Collaboration is when you work together, sometimes in separate roles, to create a common goal or outcome. This is what most of us want to do in our marriages but too often competitiveness and costly accommodations work against us. Whereas, when we can collaborate and work together we can build a life that benefits both of us.
https://jamelynstephan.com
https://jamelynstephan.com/meet-with-me/
https://www.instagram.com/jamelyn_stephan_coaching/
jamelyn@jamelynstpehan.com
Collaboration is when you work together, sometimes in separate roles, to create a common goal or outcome. This is what most of us want to do in our marriages but too often competitiveness and costly accommodations work against us. Whereas, when we can collaborate and work together we can build a life that benefits both of us.
https://jamelynstephan.com
https://jamelynstephan.com/meet-with-me/
https://www.instagram.com/jamelyn_stephan_coaching/
jamelyn@jamelynstpehan.com
I'm jamielynn Stephan. And this is episode number 106. Collaborating in your marriage. Welcome to want to want it a podcast for women of the church of Jesus Christ of latter day saints who are ready to ignite not only their sexual desire, but all of their desires to create a more fulfilling life and marriage. I'm jamielynn Stephan. I'm a certified life coach, a wife, and a mother of seven children. I'm excited to share my personal journey to desire with you and teach you how to desire more as well hello, Everybody happy Tuesday. I listened to the revival podcast sometimes with David Butler and Stephan taker. And they always talk about how in Hebrew tradition, Tuesday is a day for double blessings. So if you're listening to this on Tuesday, it's a day of double blessings and I hope all those blessings come to you. In Jewish tradition, because Tuesday is a day of double blessings and also a day kind of about things being complete. And there's a whole backstory to that, that I'm not going to get into here. Uh, people of the Jewish faith are often married on Tuesdays. And so today, I want to talk about marriage, but more particularly learning how to collaborate in your marriage. And instead of being competitive, Or even worse, making a lot of costly accommodations or compromises that actually undermine your marriage. And I'm going to tell you what I mean, as we get going here. So often in marriage, we have things we agree on pretty readily and some things we just don't. And sometimes when we don't agree, we can kind of just set those differences aside or ignore them or whatever. And it can be something that you just choose to do differently. Right. So when my oldest girls were younger, I would put them to bed between eight and eight 30 when I was home alone at night, because I wanted happy children the next day. But I also want to time alone. My littlest kids were all in bed and I just needed them to go to bed. So I could be by myself. But when my husband would be home with them alone, he would put them to bed when he heard me at the door. So I'm coming home 10 30, 11 o'clock at night from being out with friends or going to book club. And I hear my girls racing down the stairs to their bedroom. And this caused some friction because I had to deal with the cranky kids the next day. But the reality was I couldn't control him. I did bedtime my way when he was gone and he did it his way. When I was gone and we both kind of just tried to ignore the sideways glances that we got from each other, especially that he got from me about not doing it my way. But what about those things in your marriage? That can't be both ways. Like you can't have half a baby or buy half a hot tub. You can't move halfway to a new city, right? You can't buy half a house. So for many of us in our immaturity, and honestly I could fill this podcast with my own experiences, but I'm not going to, but in our immaturity, we often step into a more competitive status with one another over these kinds of issues that can't go both ways. Can't just kind of, you do your way. I'll do mine and we start to fight to win. And winning becomes the most important thing. Until frustrations get so high. And then somebody just kind of like gives up, but not in a really healthy way. Right. It's more of just, you know what fine. Have it your way type of way. And because emotions are high, it feels like you've lost and they've won. And it cracks me up because one of the stories that I have about my husband is that he always gets his way. And he has the exact same story about me. And how is that possible? Well, obviously he's wrong. But in all seriousness it's because too often in our marriage, in the past, We would concede or give up the fight to the other person with this attitude of, you know, what. You won and I've lost again. And it just proves that you always get your way in and that's kind of how we've done things. Abba has a song called the winner, takes it all and I would play it for you. I certainly wouldn't try and sing it for you, but we're not going to do that today. So one of the lines just says the winner takes it, all the losers standing small, and that's how it can feel when things don't go our way. And we feel like the other person always gets their way. Now I look back on my own 26 years of marriage. And I can see that in some ways we have been naturally