The Loving Truth

Two Things Can Be True at Once

• Sharon Pope • Episode 169

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Relationships are rarely simple and binary thinking—believing things are either right or wrong—can harm your marriage.

Human beings are complex, and so are our needs, desires, and perspectives.

You can love your partner deeply and still recognize that the relationship isn’t meeting your needs.

You can set boundaries and still be a kind, loving person.

You can enjoy your sexuality, assert yourself, and hold yourself in high regard even when mistakes happen.

Embracing nuance helps you make clearer decisions, connect more authentically, and stop falling into the trap of “good guy stay, bad guy leave.”

Two truths can coexist, and understanding that opens the door to healthier, more fulfilling relationships.

Struggling to decide whether to stay or go in your marriage and you’re serious about finding that answer?

Book a Truth & Clarity Session with a member of my team. We’ll discuss where you are in your marriage and explore if there’s a fit for you and I to work together so you can make - and execute - the RIGHT decision for YOU and your marriage.

Speaker 1:

Welcome to the Loving Truth Podcast, where it's all about finding clarity, confidence and peace in the face of marriage challenges. And now your host relationship expert and certified Master Life Coach, sharon Pope.

Speaker 2:

Hello, loves, this is Sharon Pope, and this is the Loving Truth. Today, I want to have a conversation with you about how two things can be true at once. Now we have become people who think primarily in binary terms. That's what I mean by that is either, or terms like the two extremes is how we like to think about things, and there's a reason for that. Binary choices are easier to grasp than nuanced situations, and the problem is is that inside of our relationships, things are very, very nuanced. You have two human beings with their own set of experiences and their own ideas and their own perspectives, trying to create a healthy, loving, connected relationship and while getting their needs met, where they have different needs and different desires and different perspectives and different ways of seeing and experiencing the world. There's so many nuances inside of our relationships because human beings are complicated, inside of our relationships, because human beings are complicated, and so binary thinking is harming our relationships and it's keeping us from healing the hurts inside of our relationships. So binary choices might be easier to grasp, but here's something to think about.

Speaker 2:

Generally speaking, human beings, we become fairly lazy thinkers. We want the quick answers, don't we Right? We want, we want to know is it good or bad? Is it right or wrong? Is it black or white? Am I right? Is he wrong? It's me versus them right, and so it reduces the possibilities down to only two choices. That's why we do it. It's easier to make a decision when you only have two choices. You can make a decision easier than when you have 100 choices. That will always be true, and so nuance provides many, many ways to see a certain situation, and then you have to sort of navigate your way through those hundred different choices, whereas if there's only two choices, it becomes much easier and quicker to be able to make a decision for yourself.

Speaker 2:

Logical thinkers are going to tend to think more in binary terms, where abstract and creative thinkers are going to be less likely to think in binary terms. Now, logical thinkers, I want you to think about that as like that's the engineer right? The engineer needs to know is the building structurally sound or not right? And we need that in an engineer. And so engineers are trained and rewarded to think in more binary terms. They're very black and white in their thinking many times, whereas if you're an artist or a creative, you are going to be able to navigate those nuances a little bit more easily. Now, one is not better than the other, right, they both have their good points and bad points. But in terms of binary thinking, a logical thinker is going to do it more frequently than an abstract or a creative thinker.

Speaker 2:

Now the human brain is wired to favor binary classifications. And why is that? Because it's simpler and it's easier and it's more efficient. Your brain is a very efficient functioning machine up here in our heads and it wants to simplify really complex information. So if it can simplify it down to only two choices now, we can move through that much more quickly. Now, a person who prefers quick answers is going to have to be willing to take some risk in order to get to the quick answer, because you're not going to have 100% of the information. So if you prefer quick answers, there's a risk in only having two options. But if you are someone who is a little bit more risk averse or a little bit more cautious, then you're going to be more apt to want to understand the nuance and want to dive in to understand the detail in order to offset the risk.

Speaker 2:

So the prefrontal cortex, which is that front part of our brain, right, you know, like where our forehead is. It's responsible for all the complex reasoning and managing all that nuance, that complex thinking right. It is slower to respond than your brain stem and your limbic system. Those kick in without you even having to think about it. But you actually have to engage your prefrontal cortex and get it working. You sort of have to wake it up a bit and you do that by giving it a problem to solve. If you ask it the right questions or give it the right problems to solve, it's brilliant at working through and navigating those things.

