This is a portion from my book, The Emotionally Secure Couple. It deals with the idea of building relational equity. While the book was written for couples, this principle applies to all relationships we find ourselves in.
I was relating a story to someone about how my wife and I had not had an absolute tear your hair out fight. The type of fight where we were lobbing emotional bombs at each other in over a year. Then we did. My wife hadn’t been sleeping much, and I was under a lot of stress. We had a true blue fight. There was no use of the techniques we teach in our counseling. It was simple marriage warfare.
My friend said, “Now you gotta pay.” I replied, “No, not really. We both apologized and owned our own mistakes. It’s over now.” He didn’t believe me. I assured him that I wasn’t lying to him. It truly was over. We would probably joke about it for a while, but the actual fighting part was over—no more emotional damage.
The obvious question is, how does a couple get there? I think everyone can get there. They need to work on their relational equity. You do that by actually living by your vows. You remember those? Those pesky promises where you promised to love your spouse more than anyone else, including yourself?
What happens when we live that way? We build relational equity. When your spouse knows that you are upset or hurt and you purposely chose loving words instead of hurtful, you build relational equity. When your spouse knows that you purposefully work at your communication skills, you build relational equity. There is a myriad of ways to build equity. We will not touch on all of them in this book, but any time you put your spouse and the health of your relationship ahead of your desires, you build equity. It’s like depositing into a bank.
In the same way, every time you throw a temper tantrum or act childish, you chip away at your relational equity. You make a withdraw. When you try to manipulate your spouse into doing what you want them to do either through punishment (I’m not talking to him/her) or reward (Jim, just knows that if he wants sex, he better do what I want him to do) we are chipping away at the well of relational equity our spouse has stored up for us.
We also add to our equity. Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? I’m suggesting that telling your wife you love her will increase your love for her. I’m suggesting that if you don’t want to have sex with your husband, you should because that will increase your desire to have sex with him.
Relational equity occurs when we build into the relationship.
Stop Manipulating
I’m suggesting you should stop attempting to manipulate your spouse into doing what you want them to do. I assume that you can never manipulate someone into doing something and have a long-term healthy relationship with them. Seriously think about the people you know and have known over the years. How many of them had manipulation be a part of the story, and it went well? How many of them ended in divorce. One of the sad truths of being a counselor focusing on relationships is that people are often resistant to changing their behavior to change the relationship. Every time you manipulate, even if you get what you wanted, you lose relational equity. If your relational equity hits zero, you destroy emotional security. It’s that simple.
Our view of our relationship is not made in a day. Our spouse’s picture of the painting that is our relationship is not made in a day. It’s a compilation of a thousand brush strokes. Those brush strokes either build or takedown relational equity. One of the areas where we make substantial deposits or withdrawals is in the arena of conflict with our spouse. Think about how many hurtful things typically get said in a fight. Consider how many sentences are never given the opportunity to be finished before the speaker is cut off and is told why the thought they were not able to finish is wrong and stupid. This is the pattern we must change. We must change it in how we fight, how we communicate when we’re not angry and how we do life together.
If you’re a yeller and purposely don’t yell, your spouse can’t help but notice. If you are a sarcasmer (yes, I made that word up) and you refrain from using sarcasm, your partner will take notice, and it will register. If you are a shutdown withdrawer and purposely engage well, I think you get the idea.
It will be difficult, hard, and often not clear. Life is messy. Love is messy. When we enter into a marriage relationship, we are trying to build both. It’s bound to be incredibly messy but also worth it. The problem is that usually, we expect our spouse to notice and respond immediately. We expect the equity to build on one shot. So the yeller doesn’t yell, and his spouse still attacks. That’s it! Back to yelling for him.
Imagine buying a house and then being angry because the equity didn’t go up significantly the next day. That would be ridiculous, and most people would laugh at a person who reacted that way. But that is exactly what we do when we get upset because our spouses “didn’t notice that we’ve changed after one or two disagreements.
We’ll finish this series next month.
Joe Martino is a counselor with Joe Martino Counseling Network. He has locations in Lowell, Grand Rapids, Greenville, and Grandville. For more information about Joe and his business, check their website or Facebook page. He and the rest of the counselors and staff are eager to help those in need.
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