collaborative. Like we have done things just kind of naturally in a collaborative way, but in other ways we really haven't. You know, in school, we were put in groups a lot for group projects, which I didn't love, but it was kind of this idea of like, Hey, Let's give you opportunities to learn how to work with people and learn how to collaborate, or if you've been on a mission, you know, you've gone out for two years and you've had to live with random people for two years, or maybe you had roommates in college, right. We've had to all learn how to live with someone else. And I don't want to diminish the fact that those were good opportunities for learning how to live with other people and that we had to grow up in those situations. But in all truth, they really don't prepare you. For what it means to collaborate with someone when the stakes are a lot higher, meaning when you're actually trying to create a life with someone else that you intend to be with forever. So we get married. And like I said before, some things you just both know and agree are best and you move forward. But when it comes to things that you don't see the same and you don't feel the same about that's when we all kind of fall apart and get into this. Competing to get our way or costly, accommodating to keep the peace. So when we're competitive, we want to fight to get our way. We start to look at maybe the past and use it as ammunition. We start to build evidence for why. We should do it our way. And we may bring up times when we did something our spouse's way and it didn't go so good. Right. So you can say to them, you know, honestly, like things don't work out well, when we do it your way, you can't really be trusted to make this kind of decision. Or maybe we look back and we're like, listen, we did this and we did this and we did this and we did this and we did this and it was all your way to honestly, it's time for me to have my way for once, you know, we're kind of keeping score. We can. Look at our role in the marriage, either, maybe as the financial provider or the one who does more in the home with the children and maybe we decide, listen, I should be entitled to getting my way because it's going to impact me the most. Now it's not because there's no legitimacy to some of these things that we're thinking or bringing up, but when we're feeling defensive and we've dug in. It's not going to create something better in the end. And that's what we're really wanting. Right. We're wanting things. To just get better and better in our life going forward. But to do that, we can't dig in and become competitive. So when we're having these conversations and we're defensive and competitive, we may end up still making the decision that from the outside, if we had no emotion about it, we know it was the right decision. But because there's a winner and a loser in the conversation. Now there's this resentment. That's there. There's this, you know what fine have it your way. But don't kid yourself that you have all the power here because I resent you so much. And we nurse that resentment because it does make us feel like it's something we can control and it gives us this feeling of power in our relationship. So this decision, even though in the end, it probably was the best decision. Doesn't bring the same goodness into our lives that it could because we're holding onto resentment and just maybe waiting for things to go wrong. So we can say told you so. And that brings me to the other thing that we often do when we're faced with a decision or a choice that we need to come to a consensus on. And that is costly accommodation. People pleasers do this all the time, but I think most of us could probably think of a time in our marriage is when we've done this. We can maybe see how adamant and holding from our spouse is about this decision and maybe they're super upset. We can maybe see that they're upset with us. And so to keep the peace, to take the discomfort away from the situation and from our spouse, we give in, or we give up. Now that is accommodating. But it becomes a costly accommodation when we're giving up something that has a high personal cost to us. And we give it up just to keep our spouse comfortable or happy with us. That's too costly and it's not good for either of us. Like you think about a toddler who's having a fit in the store because they want a candy that you've already said no to. Okay. It's like, no, you're not having it. If every time your toddler freaked out. And was upset. You were to give them what they wanted. They would never learn how to manage their disappointment. Well, They never would learn how to respect the boundary of no, they would never learn the idea of delayed gratification. Now you're not a toddler. Your spouse is not a toddler, and I'm not suggesting that you need to go out and teach your husband or your wife, how to deal with disappointment and to learn delayed gratification. That's actually not your job. Don't set up situation just to teach them a lesson, but. When you always give in to your husband's discomfort by accommodating him or your wife's discomfort. Neither have used growing up because it keeps you immature because you never have to learn to actually be okay while your spouse is not okay with you. And it doesn't help your spouse learn how to be