She’s waiting for me to change. I’m trying to figure out how.
Jazmin writes: I never learned how to communicate with a partner. That just wasn’t a reality in my life growing up. I’m on my third relationship, which also happens to be my 2nd same sex marriage. It’s by far the healthiest relationship I’ve ever had in my life! I freaking love this girl and her intelligence. She offers so much insight when it comes to communication, emotions, and points of view. We’re coming up on 6 years together. We are at a point where all she feels is resentment. And she isn’t really interested in doing any more work without me putting in all the effort I didn’t at the beginning of the relationship. I’m struggling bad—trying to figure out what to do for this relationship as she continues to wait on me to figure out how I’m going to do it. How do I begin to start fixing this thing that we are in?
Dear Jazmin,
First off—can I just say congratulations on being in the healthiest relationship of your life with a girl you clearly adore? That is no small thing when you grew up without learning the essential skills for healthy relationships, including how to communicate with your partner. And it’s absolutely something to celebrate, even while you are facing the reality that your wife has reached a point where she’s burned out from putting in all the effort to keep the relationship going.
Your situation is one that many people are familiar with. You fall in love, head over heels, make a commitment to each other—even get married—and then you discover midway into the relationship that you don’t actually know how to do a healthy relationship because you never learned. You didn’t have any role models, except for those who showed you what not to do.
But when we don’t know what to do instead, it’s almost inevitable that we either slip into the unhealthy relationship dynamics we witnessed as a child. Or, we try to do the exact opposite of what we learned, which actually ends up also being unhealthy.
As long as your girl was putting in all the effort to keep the relationship going in the right direction, you were probably propelled forward through the power of all the emotional labor she was putting in. But when one partner is trying to pull the other along the path toward having a healthy relationship, resentment and frustration are a foregone conclusion.
It doesn’t feel good to be doing all the work on the relationship. And it also doesn’t feel good when it seems like your partner is trying to make you change. It’s natural at that point to resist, to dig in your heels a bit, and also to start to think that it’s your partner’s responsibility to get you to change and if you’re not changing, it’s on them to work harder or better to get you to change.
That’s not a fun dynamic for either person. And so, thankfully, your wife gave up on this and now she’s waiting to see what you do in response.
It can come as quite a shock when your spouse suddenly stops overfunctioning in the relationship and instead pulls away after years of unequal emotional labor. For you, this shock is offering you the much needed wake-up call about what it really takes to build a sustainable intimate relationship.
Despite all the fairy tale messages to the contrary: on its own, love is not enough.
Love is an essential quality—and, based on your letter, it sounds like you’ve got an abundance of love for this intelligent woman you’ve committed yourself to. And that’s great, because that’s going to serve as your motivation for doing the hard work of addressing your relational trauma from childhood (meaning, at the very least, the absence of healthy communication when you were growing up) and developing the relationship skills you missed out on learning.
If you’re like many people, hearing from your partner that she is done trying to fix the relationship created immediate panic. Suddenly, finding answers to the question of how to fix a relationship can feel like an emergency.
At the same time, the reality is that there are no quick fixes for longstanding problems in a marriage.
When one partner has been putting in the work and carrying far more than their share of the emotional labor, there are no big gestures or promises that are going to solve this. What your wife is waiting for isn’t a promise to change (which she probably won’t believe at this point).
She’s waiting to see whether you can make ongoing, sustained efforts to address your contributions to the issues in your relationship. In other words, as she withdraws from the role of the overfunctioning partner, she’s waiting to see if you can step out of the role of the underfunctioning partner and really show up consistently and grow into an equal partner who shares the responsibility for creating the kind of marriage that both of you want.
Given that you grew up without the chance to learn relationship communication skills, it makes sense that you may have coped with this lack by just trying to avoid wading into relationship waters where you felt inadequately prepared.
