I've Been Teaching This Marriage Principle Wrong For 14 Years...

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I've been teaching this marriage principle for 14 years.

And I've been getting it wrong.

The principle: your spouse's perception trumps your intention.

It's true. But it's only half the story.

Because perception can be weaponized.

"He scheduled a reminder to send me flowers... if he really loved me, he wouldn't need one."
"He spent $60 on roses and didn't even put them in water."
"He moved my stuff again."

That's not perception. That's negative sentiment override.

And it'll kill your marriage faster than the original hurt ever could.

In this video, I break down what I missed for 14 years... the push-pull dynamic underneath every interaction, why your spouse's good intentions still land as wounds, and how to respond without weaponizing your perception against the person trying to love you.

Grace is needed on both sides.

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Transcript

The Principle We Get Wrong

SPEAKER_00 0:00

I've been teaching this relationship principle for 14 years. And here's what I've gotten wrong. You're not going to believe it. The principle is this. It's one of the things we've taught at Marriage Helper for forever. That your intention is not better than the other person's perception. Or let me say it this way: the other person's perception of what you do and how you treat them actually trumps your intention. So let me explain it this way. My husband loves his things being in a certain order. He loves them being where he left them. He has a whole system to his madness. But sometimes I think that I'm doing the helpful and loving thing by organizing them or putting some things in the drawer, putting it away for him so it's not so cluttered. My intention is good. His perception, though, is you are touching my stuff. You are moving it from where I put it. I feel disrespected because this is mine. Like keep it where it is. Otherwise, when I need these things, I can't find them because it's not where I left them. Have any of you ever had that experience in your marriage? But see, the principle that we have taught at Marriage Helper is well, his perception, this is disrespectful. I feel disrespectful. Please don't touch my stuff, trumps my intention of being helpful. And in a lot of cases, that still stands. That is still true. But here's the other part of it that I totally missed, that I believe needs to be added in to how we think about this. But before I tell you that, I want to explain the actual like foundation and phenomenon of what's going on under this just a little bit more detail. It's called push-pull. You see, we can end up doing things that push the people that we love away, like when I move my husband's stuff. It's a push behavior to him. And his perception of that is accurate. It is valid. Whether or not I agree with it, I have to at least understand that is how he feels. Okay. Then there's the opposite aspect of this, which is pull, the pulls that we do, which are things that evoke positive emotions in our spouse because we do them. Like when I make him his favorite meal, or when I ask him how his day is, or when he does does those things for me. Those are pull behaviors. The more pushes that we have inside of our relationship, the worse our marriage is going to be because we're constantly doing things that are evoking negative emotions in the other people. Whereas the more pull behaviors that we have, the better the relationship is going to be. Because you're doing more of the things that evoke positive emotions. And guess what? The more you do things that evoke positive emotions, the more likely your spouse is to also do things that evoke positive emotions within you. However, here's where it all began to break down. So a couple of years ago, in fact, it may have just been last year, it may have been way more recent than I'm than I'm remembering. My husband bought me this incredibly expensive bouquet of roses. Now, here's a couple things you need to know about me. Number one, I think that spending a lot of money on flowers is one of the worst financial decisions someone can make because they just die. However, I understand that they are beautiful. And I love looking at flowers. It's not that I don't enjoy them. I just wish they cost like a fourth of what they normally do. But what made it even worse was when my husband spent$60 on a bouquet of roses, and he didn't put them in water. He didn't put them in the fridge. He didn't do anything with them. And so by the time I received this beautiful, expensive bouquet of roses, they looked like this. They were half dead. They were wilted. They were literally falling apart. Sixty dollars, and they were already dead. His intention was so good. He wanted to get me something beautiful to show how much he appreciated and loved me. But my perception was: did you not even care enough to put them in water? Did you not even care enough to try and get them to live long enough for me to actually even enjoy them? But that's where I was wrong. Because that is the tension in this dichotomy. We can weaponize saying, well, my perception of what you intended to do is negative. You didn't care enough to actually make the flowers last. You didn't care enough to take it all the way to the end. Or for him, you you were just trying to annoy me. You didn't care enough to not touch my stuff or whatever it is. And we can end up weaponizing that to an extent to where we never see anything good about what our spouse's intentions are. Back, shoot, probably about 10, 12 years ago now, when I was in the middle of getting a master's degree at marriage of marriage and family therapy, I was counseling this couple. And I will never forget because I ended up being so frustrated. I was on a call with them, and the wife she said, I'm just so mad at my husband because he has to schedule reminders in his phone to take me on a date. Or he actually schedules time in his phone, puts it on his calendar to remind himself to send me flowers. If he actually loved me, he would just remember to do it. It would be spontaneous for him. The way that she felt in that moment, the way that she was perceiving things was because my husband doesn't do this the way that I want him to, means that he doesn't love me. And that is where it all goes wrong. Because that's not the real intention behind the concept of push-pull or the concept of perception and intention. We can take it much to the negative, where everything we see about what our spouse tries to do for us is always not good enough. Because the truth of the matter in that situation was her husband did love her. He loved her very much, so much that he didn't want to forget these things. And so he made it intentional to go in and schedule these times to remind himself so that she would feel loved. In that instance, she was wrong. In fact, she was trying to be controlling. She wasn't even trying to see the positive intent behind her husband's