collaborative in your marriage and to learn how to make sacrifices on their side for something better. So because I've coached women on their sexual relationships. One example of costly accommodation that I see is when women agree to sex, they don't really want to have, because they can't stand how pouty or mean their husband gets when they don't. And so they have sex, but they feel so angry about it. They hate that they have to use their sexuality to manage their husbands emotions. And they don't even feel like their sexual relationship has anything to do with them at all. They kind of just feel used. So they have accommodated their husband in the name of peace in their marriage. But it comes at way too high of a cost because they don't respect their husband. They don't respect themselves and they feel so much resentment that they end up just finding other ways to punish their husband. And that's just kind of a really easy example for me to give you to help you understand what makes something a costly accommodation. You know, we are taught to sacrifice in our life for other people. And I do believe that sacrifice is an essential part of any relationship that we're in. If we want it to thrive. But I think too often, we get confused about what kind of sacrifice enhances a relationship and what kind of sacrifice actually hinders it. And as women. And actually men probably as well, we are taught to be self-sacrificing and I think there's a lot of value in being able to sacrifice something you want for something better, but that is the key. It has to be for something better. That is a healthy sacrifice. That is actually honestly the true meaning of sacrifice. It is giving something up for something better. Now sometimes we think, you know, maybe it's best for me to give this up. So my spouse isn't mad at me or isn't going to be uncomfortable and maybe, maybe that's true. But if you resent your spouse for that sacrifice, it wasn't really a sacrifice. It wasn't a good sacrifice. It was just a costly accommodation and it will undermine your marriage. When you get married and you're now sharing a life with someone who has their own ideas and perspectives and desires and experiences, you are really essentially inviting them in to disrupt your life. It's not comfortable. Because the idea isn't that you're uniting yourself to someone who's just going to join your life. And I think too often, that's kind of what we all wanted. That's what we were all thinking. It's like you, Hey, Hugh husband come join my life. The one that I dreamed up, the one that I'm on track to create, and you're totally part of the plan, right? Husband check mark. That's what I wanted on my path. And so now let's go and create my life and you get to kind of tag along with me. Oh, no, no, no. Right. You've now joined yourself to someone who has their own dreams and ideas of what they want for the future. And you now have to make a life together and that is work. That's why marriage is such a purifying thing because it requires more from us than it would. If someone would just come along on the path that we've already designed. Babies are super good at this. Kids disrupt our lives. Like a baby wants to eat at three in the morning. And even though that's hard and uncomfortable and all you want to do is sleep. You get up and you take care of that baby, because that's what needs to be done. We are driven to accommodate a baby's needs. Just because of our nature and it's not a costly accommodation, even though we lose sleep. When we drag our butts around for a year, it's not a costly accommodation because it's a sacrifice that brings something better as a result. So when we have kids. We're inviting inconvenience and disruption into our lives, but we do it because we want something better. We want more love and more to love. We want more purpose. We want more connection. So we make sacrifice for this. We make room for them in our life. And we just accept that, especially while they're young, they're going to require a lot of us. But in marriage with two adults, we don't have the same innate. Um, I don't even know what to call it. Like with a baby, you just adjust in sacrifice because it's what a parent does in a marriage. You can stay selfish forever. It won't produce a good marriage, but if you put enough pressure on your spouse to please you, you never have to actually make room in your marriage for the other person. And you can just kind of put your head down and push forward. And try to drag your spouse along the path with you, but that isn't a good marriage. It requires much more deliberate work to put aside your own desires and comforts and dreams as the number one and make room and adjustments for two people and to build a life that has space for both of you. That is bigger work. Jennifer Finlayson Fife says that we are happiest in marriage when we belong to ourselves and we belong to the other person. Really knowing and being yourself while you're also in a partnership. Feels so good, but this is hard work. But it's how we thrive. Being in partnership, belonging to someone else means you aren't going to thrive though at the expense of your spouse. It means that when you have a decision to make in your marriage or you're setting a goal as a couple, you're going to be asking yourself. If things