An Optometrist’s Wisdom
This week I had a visit with a new optometrist. Somehow my profession came up, and next thing you know, the doctor revealed that he and his wife had been married for forty years. He proudly divulged that he would be the third consecutive generation to achieve such a long-lasting marriage.
“And you know what the secret is?” he asked me. Without waiting for a reply, he continued, “We agree to disagree. We are two separate people. We don’t try to change one another’s way of being.”
Wow, I thought. This guy and his wife realized something very crucial, something that most couples don’t even realize they are having trouble with.
Now, first things first—I don’t personally believe that the longevity of a relationship is a singularly accurate way to gauge its success.
Plenty of people have short-lived but intensely meaningful, loving, and healthy partnerships. And plenty of people remain in conflict-ridden, sexless, and abusive relationships, or even just boring, misaligned ones, for way too long. So I want to be clear about the fact that I absolutely don’t measure a relationship’s “success” by solely its temporal duration.
That aside, the optometrist was able to articulate a mindset for his marriage that revealed a degree of emotional maturity and what’s called individuation.
Individuation is what psychology calls the process wherein a person attains a sense of individuality and independence from the opinions and emotional states of others. It starts in infancy and ideally is completely achieved by the time someone is a fully fledged adult. To be able to respect a spouse’s autonomy as an individual, and not fall in the trap of trying to control them, requires that this process of individuation be completed relatively successfully.
Most couples I work with kind of got there, but along the way they also picked up a lot of people-pleasing habits, defensiveness, abandonment issues, and relationship anxiety. So when their partner expresses a different opinion, or has a different idea or habit in some way, it is often experienced as criticism, rejection, meanness, illogic. Instead of being able to “agree to disagree,” i.e. stand firm in their own sense of self and confidence in who they are, things usually devolve into arguments and exhausting fights.
Part of the reason the fighting is exhausting is that the couple is usually not trying to solve whatever the issue is. A lot of the time, each person is trying to mold the other to be exactly like themselves, and getting upset when it obviously doesn’t happen. Rather than trying to understand one another, they are often trying to control one another.
In my work with couples, I draw heavily from Imago Therapy. This modality is very useful in understanding why the hell we choose partners who push all our buttons, and often are quite dissimilar to us in personality and other traits. We dive deep into each person’s infancy, and the transition into adulthood, in order to better understand where each partner is coming from.
At the end of the day, a relationship is like a pressure cooker for personal growth, a sort of blinding mirror showing you all the things about yourself that you’ve been able to ignore until now. The fairy-tale idea that a relationship is just about romance and companionship just does not always hold up once the initial rush wears off. To get to truly profound, exciting, and lasting connection, we have to peel back all the crap that gets in the way of you seeing your partner for exactly who they are, and break out of the draining patterns.
Whether a relationship lasts 40 days or 40 years, my goal as a therapist is to create space for couples to take a deep breath, understand the impact of old wounds, and see their partner for who they are—a different, unique individual. We work to eliminate shame and blame from the dynamic, so that you and your partner can feel safe enough to be authentic and honest.
There is no quick fix. With patience, commitment, and non-attachment to the outcome, change and growth are possible.