Emotional avoidance is really common for those who grew up in unpredictable, scary, or isolating home situations. Keeping your head down and hoping that things will blow over quickly in your relationship may have felt like the best available strategy.
Even though you didn’t intend to emotionally abandon your wife in your marriage, you probably did. And alongside her resentment, she might also be experiencing loneliness and even grief about how things have gone so differently than she’d hoped.
So let’s break this down so you can figure out how to fix your relationship when it seems like it’s on the verge of breaking.
The first step is identifying what the problems are. My guess is that your wife has been trying to talk to you about these problems for a long time, so hopefully you can do this first step pretty easily.
Let’s say that, based on the feedback you’ve gotten from your wife, you recognize that she’s not happy about your tendency to shut down when she tries to talk to you about something important. She’s also noted that you avoid coming back to important conversations that were left unfinished. And you have a tendency to lash out if she tries to push you to talk when you don’t want to.
She may have also asked you to initiate difficult conversations to address your concerns in the relationship, instead of hijacking conversations she initiates about her concerns. Or maybe you know that your tendency to be defensive is a problem in your relationship. Or your tendency to turn on yourself in self-hatred every time she gets upset or feels hurt, so that she ends up comforting you instead of the other way around. Or maybe it’s that you never talk about your feelings.
Whatever the specific issues are, once you’ve identified them, you can start the process of self-reflecting and figuring out what’s contributing to these issues.
It can be really helpful to have a notebook or a document where you can write down your answers to these questions and focus on getting more clarity as you think through the questions.
So, if your wife has given you feedback about what you do in your interactions with her that is not working for her, here are some questions you can ask yourself:
Why do I do this?
When did I first start doing this?
Could this be a way of protecting myself? If so, what am I trying to protect myself from?
What’s getting in the way of me doing something differently?
Note that these are questions to ask with curiosity. It’s not an opening to berate or criticize yourself. You’re trying to get information here, and because your relationship patterns are likely the result of painful past experiences in relationships—either from childhood or previous romantic relationships—you deserve to be treated with compassion and kindness as you engage in this process of self-reflection.
So, what does this look like in practice?
Let’s imagine that your wife has expressed that she is tired of trying to talk to you about issues because you get defensive any time she brings up something that’s bothering her. You interrupt, interpret everything she says as an attack, and then divert the conversation by introducing your own complaint about her.
Why do I do this? When you ask yourself this question, you might recognize that when your wife talks to you about something she’s unhappy with in your relationship, it sounds like she’s attacking you. And so, you defend yourself and then you go on the offensive to get her to back off.
When did I first start doing this? As you think about when this first started for you, you realize that this has been your reaction to previous partners as well. And you can even remember doing this with your best friend in high school.
Could this be a way of protecting myself? What am I trying to protect myself from? When you consider whether this reaction might be a way of protecting yourself, you think about being a kid and how you couldn’t show any sensitive feelings or your family would start making fun of you. And you realize that having a big, angry response was the only way to get your family to back off.
What’s getting in the way of me doing something differently? When you ask yourself what might be getting in the way of doing things differently with your wife, you realize that you have no idea how people sit calmly and listen to a partner express dissatisfaction or unhappiness. And you wonder if maybe that’s something you can work on, because you realize that your wife seems to have the ability to listen to feedback without immediately getting reactive and hostile.
While problems in a marriage are related to what you are doing, other times, it’s about what you aren’t doing.
If your wife has given you feedback about things you don’t do that are causing problems in your relationship, here are some questions that can help you get deeper insight:
Why don’t I do this thing my partner wants from me?
Does this thing feel scary? Or just hard?
Why is it scary or hard?
Do I want to do this thing? If so, what do I do to make it happen?
So, let’s imagine that your wife has expressed frustration about the things you don’t do. Let’s say that you know that your wife is frustrated because you never talk about your feelings, so she doesn’t know what’s going on inside you, and it’s hard for her to feel connected to you. Let’s go through the questions and see how they can help you gain more self-insight.