go my way. What is the cost to my spouse or to my children. And this is such a good question to ask. And it really gets you into more of a collaborative frame of mind and out of that competitive or costly accommodating frame of mind. What is it going to cost them? If I get my way. And another great question to ask is if things don't go my way, what is it going to cost me? And again, it keeps things really clear because let's say you wanted to move into a bigger house in a new neighborhood, but no one else wants to Your husband doesn't want to, your kids don't want to. It's a really good idea to ask, like, okay, what's the cost to my kids. What's the cost to my husband. If I get my way and require yourself to answer that question. All right. Just like it's going to cost us more money. My husband might have to work more. Maybe I'm gonna have to work more and he's going to have to make up the difference here for us to do that. Right. It's going to leave him with more responsibility. And my kids are going to have to switch schools and they're not going to live across the street from their good friends anymore. I'm going to be further from my favorite grocery store. You know, whatever it is, weigh the cost that it's going to be to your family. If you get your way. And then ask, like, what will it cost me if I don't move? What will it cost me if I don't get my way? And maybe for you, it's things like, listen, our house is way too small. And so I'm constantly having to come up with new stores solutions and constantly having to Dee junk. So I don't go crazy. And we have three kids in every bedroom and they're fighting all the time and I feel like I can't have anyone over. And if anyone comes in from out of town, they can't stay with us. We have no room and I'm just sick of that. And I've always wanted to have my own space, just a space for me, an office or something. You start to look at the cost on both sides of the issue. And even though. You matter and you have a right to have a say, And you want to thrive in your marriage. You can't really thrive in a marriage if you're thriving at the expense of your spouse. So the idea is that you're both working to create this marriage where both of you can thrive or you can belong to yourselves and to each other. So, what does it really mean to collaborate? What exactly is it that I'm talking about here? Collaboration is working together sometimes in separate and distinct roles, but working together to create a common goal or outcome. Now a key to collaboration is being willing to have the conversation until you get to a solution or a place where you can agree what is best. You may be disappointed. You may understand, like this is going to be hard for me. And it may actually require more sacrifice from you then from him or vice versa. But you're willing to do it because it gets your relationship or your family in a place that you want. And really what I want to emphasize here. Is that to effectively collaborate. You have to stay in the conversation. Now sometimes you're going to be able to sit down and talk for a minute and come up with what's best and high-five and move on. But other times it's going to require a long conversation or maybe many conversations over a long period of time before you're able to get to a place where you both understand really clearly. What truly is best and you're willing and ready to agree to it. So for most of us, we get into a conversation with this intent, right? Like I'm not gonna lose my temper. I'm just going to be open to what he has to say. And as the conversation goes along, suddenly things go off the rails. And it feels like it's not going well. And we tend to revert to our immature behaviors that we've always been bringing to these situations. So, whether you're getting upset and calling names, or just kind of deciding, you know, I don't care. You know, whatever you're going to do, whatever you want to do anyway. So forget it, or whether you just start to just agree to keep the peace. Okay. Yeah. Fine. If that's what you want. All of these are ways that we take ourselves out of the conversation and away from the pressure or the discomfort that we're feeling in it. This is where our work is. Those are the habits or cycles that we have to actually stop doing so we can actually collaborate effectively with each other. And so it's when things start to go off, the rails that we have to require better from ourselves is when we have to say to ourselves in our head or even to our spouse. Okay. Listen, I feel myself wanting to just give in and walk away from this or. I feel myself wanting to tell you, you know, what? You always get your way. So just go ahead and do it your way anyway, and just walk away, resenting you, but I'm not going to allow myself to do that. I'm going to require myself to stay in this conversation to behave well until we can come to an agreement on what is best, and maybe you'll have to take a break, but you know that you're in this conversation still that you're going to come back to it. And that you're going to come to a place where you will collaborate because you're willing to do it. And you're willing to hold yourself to good behavior to make it happen. Now when you're being collaborative. You're not being competitive. You're not keeping score. When you're