Speaker 2:

But we don't often engage it because we sort of want the quick fix, we want the easy answer and we've become a bit lazy in our thinking and it's not serving us when it comes to our relationships, which is why I'm bringing it up today. Now, there are also some familial, some cultural and societal things that are taking place here as well. So, for instance, because most of the world is looking for an easy answer, we love those memes on social media, don't we? You know when someone can just boil a relationship topic down to a single square box and maybe 10 words or less. I promise you, like I have a love-hate relationship with memes, because I have to do them too, but I have tried to. As a team, we've taken to having multiple screens of memes because it's like you need more information. Relationships are complicated and oftentimes, if you can boil something down to 10 words or less, it's not terribly helpful.

Speaker 2:

Everyone wants to be able to solve every problem from a 30-second TikTok video. Well, solving a decade of marital challenges is not going to take place in a 30-second TikTok video. Challenges is not going to take place in a 30 second TikTok video. So we have to allow for. There are some places where nuance is really important and we're. Investing in understanding what's going on is really important, and taking the easy path out is not going to serve you. The other thing that can take place is that we will look to our parents, our families or our friends to tell us what to think In our lazy thinking, instead of looking at all of the data and going okay, here's my interpretation of what's going on and here's how I feel about it.

Speaker 2:

Instead, what most people do is they believe what their parents believe and they don't question those thoughts at all to figure out. Does that work for me? Is that really what I think based upon my life experience? Now, sometimes they do, but sometimes we're just lazy and we're like, yeah, I believe that because that's what my parents believe. I believe that because that's what all my friends think, and that becomes our shorthand and our efficient way to come to answers.

Speaker 2:

So most people are unconsciously committed to being right, and I know none of us like to think that we want to be right, but we do. We want to feel right because being right makes us feel secure, and binary thinking leads to one person being right and the other person being wrong, and inside of our relationships, when you have to be right and your partner has to be wrong all the time. Now you're not on the same team. Now you're adversaries and you're not allowing for two people who see the world very differently to. Maybe neither of you is right or neither of you is wrong. You just happen to have different perspectives. You just see the world differently, right. And so I feel like the algorithms in social media and online in general are just amplifying this more and more, are just amplifying this more and more Because whatever you like online or whatever you pay attention to online, they're going to serve you more of that in order to keep you on each of their respective platforms so that you can be quote addicted to that platform. They want you on that platform as long as possible. I mean, that's what social media has been built for. So here's the problem with all of this Binary thinking leads to oversimplification and human beings are complicated and emotions are messy, and both of those things are super relevant when your marriage is struggling.

Speaker 2:

It doesn't give us a full understanding of what's taking place in the marriage. It gives us a great deal of conflict. It puts us into an us versus them, an adversarial type of relationship. Now my partner is an adversary as opposed to the person I'm supposed to be walking this life beside, where we're on the same team, both trying to accomplish the same thing, which is to feel good inside of our marriage. It puts us into opposing camps. That binary thinking puts us into opposing camps. If you're paying attention to anything that's going on politically in the US right now, you can very easily see this and it creates a lot of us versus them mentality and it's really hard to find that middle ground and that place where we can find agreement. And I always say health resides in the middle, it doesn't reside in the extremes. When it comes to your life. It doesn't apply when it doesn't help when it comes to politics. Your life it doesn't apply when it doesn't help when it comes to politics and it does not help when it comes to your relationship either.

Speaker 2:

Binary thinking is going to limit our ability to be creative or innovative in terms of the ways in which we look to solve the problems in our life. It limits our ability to change our minds, because when we make up our minds about something and we state how we feel about something, we're pretty hard pressed to come off of that, because once we state how we feel about something, it sort of becomes like the ground that we stand on and we don't want to back away from that, even though we are the most intellectually intelligent creatures on the planet and we should be able to take our current line of thinking, our current understanding, get some new information, maybe from our partner, about their experience, and then be able to create a new perspective, apply that, mix it in with our own perspective to develop a new perspective. We should have the freedom to be able to do that. But when you have lazy thinking, you're not going to automatically do that and, lastly, it leads to labels, and labels are going to limit how you see people.

Speaker 2:

When you put a label on someone, you think you know the totality of that person based upon their label? Think you know the totality of that person based upon their label. And human beings are complicated creatures, right, and that label can be anything. Right, it can be, well, you're either black or white. Well, what if your dad was Jamaican and your mom was Asian? You know what, right? Or you either have ADHD or ADD or Asperger's, or you're normal. What does that do? Now? It just creates everyone who is not fitting into the bucket of normal is now an other. There's something wrong with them. And then normal people are normal. Like, that's not healthy.