Why don’t I do this thing my partner wants from me? When you ask, “Why don’t I share my feelings?” you might at first draw a blank. But then you realize that you are rarely even aware of how you’re feeling, except for when you feel angry.
Does this thing feel scary? Or just hard? When you ask yourself, “Does talking about my feelings feel scary … or just hard?” you realize that it’s both. It’s hard to know what you are feeling, but you also can’t imagine sharing that you’re feeling sad, or disappointed, or afraid.
Why is it scary or hard? When you ask yourself this question, you realize that it’s hard because you don’t have any practice doing this. And it’s scary because it feels too exposed to share these kinds of feelings, like you’re opening yourself up to being hurt if you were vulnerable like this. You might realize that you learned early on in childhood to keep your feelings to yourself, to go to your room if you felt sad or hurt, rather than try to talk to a parent about it.
Do I want to do this thing? If so, what do I do to make it happen? This is such an important question because in order for change to be sustainable within a relationship, we have to find our own inner motivation for making changes. It can’t simply be because our partner wants us to change.
Asking yourself if you actually want to start talking about your feelings is going to require some radical honesty on your part. Once you’re clear that you genuinely want to change—for yourself, not just because your wife wants you to—then you can focus on figuring out what relationship skills you need to develop in order to change your patterns and address issues in your relationship.
This is an important and courageous step that’s going to require you to get outside your familiar comfort zone. Your courage and commitment to venturing into the unknown deserve to be celebrated.
But I also want you to be prepared that your wife may initially be less enthusiastic to see you changing than you might imagine.
While you might imagine she’d be happy that you’re finally doing what she’s been requesting for a long time, it’s essential to remember that she’s built up a lot of resentment and frustration. That’s why it’s not uncommon for over-functioning partners to react with anger when their partner finally starts making changes.
She may wonder why it took so long for you to take her concerns to heart. Watching you change shows her that you have been capable of change all along. If she’s like many individuals I’ve worked with over the years, her reaction might be something like: “Oh, so you can change. You just chose not to until now. It didn’t matter to you how much I was suffering or the toll this was taking on me. All you actually care about is not losing this relationship.”
I tell you this so that you won’t be discouraged from working on yourself and building new relationship skills if you’re met with this kind of surprising response. Investing in your personal growth is valuable no matter what.
Focusing on your own reasons for growing and changing will help you not look to your partner for positive feedback and appreciation of the efforts you’re making. If she gives that positive feedback, great. If she doesn’t, it might be because she’s too resentful and burned out by how things have been in the past to have anything left in her tank right now. Or she’s waiting to see whether this is real and you are actually changing, rather than reacting out of a temporary state of panic.
Remember that you don’t have to get this right every time. Learning new relationship skills is an ongoing process that inevitably involves a lot of mistakes. But you can always try again. You can come back and say, “I’m sorry for that. Here’s what I wish I would have done instead.”
And on that note, Jazmin, I am wishing you the self-compassion and kindness you’ll need on this journey as you ask yourself the hard questions and start learning new ways to show up in your relationship with honesty and openness.
~ Angela
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DISCLAIMER: this content is intended for informational purposes only and does not constitute professional medical or psychological advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other licensed health care provider with any questions or concerns you may have regarding a medical condition.
about angela Amias, LCSW
Angela Amias, LCSW is a relationship therapist and nationally-recognized expert on trauma and relationships. She’s the co-founder of Alchemy of Love, which provides trauma-informed relationship programs and resources. She’s also the founder of the Institute for Trauma Informed Relationships, which provides training and education to therapists and coaches who want to help their clients heal past wounds and create more fulfilling relationships.
As an expert on trauma and relationships, Angela has been featured in numerous publications, including Today, Oprah, Cosmopolitan, The Independent, Well + Good, Inc., Forbes, Business Insider, Salon, MSN, Women’s Health and the Toronto Sun.