actions. So we have to have both. We need to understand that it is important to see the actual intention and heart behind what our spouse is trying to do for us before we say that our perception of what they did trumps it because it doesn't. Both of these things are important. We need to be able to see the good behind what our spouse tried to do and also understand what our perception is in the middle of it. So here's how I ended up doing it. Probably after the second or third time I got a dead bouquet of expensive roses. So, you know what? He had good intentions. His heart was in the right place. It's the thought that counts. That's what we always hear. But I need to tell him. I need to tell him how I feel in a way that is loving and kind and acknowledges the good he was trying to do. Because another psychological principle that we know to be true is that the behavior you reward gets repeated. So I don't want to go and just say, are you an idiot? Like, why would you not think to put these in water? How stupid could you possibly be? That's contempt. That's what we call a four horseman, known from research. And those that's one of the things that actually increases your chance of divorce astronomically if you say things like that to your spouse, especially when they're trying to do good things for you. However, not even however, period. New sentence. You need to also be able to know how to convey how you feel about things in a way that is health-giving and life-giving to your marriage. So here is what I ended up doing. I said, hey babe, I love that you are thinking of me and that you are trying to show how much you love and care for me. And I really feel appreciated. In the future, though, like, remember to put these in water so that they'll live and that I can enjoy them even longer, which is so much better than me saying, How in the world could you be so stupid to spend$60 on a bouquet of roses and I can't even enjoy them because they're dead? That's what people tend to say. When we don't think about our words, when we don't think about our actions and our relationships, we can just tend to get too comfortable. We tend to think only about us and our happiness and how we want our spouse to be, that we forget that we still need to show up our best selves, that we still need to think about how we can turn situations where maybe we wish our spouse had done something different, but how can we be the pull in that situation? How can we still communicate with kindness and clarity so that things continue to get better and not worse? And the way that we can respond and the way that we do end up responding in situations like that end up making all of the difference. So what's the point? The point is grace is needed both ways. But you can't control your spouse. You can only control you and not just your actions, which matter, but your mindset. My son, Arrow, that's his name, he is the greatest joy and he struggles so much with a negative mindset at times. He can be super excited about things, and then not even 10 seconds later, he can find the bad in it. And he can get on these spirals kind of quickly. And I've been noticing it in him. I think partly because I see where he may have gotten it from me. And so it's been quick for me to be able to stop him and say, hey, babe, let's think of the good right now. And it's like at times he gets in such these downward mental spirals when he just tries to find the negative in every situation that it continues to compound. And he finds more and more negative. And so the practice that I have with him every night is what are three good things that happened today? What are three good things? Because that actually begins to rewire his brain to see the positive more than it sees the negative. And guess what? It can rewire yours too. There's a lot of research out there about gratitude and how the more we think about things that we are grateful for, the more likely we are to see more things in our life that we are grateful for as well. So think about this in terms of your marriage. When my marriage was at its worst, it's because I had a laundry list of things that I wanted my husband to change. I wanted him to talk differently to me, to use a different tone, to do things differently, to help more around the house, whatever it was. And guess what? All I could see were the things he was doing wrong. When I changed my perspective, and when I began to really focus on the things that he was doing, the way that he was showing up, I changed. And then he changed. There's this other principle that we know in relationships called negative sentiment override. And it's that the more negatively you think about a person, the more likely you are to see everything they do, even when it's a positive thing, even when they are trying to do something good, like the couple that I was counseling, where he was trying to go out of his way. He knew his natural tendency was to forget. So he wanted to be sure that he was making sure that his wife felt loved and seen and appreciated. But she had a negative sentiment override towards him. Everything he did, she could only see in the negative. And you want to know something? He has some responsibility in that. Yes, because people don't get into negative sentiment override unless there's been some kind of hurt and pain that's happened in the relationship that's led to that negative sentiment override. Got it. That part's on him. But he was trying, and she was not allowing for those things to turn into positive things in her mind because of this override. Because everything he did, she had this veil over her eyes that none of it was ever good enough. She had to do the majority of the changing. She had to actually begin to see the things that he was doing and attribute a positive intention to them, even if she didn't feel that way. Unless data or something else that you have says otherwise, the fact that your husband is scheduling time to send you flowers in his phone, there is not really a negative around that. Most women would die for that to happen. They would love it. So, where is it in your own marriage that you have a negative sentiment override? That everything your spouse does, you can only see it in a negative light because of your own hurt and your own negative mindset that you do have control over. If you are struggling with this, we have an assessment. It's a free assessment. It can help you better identify the actual core issues that are going on in your marriage. You can click the link in the description below and get free access. You'll take it, it's a handful of questions, and you'll get your results immediately emailed to you, as well as some next steps that we offer at Marriage Helper that could be a good fit for you. More than anything, you have to change the way that you're thinking. Grace is needed on both sides. And if you continue to only see the negative things that your spouse does, you'll continue to only see the negative things your spouse does. So choose to see the good.