um, celebrities, couples each person was a celebrity and their owner they get married and they'll do the fixer-upper show together and a couple of years later they're divorced. Well, on paper they had the attraction, probably had some limerence going on. They had their joint aspirations. I'd be willing to bet that if you were to go and map out where things were breaking, I think a lack of full mutual acceptance is probably kind of toward the root of things, which leads to the practicing of horsemen. I would almost venture this is a hypothesis. So, dr Gottman, you're probably not listening, but if you are, don't come hunt me down I would venture to say that lack of acceptance is the root cause of the, the partitioning of horsemen.
Speaker 1:In other words, when you practice horsemen it probably comes out of the heart of a lack of acceptance toward the other person, because if I don't truly want to accept you for who you are, something wrong with her, I'll start to have contempt for that thing, whatever it is. I may decide that, like, how dare she say something to me when she, you know, say something about my McDonald's when she this, that or the other. So then I decide to return fire with criticism and then, when that criticism is not received, well, I start getting defensive and then I just stomp off and stonewall until the next fight. I would say, at the heart of that, at the root of that, the root cause, if the four horsemen, if it was a tree with four big branches of death, the roots would be lack of acceptance. That's my hypothesis.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I would say that's how important it is. And if you're looking at that love path image, you're not going to be able to really get to those aspirations that you share with one another and start working on in life without the full acceptance. You just can't go there. You can try and it's going to fall apart every time. You've got to go back to the bridge of acceptance and you've got to cross that fully.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so how did we do this in our marriage?
Speaker 1:Slowly, didn't happen overnight.
Speaker 2:No, but let's like paint the picture for because I think that it's a lot of information to hear, but hearing it through story can help understand how it all works and how it all plays together. So the first several years of our marriage probably more than just the first two, I mean the first two we were together and it was difficult. So I was an extrovert, you were an introvert. That's one thing that we didn't really accept or learn to love about each other for a while and it drove a deeper wedge. So I, when we lived in Korea so we got married moved to Korea for those who don't know and you were in a pretty high demand job, working 10 to 12 hours a day, flying nights several days a week, flying nights several days a week. So you and you were like new to really being in the army and and being in that kind of position where you were over a platoon and things like that. So you were just under super high stress.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and you'd work 13, 14 days in a row sometimes.
Speaker 2:Well, I couldn't work at first.
Speaker 1:No, I would.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, you would work, yeah, yeah. So you were working a ton and you weren't working at all. And I was working at all.
Speaker 1:So you're the extrovert at home alone for 12 plus hours a day.
Speaker 2:No way to leave, no car.
Speaker 1:You had friends, but I mean, they were often stuck at home without a car too. Without a car too, and I, the introvert, stuck around people all day, 12 plus hours at a time. I come home, well, what do I want to do?
Speaker 2:You want to chill out?
Speaker 1:I don't want to talk, I don't want to think, I don't want to move, I just want to like lay there and you are like a chatterbox with some overcharged batteries in your back, just wanting to go 100 miles an hour and share your life story and do things and leave. Yeah, leave, go do stuff. Yeah, I would say that, you know, and that was hard, those were hard times and that was a rough way to start the marriage.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because we would fight, we would fight about it. I do think, though, that we realized the differences, and we also were like look, I felt that on some level, I could accept you for being an extrovert. I didn't love, I couldn't like, I couldn't. I realized I there was no way I was going to be able to control out of you. That at the end of the day, when I get home, you're going to want to be a chatterbox and do all this, and I probably tried at first.
Speaker 2:You did.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:You didn't try to control the extrovert out of me. You tried to control the rest of the scenario around my life.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Like no, you can't take the car. No, you can't travel into Seoul.
Speaker 1:No, you can't do all of this stuff.
Speaker 2:So I, like you'd put all these rules in place around me, where you might have been like, oh you're an extrovert and that's great and I love you even though you're an extrovert, but I couldn't actually go do anything.
