Intentional Living: Chapter 3, The Unintentional Life
The Unintentional Life
“An unintentional life accepts everything and does nothing.”
John Maxwell[i]
For much of my married life, I drifted in the relationship, letting my wife make almost all the decisions. “Happy wife, happy life” was my maxim, and I thought I would get that happy life by letting her get what she wanted. I could not have been more wrong. She wanted an active partner sharing the driver’s seat, but I was like a passive trailer that she had to tow along behind her. I left her to come up with ideas, and I either dragged along reluctantly, or agreed because it was easier than trying to come up with something myself.
Nature or Nurture?
Lady Gaga’s song “Born This Way” speaks strongly to the undeniable part that nature plays in our development, but we are also heavily impacted by the family we grew up in.
My family was confrontation-averse, with the result that I never learned how to cope with disagreements which are inevitable in any marriage. My siblings and I were taught not to argue with each other and not to upset my mother.
I have a vivid memory from when I was ten years old, when I had been instructed to use our push mower to cut the grass. Like many ten-year-old boys, I found other things to do and got distracted from the chore. When my mother discovered that I hadn’t done was had been asked of me, she went outside and started mowing the lawns herself while tears of frustration ran down her face. I followed her outside and was humiliated and ashamed as I watched her do the chore I had been asked to do. Punishing me in any other way would have been preferable to the humiliation I felt on that day.
I learned to be outwardly compliant and cooperative which became a problem in my marriage because I was following my wife’s lead, not participating with her.
My wife’s upbringing differed significantly from mine, shaping her distinct personality. She is a truth-teller from a family that spoke their thoughts openly. She learned that she needed to be strong, to speak up, and speak out if she was going to survive in her family environment. She was decisive, leaving home at the age of fifteen to avoid the dysfunction of her extended family.
In our marriage, our different upbringings and learned behaviors clashed, impacting many normal interactions which should have been simple and straight-forward. On those occasions, I would capitulate, shut down, give in, and give up, but not without some back-handed passive-aggressive responses, to let my wife know that I didn’t really agree with her. I resisted her purchases, when she wanted to buy me a jacket, a lounge seat, even one brand of dish soap over another. I resisted her ideas for holidays, when all she wanted to do was give us great memories. I resisted, because I wanted more control but didn’t know how to ask for it and didn’t know how to discuss our differing opinions in a mature, adult way. I was intimidated by her strength of character and forthright personality.
I didn’t have a happy wife or a happy life. Something was seriously wrong, and I blamed her for it, never thinking that I was the primary cause of my unhappiness and by extension, the unhappiness we were both experiencing in our marriage.
Not surprisingly, my unhappy wife, who had an equally unhappy life, was extremely frustrated with my passivity. She didn’t know the cause and couldn’t find a cure. She loved me, but didn’t like me, and I felt the same about her. We were married on paper, but not in practice. Fortunately, my wife didn’t give up searching for an answer, and eventually found it.
I was exhibiting classic ASD-1 characteristics. My inability to connect to her emotionally was partly due to my reduced emotional neural network. In simple terms, I don’t have the emotional wiring to grasp the significance of her emotional needs in the relationship. I placed a higher value on my logical thinking than on my need to meet her halfway, and I failed to accept that I was out of my depth emotionally and that I needed to let her help me grow in this area.
My wife’s new understanding about my reduced emotional neural networks was her salvation, because from her perspective, the only other possibility was that I was a self-centered, belligerent narcissist. It gave her a framework to explain my behavior, which she then encouraged me to explore.
At first, I resented the label and didn’t want to accept what I saw as a cognitive deficiency because it hurt my pride. I heard the word ‘deficiency’ and in my mind translated it as ‘defective’, but as I started to look back over my life, I could see other events where I had missed emotional cues, so perhaps there was something in it after all. I realized that my wiring wasn’t a defect because it gave me many other strengths that enabled me to succeed in other areas of my life. In a sense, it was as if I was short-sighted and needed glasses to see well in the long distance. I wasn’t defective, I simply needed tools to help me succeed in the areas where I was not as proficient.
I believe it was an intervention by God that captured my attention because I was so convinced that I was not the problem. Yes, I know it takes two to tango, and that one person isn’t the cause of all the problems, but my unwillingness to look at my own issues, recognize them for what they were, and work to resolve them was the driving force behind the ever-increasing distance between us. I realized that the only person I can change is me.
It became clear that being unintentional in my relationship is tantamount to kissing it goodbye. It is abdication of responsibility which easily becomes wilful neglect. I always found a reason for not putting in more effort, and the reason always pointed at my wife, but as the adage says, when you point at someone, there are three fingers pointing back at you. This was exactly what I was doing in my marriage.
As I look back over my life, including before I was married, I am struck by my pride and arrogance. I believed I was better than, smarter than, more aware, and more together than others around me and to top it off, I believed I came from the best possible family. We didn’t have flaws like other families. I didn’t think it in a prideful way, to me it was self-evident. I hate to think about how that projected into my friendships over the years, but I suspect that I came across as a condescending know-it-all.
Nature may have given me an introverted personality and ASD-1 neural wiring, but nurture had shaped me into someone who could not cope with conflict, was unaware of my own short-comings, and resisted facing reality.
My lack of self-awareness left me adrift, with no clear direction. I could not conceive of a plan that would enable me to reach the elusive goal of a fulfilled marriage. It might as well have been a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. This led to a sense of hopelessness, and for many years, I felt like a failure, convinced that my only competence lay in my professional work.
In the next chapter, I will look at the various ways that my drifting impacted our relationship.
[i]
John C. Maxwell is an American author, speaker, and pastor who has written many books, whose primary focus is on leadership. https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/44461012-intentional-living-choosing-a-life-that-matters
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