collaborating, you're really just trying to answer that question. What is best? What is needed? And then once you have that answer as a couple. You're willing to do whatever it takes to make that happen. And that can mean again, that one of you may end up sacrificing more than the other to make something bigger than yourself. Something that you both know is best. And you can know that it's a good sacrifice because it will actually elevate both of you in your marriage. It's going to produce something better for both of you. It won't be a sacrifice. It only elevates your spouse or vice versa. When you are collaborative in your marriage. You take 100%. Of what is your responsibility? It means that you really look honestly at who you are in your marriage. You look at how are you loving your spouse? And you get honest about whether or not you are actually acting in a way that creates a good marriage. Because then when you approach your spouse about an issue in your marriage, you won't be doing it in a way to punish that person or to tell them how they need to change. So you can both be happy. It's really more of you inviting them into a conversation with you that you're already having with yourself, a conversation that says here is where I see that I can do better. Here's where I see that I am not being the type of woman or man that I know that I want to be. And then you can say, and here's what I see in you that makes this hard. And again, it isn't to punish your spouse, that you're sharing these observations. It's simply an invitation to collaborate together to make something better. So the things you talk about will push you as much as they're going to push your spouse, because you're going to be taking a hundred percent responsibility for you. And your stuff in the conversation. Now just because you're trying to make a more collaborative marriage doesn't mean that you need to become the same people, the same person as each other. That's not it at all. If you're striving for more collaboration, it will mean striving for more space to be who you really are while making space and welcoming in who your spouse really is too. So collaborative marriages can have really strong, distinct roles in them. Like in my own marriage, I would say that we have a very role-based marriage and a lot of ways. Now we actually collaborated about this type of marriage, the roles that we were going to play from the very beginning of our marriage, even before we were married, because it was really important to me to be able to stay home with my children while they were young. And I wanted nothing more than to be a mom and a homemaker. That was my honest to goodness. Dream My husband had dreams of a family as well, but he wanted to pursue a career in medicine. And he had wanted that since he was really young. And so he became the sole income earner in our family, and I became the full-time caregiver and homemaker. And even though we both have had days where we've made comments about the weight of those roles, right. And maybe had times where we're a little jealous of the other person's role. Like when everybody's sick or chaos is raining in the house and he's walking out the door to work, like skipping out the door to work. And I wish I could just trade places with him for the day or when I get to spend the time in the summer when my kids are out of school, just being with them and enjoying them. And he's having to be at work. I know he wants to trade places with me, for sure. Because, you know, each of our roles comes with benefits and sacrifices, but overall, when we look at what we want for our family, these roles, we both feel give us what we want. They give us what we genuinely have felt from the very start was best for us and for our kids and for what we wanted to create. And so don't feel like you can't have roles in your marriage to be collaborative. You don't have to have roles, but most of the time, most couples do have some distinct roles. And a lot of overlap otherwise, and we just adjust in our roles as life throws us challenges and curve balls. So sometimes I remember on this podcast that is about desire and that I should talk about desire. The idea around collaboration is that you bring what you desire and your husband brings what he desires and together you decide on what unitedly you desire and you go create it. And when you share that desire, when you share that outcome, you want. It makes it so much easier to collaborate with one another. And remember, you can always renegotiate a decision you come to now, like you can't renegotiate a baby, really, but in general, you can change your mind as a couple about something you've decided on. Sometimes life circumstances are going to force you into a position where you have to renegotiate your original decision. But I actually find this helpful to remember when I can see that it's going to be me. That's going to have to make the bigger sacrifice for what's best. Sometimes that bigger sacrifice is honestly just my pride, but in the moment it feels hard. But when I say to myself, listen, This does legitimately seem like the best decision it is going to be disappointing for me and a little hard to swallow, but I'm going to go all in on it and I'm just going to be willing to do this. And just no. It may not work out. You