Speaker 1:Well in the flaw. The flaw in being married to a man who's watching Taken probably three or four times is that I of course imagined. Taken that I would be Taken.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I'd be too busy to go rescue you, plus lack of martial arts skills yeah, and I'd be too busy to go rescue you, plus lack of martial arts skills. So so I had this, this thing playing in my mind of if she goes off adventuring like that's it, she'll be taken and I'll just never see her again, kind of thing. The car I clamped down. I was just so stressed out that I wasn't being. I was being very rigid. I could have, I could have loaned the car to you, and I did eventually 14 years later, you tell me.
Speaker 1:Thankfully we got you another one at some point, but then you went back to the United States just a few months later. It kind of stunk that as soon as we did get you a decent solution like and because we we were kind of sick of each other and you were like you know what I'm just going to go do? Grad school States Right, and it was an excuse that we both used to to. You know, we didn't want to separate on paper because that looks bad, but we also were just like oh, marriage is hard.
Speaker 2:Marriage was hard.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I, and it wasn't until late in the army game and I think I made a lot more strides after the army toward full acceptance. And, by the way, I say, you know you need to do full acceptance. Just to be clear, I don't believe that's an overnight process. I don't believe that's a snap decision that you make right now. I choose to fully accept my spouse and then, boom, magically you've fully accepted them. I think you can make a lot of progress toward fully accepting your spouse by deciding right now that that's what you want to do. But it will take time and you have to check yourself and you have to monitor yourself, hold yourself accountable on some level. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So yeah, acceptance is not an instant thing. You can make an instant decision that that is what you would like to do, but don't be fooled into thinking that that suddenly means that you've done it. It took me years, and maybe there's still more, for me to fully accept about you that I will discover as we go Trusting and I think it helps that I trust you to fully accept me as I venture to fully accept you. And if there are things about you that I don't fully accept yet, I look forward to discovering what those are and then changing my attitude toward whatever it is.
Speaker 2:So a big shift that happened for us was so you had been really controlling when we lived in Korea, and so what I ended up naturally doing was making this list, like mental list, of if Rob would just change these things, then everything would be better. And it was like if he would be less controlling, if he would do this, if he would do that, whatever Right. So I, because of how I felt it led to this list, mental list of how I didn't accept you, I didn't accept, I didn't accept the things you were doing, but it in, in how it felt controlled and some of those other things, but it also led to me just fundamentally feeling like and treating you like I didn't accept you. So it ended up being this cycle like a cyclical, cyclical nature, and it wasn't until I began to change. This was when we were in Fort Rucker the second time.
Speaker 1:Now Fort Novosel.
Speaker 2:Which was the worst? The when we were in Fort Rucker. The second time. It was like that's when things really got to their climax, probably in our marriage in the negative way, when it was all just really, yeah, really bad, and that was around the time where I ended up realizing that, and when we moved to fort hood from there, it was like that time which was all kvassos.
Speaker 1:I don't changed the names of them. I don't know these new names.
Speaker 2:Um. And so it was during that like four month period ish, that I began to realize I have to focus on me. I can't control Rob, because it's not going to work. So what can I do to begin to change myself? And I began to work on my pies more. Accept you and that's where what you were talking about earlier. Like you felt like I had probably accepted you first.
Speaker 2:Well, it came out of me accepting myself first, working on myself and realizing maybe I shouldn't just always walk on eggshells around you. Maybe I should just take like, hey, you know what this is, something I want to go do or something, or hey, you shouldn't speak to me that way, or whatever it is. I began to stand up for myself a bit more, which those who know me probably could never imagine me not standing up for myself very much. But I began to change, but in a loving way, and it began to change our marriage. Now there were some other things, I believe, that were really important in that process. We started going to a great church together. You were in a job that was not as stressful as it had been when we were in Alabama, so all of those things led to an alleviation of the outside stressors in the marriage. But also because of that it led to an alleviation of the inside stressors in the marriage and I really feel like Fort Hood was kind of our turning point.
