“What is something you think your spouse doesn’t get about your experience in the marriage- something you wish he or she understood about what’s going on with you?”
This was one of the questions developed by researchers at the University of Minnesota who created a protocol for counseling couples who were on the brink of divorce. The protocol is known as “discernment counseling” and helps couples gain insight into their marriage relationship and whether divorce is really their best option. It is a powerful question and often gets to the very heart of what neither spouse ever really knew about the other.
While the following example is hypothetical, it is one type of scenario I would often see when working with couples contemplating divorce. In this example imagine both spouses are highly creative, artistic people in their respective fields. They had been married for nearly 20 years when the husband finally decides to separate from his wife.
During one of our discussions alone, I ask the husband this question about what his wife didn’t understand about his experience in the marriage. Without hesitating, the husband describes that shortly after the two were married he had just landed his dream job as a musician in St. Louis. However, his wife wanted to relocate to Boston so she could pursue an advanced performing arts degree from a prestigious university. The husband said he felt compelled to give up his work in St. Louis so his wife could pursue her education and advance her own career. For years, the husband felt that he had missed out on a golden opportunity that would have made him even more successful than he already was. The band he had chosen to leave behind in St. Louis went on to be very successful. He felt his wife had never appreciated how much of a sacrifice he had made for her and these feelings of resentment had festered for years.
Later, during a private session with the wife, I would ask her the same question. She would tell me how she had always felt inferior to her husband’s artistic and creative talents. She had worked so hard to become a performing artist in her own right but never seemed to be fully accepted by her husband as his artistic equal. Her primary reason for pursuing her educational opportunity was to finally convince her husband of her worth. She could never understand why her success in her own work had never seemed to merit the approval she had longed for from her husband.
Neither of the two had ever expressed to the other how they had truly felt about their experience in the marriage and had assumed the sacrifices they had made years earlier had been exactly what the other had wanted from them. Instead, they both chose to suffer in silence. This tragic misunderstanding and the corrosive feelings that built up over time had finally reached a point where neither felt the marriage could survive. Both spouses had believed the other’s behavior all those years earlier were the root cause for their current unhappiness but had never expressed their feelings to the other.
I wonder what might have happened if this couple had asked one another this question when the issue had first come up and before moving? Could some accommodations have been reached if each had known the other’s deepest yearnings for their lives together? What if each spouse had made it clear what they needed to thrive while also discovering what their spouse needed as well?
I wonder why we wait for the marriage to come to an end before we ever have that kind of honesty with our spouse? Why aren’t we asking each other that question in our marriages today? How might our understanding of our spouse’s deepest desires make all the difference? What other choices could we make in our marriage with that information?
What if both you and your spouse felt truly empowered to ask such a question of one another and really hear what the other is saying to you? It’s a simple question but the sooner you have the courage to ask it just might make all the difference in your marriage.
~Author - Chris Klippen