may have to redirect, it may end up going your way in the end. And sometimes that helps me just chill out a little bit and be more willing to give up something. Now, if you know, you need to have a conversation with your husband about something, whether it's a big purchase. Or a move or adopting a baby, like whatever it is, it is good to take a minute and get clear with yourself first. Ask yourself. If this decision were mine, just my decision mine alone. What would I do? What would I choose? What would I want? What I want to move across the country, but I want to have another baby, but I want that new vehicle would, I want my child in that afterschool activity. Okay again, this isn't so you can see what you desire and then dig in on that desire and never give up until you get your way. It's just simply requiring yourself to understand what you really desire. So you can take that authentic self to your husband. So get clear on what you would want. Should the decision be yours and yours alone? And make sure that it is really what you want and not what you think you should want. I remember when we were needing a new car. Or at least like a new to us car. Cause I had never owned a new car and we were struggling finding something. So finally my husband said, listen, I think we actually should go look at some brand new cars. And I did not care about getting a new car. Now there was a woman who had told me that she's like, listen, you should be driving a way better car than you are and not these beat up old cars. And so I wondered if I should really want a brand new car because I felt like maybe I looked so ridiculous with what I was driving, but in the end, That is what someone else wanted for me. Not what I really wanted for myself. I just wanted a reliable vehicle. Now in the end, we did get me a brand new car because we decided given the inventory at the time and pricing that it was the best decision. But be careful when you're thinking about what you really want, that you aren't actually thinking, this is what I am supposed to want, because that's not helpful when you go to make a decision together and collaborate with your husband. And when you sit down to discuss or collaborate on a big decision, or even a small decision, ask your spouse the same question and be willing to really listen to their answers and accept them. Ask them. Hey, if this was your decision to make on your own, what would you choose and what would you want? And then let them tell you their answer and find out why, like, why would you choose that? I want to know more. I want to understand why you feel about this, the way that you do. I had someone close to me, her husband came to her and he just felt so strongly that they actually needed to move their family across the city from where they were currently living. And I think she was a little shocked and certainly concerned about the impact that that was going to have on her social life, but really more worried about the impact it was going to have on the social life of her kids. It hadn't even been on her radar to move, but as she asked him to tell her why he wanted to do that, she really came to understand that he was seeing things she hadn't really considered and that for their family as a whole, it really was the best move they could make. And it required a lot of sacrifice from her a lot. She had a lot of little kids. She had a baby and the move ended up having a lot of unexpected and expensive twists and turns and it ended up being double the work for various reasons. But. Because he'd really thought this out and knew what he wanted and was able to help her see that it was truly best for all of their family and for his work. They were able to push through the obstacles and create something better for their whole family. So take into consideration the desires of your spouse and try to really understand where they're coming from so that you can collaborate effectively together. I hope this has made sense. I have really been thinking a lot about this over the last year. At least. It's been on my podcast list for a long time. Sometimes when I'm coaching on it, it feels like it really flows supernaturally, and I can explain it so well. But when I went to organize my thoughts on this topic, I have super struggled. And so I've held off doing it. But I hope that it's been useful and helpful despite all of my struggling to get it together. If nothing else, I would just encourage you to drop out of the competition or the costly accommodations that you're making in your marriage and require yourself to be more collaborative. Your spouse doesn't have to want this right now. Just you requiring yourself to be more collaborative. We'll increase the overall collaboration in your marriage. It will Uplevel your marriage. And honestly, you will be happier in your marriage when you actually collaborate. You'll be creating more goodness in your life from a place of goodness. And you will totally notice the difference in your relationship when you do that. I promise. Have a great week. Everyone talk to you later. Bye Thanks for listening today. If you like what you hear on the podcast, and you'd like to learn more, feel free to head over to my website. Jamilin Stephan coaching.com or find me on Instagram or Facebook at Jamileh. step in coaching.