Speaker 1:For the better.
Speaker 2:For the better.
Speaker 1:Can you you can speak this way better than I accepting the person. Can we touch on accepting the person, not the behaviors? So if you could go into you know, alcoholism, serial affairs, things of that nature and how you accept a person without the behaviors, and then after that could we get into the role of and how important self acceptance is. I feel that the more I accept myself, the easier it is to accept others, and the more I accept myself, the more I feel like I'm going to be able to do something.
Speaker 1:I'm not nervous before I speak publicly. I don't really care that much if I make a fool out of myself accidentally. It's not something I strive for, but it's just. You know, if it happens, it happens and there's a self-acceptance. That's there and it makes it easy to be comfortable in my own skin. It makes it easy to look at other people and be like that's a flawed human being just like me. It's like in toy story for the the spoon. Characters like you're trash just like me yeah, um so.
Speaker 1:So if we could talk about accepting the person at behaviors and then the role of self-acceptance?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So it was also at Fort Hood that I had been working on my pies you had lied to me about for several years up until that, even when I had point blank, point blank asked you, and I think this is a perfect example of it. For some reason I handled this really well, like the me a year before. If I, if you had told me that a year before which you wouldn't have told me that a year before because our marriage wasn't good enough, like you, you were hiding it for a reason and I think the state of our marriage was one of those reasons. But if you had told me that a year before, it would likely would have been oh my gosh, what do you mean? How could you? You know just a ton of responding with further character attack, criticism, contempt, all of those things. But because you told me when you did. I don't even know if you remember my initial response, but I simply said I'm so glad you told me and I fully believe that we can work through this.
Speaker 2:So there was a response from me of I accept you, I don't accept what you're doing, it's going to have to stop, we're going to have to make a plan to change it, which we did, but it was. It didn't further ignite shame within you, I don't think, because it was. Hey, I see that that took a lot for you and I love you regardless of what you just said. Um, and it was a very trust building experience as opposed to a trust breaking, whereas if I had taken what you said to me and inflicted shame and all of those things, how could you? You likely would have not shared that with me again in the future and just hidden it and it probably would have continued to fester.
Speaker 2:So we don't have to accept, and so that was our situation. But with things like when your spouse is drinking too much, it doesn't mean you go and get them the beer every time they ask for it. You can, but also you can't necessarily rip the beer out of their hand. So it's this fine tension between hey, I love you, I see you're hurting, but this behavior can't continue for your good, for our good, for our family's good. So let's talk about that. It doesn't mean you don't have hard conversations, but those hard conversations are much easier to have when the other person knows that there's love and acceptance and when those conversations aren't encapsulated in shame and if, if you're, if the listeners are familiar with dr joe's talking about pushes push behaviors.
Speaker 1:Sometimes those conversations can be healthy pushes yeah, necessary pushes a necessary push um and it it may actually further push your spouse away. They may even feel very unaccepted. What do you mean? I can't drink. You don't accept me how I am. I'm an alcoholic. I've been an alcoholic my whole life. How can you not accept me? Right. And it's like you know you as a person. You aren't alcoholic, like your identity. You know your name is Rob or Kimberly. It's not alcoholic. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Your identity is Rob or Kimberly, not alcoholic Right. Alcoholic is a behavior pattern that you exhibit. You know, and it's possible for me to accept Rob or Kimberly or whomever without accepting the habit. One example was a man I think your father gave this example that his wife basically decided that she wanted to go to sex clubs and have lots of partners and that he needed to accept that about her. His, his reaction, I think very appropriately, was nope, you can accept a person without the behavior and you can draw a line to like this behavior is so destructive that we can't remain married If it continues having multiple affairs, multiple affair partners.
Speaker 1:So, yes, I believe that, and do we need to address in any greater depth the accepting of a person without accepting of the behavior?
Speaker 2:Well, I want to use a different example, because sometimes we think of acceptance with these really big like addiction gambling.
Speaker 1:It's not always a huge thing.
Speaker 2:But I shared this at the end of the sabbatical episode that I did, and I was talking about the things I learned and changes in my life and things like that that you realized during the during my time off, was a resentment that you didn't realize you had toward me about how much I traveled, especially for work, and how you had begun to feel like I don't want to put words in your mouth, but the way I interpreted it was you began to feel like I was using and abusing your, your ability to stay home with the kids and just kind of do whatever I wanted to do whenever I wanted to do it, and my family came second to my work and how I was prioritizing things. And so this is a perfect example too. Like you loved and accepted me, but it was something I was doing that wasn't edifying to the family. It was a hard conversation that we had to go through. It was difficult for me to hear because I took it very much on my shoulders, like when you said that to me, it was like my whole world shattered for a week and I was like, oh my gosh, what have I done and how do I rectify this? And so that was an. That's another example of like.
Speaker 2:I couldn't just keep doing that because I was traveling a lot without the family or without you, and so it allowed us to have a conversation of, okay, well, what and it goes back to what you were saying earlier about end goal of aspirations Like we would have never been able to.
Speaker 2:That was something you and I needed to work through in order for us to be able to have some deeper conversations about, like, our core needs, what the future looked like, what we wanted the future for our family to look like, which then led to changes that had to happen, but ultimately also like okay, so if I'm going to travel, we take the family, or you go with me, or like so we just made some changes. But I also could have listened to you say that and just said I would to like I have to, because it's what helps bring money into the family, so you just need to be okay with that. And that's how people get defensive in these situations, which leads to and you could tell, like if you had been that vulnerable, coming to me saying all of that, and then I would just been like nope, you're wrong, I'm going to keep doing what I'm doing, then that continues that divide and you can't be as vulnerable and trust won't build as easily and it affects everything down the road.
Speaker 1:I had forgotten about that.
Speaker 2:It was a pretty monumental part of my.
Speaker 1:You handled it with humility and um and grace and we've worked on a lot of compromises. So now, when you're like, no, really, I have to go to this thing and it's gonna be very difficult to take the family not impossible, I'm a lot more comfortable being like, all right, I'll stay home. I don't love it, but but like we'll, we'll do it.
Speaker 1:Is there a way we can shorten the trip, possibly so that you only do this, this and this, and your willingness to work with me and not be like, ah, screw you. I think that's helped a lot, and sometimes your disposition and attitude if you simply approach an issue with a willingness to try and compromise that'll often make the other person feel respected. So then we go into, before I get to, self-acceptance. For those who are familiar with the, what's the technical name of the commitment, Triangulation of love.
Speaker 1:The triangulation of love. So if you are a listener and you're able to like Google stuff, go into Google, type in the triangulation of love, hit images and it should be a triangle. It has intimacy at the top, commitment in the lower right and passion in the lower left, and what I really want to talk about here more than anything is intimacy. So on a one to nine scale, nine would be the top of the triangle, one would be the bottom. When you measure a couple, you don't aggregate their results. Each individual person keeps their results and it is absolutely possible, if you're following what I'm saying, if you're looking at the picture or if you're just otherwise, not looking at a picture but trying to visualize think of a line that intimacy is a straight up and down line. Higher is better, lower is not better. Lower is worse.
Speaker 1:It's bad. It's altogether possible to have one person in a couple, in a marriage, in a relationship, even a friendship, or a parental to child relationship, have one person in a couple, in a marriage, in a relationship, even a friendship, or a parental to child relationship, where one person has a very high intimacy score, which means that they feel that they can bear their soul, they can expose themselves, they can be their true self around this other person. To this other person, they can tell them anything that that person's going to have a very high intimacy score because they feel fully accepted and then the other person is like a two or a three they cannot, or at least they don't feel that they can, bear their soul. This can often relate back to in many cases you'll find the man, not always. It's certainly possible that this is flip-flop the woman would be high in intimacy, the man would be low. I feel that if you were to try and aggregate a lot of these and do some metadata analysis, you'd probably find the majority of the cases where there's a high discrepancy in intimacy between a man and a woman, it's typically probably going to be the man, much higher than the woman in most cases, and a lot of times this can relate back to men.
Speaker 1:We can be very opinionated about what's good, what's bad, what brands, what sports teams, what cars are good, and to us it does not compute that somebody else can have a different opinion, and, especially early in marriages and relationships, we can then criticize the other person for having a different opinion. Something as simple as a preference for Coke or Pepsi, a preference between the sports team or that sports team, pepsi, a preference between the sports team or that sports team. Uh, if you live down in alabama and you have a couple where you know one person roots for auburn, the other roots for bama like they might need to just start their fighting words yeah, they might need to start their marital therapy like just from the get-go, and so you're often left.
Speaker 1:You also be. You can also have a situation where early in the marriage the first year or two it is the case where the man is not accepting and the woman may never recover from that. Even if he matures later on and becomes more accepting, she may not feel it or, because of all the rejection or criticism she faced in the first year or two of marriage, she still may not want to bear her soul Years later, decade later, because she's like nope, I remember 10 years ago when I said I like Pepsi and I got an earful for an hour over it, and I remember I would do stuff like this to you, maybe not over drink preferences, but just random crap. You know, if you screwed something up just a little bit, I'd go on for like an hour and you would often point out like chill, I already said I'm sorry, I can't go back in time. And I would often be like oh, yeah, it's true, I'd be like all right, well, I want to rant for 30 more minutes, but I guess I'll not.
Speaker 1:So it's important when you are thinking of intimacy in terms of can I bare my soul to this other person, can I tell them anything about me and they accept me? Make sure that's a two-way street. And if your spouse, if you suspect that they may not be bearing themselves to you, I actually think you could probably go to them gently in conversation and say hey, you know what Am I blocking intimacy? You are you scared to bury yourself to me? Are you scared to tell me about yourself and and whatever I've done to cause you to to feel like you can't do that? I'm truly sorry.
Speaker 1:I want you to know that I want to accept you. I want to accept all of you. To accept you, I want to accept all of you just the way you are. Yeah, and I believe that conversation probably go a long way.
Speaker 2:For sure, it'd be a wise thing to do.
Speaker 1:And it helps to have self-acceptance.
Speaker 2:Yeah, for sure it. And the self-acceptance when we are, when we can look at ourselves, and instead, you know, as women, a lot of times we'll look at ourselves and say, oh, if only this area of my body were skinnier or this area were bigger, instead of just looking at ourselves and loving and accepting our body for how it is as an example.
Speaker 1:For men, it's our calves.
Speaker 2:It's your calves and biceps.
Speaker 1:Our calves are not big enough.
Speaker 2:Upper body strength according to the body esteem, the body esteem scale. But yes, the more likely we are to see things within ourselves, that should change. That's more likely to translate into how we see other people, and I noticed this a lot with our daughter. So I've had to be really mindful, as she gets older, of noticing how I talk about myself, because she picks up on it and she'll. I don't want her to think, oh, maybe I should, because she's heard me talk before about like needing, like oh, maybe I should, because she's heard me talk before about like needing, like oh, I want to be on a diet or whatever. And then she started using those words. This was probably about a year ago and I was like, no, you don't. But it makes you have to look inward and say how am I showing those people around me that I can love and value and cherish myself? And that also helps us love and value and cherish others. Well, as we wrap up the episode, what are your key three takeaways from today's episode?
Speaker 1:I think we touched on it last and we touched on it briefly, but self-acceptance is kind of a cornerstone. Acceptance is a two-way street but you can only control how much you accept the other person and that if you want to successfully move to the to the later stages of the love path, toward joint aspirations and things, mutual acceptance is key to doing that.
Speaker 2:Absolutely Love it. Thanks for joining.
Speaker 1:Thank you for having me.
Speaker 2:Until next time, until next week, stay strong.
Speaker 1:I'll try.
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