Speaker 2:

Or you're either heterosexual or homosexual or bisexual, as if those are the only three options, when maybe sexuality can be fairly fluid and we just don't understand it that well, because where was our education on sexuality? Right, it can be labels like that, but it can also be. You know, my wife is a redheaded step monster to my kids. And then that becomes the label through which I see my partner. Right, it limits the totality of who they are. So that's why I don't like labels and we fear things that we don't understand, and so that's why sometimes we'll just put a label on it, so that then we can simplify it in order to make sense of it in our brain in an efficient way, because binary is easier to understand. But I'm telling you, when it comes to human beings, we have to let go of binary thinking. When it comes to your partner, when it comes to your marriage, when it comes to the challenges that you are experiencing in your marriage, it's not so simple, because if it were simple, you would have figured out those challenges. You would have figured it out a long time ago, because there would have only been two options and it would have been easy. So I'm going to go through and give you some examples. Some are related to just life and some are related to marriage. But two things can be true at the same time, and I think if we're going to have healthy, loving, connected relationships, we have to be able to hold two things being true at the same time. That don't automatically go together. So here's some examples For instance, a woman can wear makeup and dress sexy and bring a lot of masculine energy.

Speaker 2:

This is how women have bridged their femininity in a traditionally masculine world for decades. Now, right, so those two things can be true, even though they don't often go together. You don't think of them together in a stereotype. You can be smart and beautiful it's not an either or you can be older and stunningly gorgeous, right? Aren't we experiencing women now in their 70s and 80s that literally are gorgeous, like I think it's amazing. But it used to be like, oh, once you got older, there went your looks. If you're a woman, if you're a man, it was the opposite. So my husband is African American. He listens to R&B and soul and jazz. He listens to reggae and gospel, but he also listens to country. So try putting that into a box or putting a label on that.

Speaker 2:

You can be a mother and you can work outside the home. That one's pretty easy to grasp for most of us these days. Here's one for your marriage. Your partner can be a good person and they can have terrible behavior. They can be a great man, they can be a great father, they can be a great provider and they can yell at and degrade their wife. You, too, you can be a good woman, an amazing mother, but also someone who criticizes or emasculates her husband. Now, all these things, these happen. These behaviors occur out of fear, insecurity, and they're just old wounds that are playing out. But they're still playing out and they're still very relevant.

Speaker 2:

You can be assertive and cherishing with your partner at the exact same time. Assertive doesn't mean that you have to be a bitch. You can be assertive and you can be loving simultaneously. So instead of saying, don't talk to me like that, who do you think you're talking to? You can say I understand you're upset with me, but I can't hear you when you're yelling at me. Can you please tone it down so I can hear you? I want to hear you.

Speaker 2:

Right, you can be both at the same time. You can feel bad about hurting your partner's feelings and you can still hold yourself in warm regard. You can still think highly of yourself, even though you don't think highly of the choice you made or the behavior that you took. You can make amends and you can do better in the future, realizing that you're imperfect. You're a human being out here, humaning, and you're doing the best you can, but you're going to screw it up once in a while. You don't have to fall into this deep place of shame where it means something about your character, believing that you're a horrible person unworthy of love. That's never going to help you create healthy relationships because you'll sabotage yourself because you think you're unworthy.

Speaker 2:

You can be a woman with morals who enjoys sex. How about that Newsflash? When sex is good, women often enjoy it. When someone is paying attention to her experience, she can be just as sexual as a man can be. She can be an amazing wife, mother, woman and she can enjoy sex. Right, those two things can be true at the same time. You can have boundaries and be a kind person. Many women will avoid setting boundaries for themselves because they think it means that they're going to be unkind in some way or that they're going to be bitchy in some way. But if people really loved and cared about you, why wouldn't they want you to be able to tell them how you can feel safe in the relationship? Right, you can be.

Speaker 2:

Your husband can be a good guy and you can still choose to end the marriage. See, the prevailing line of thinking is good guy stay, bad guy leave. So we go looking for all the reasons that he's a bad guy, but maybe he is just a good, kind-hearted human being. I've had women say to me I wish you would just cheat on me, or I wish you would hit me, because then I'd have a reason and what they're looking for is a justifiable reason so that they can avoid judgment.

Speaker 2:

But this is your one most intimate relationship, and sometimes good guy, but checked out. Good guy but no connection. Good guy, but not showing up for you. Maybe it's not enough. Or the last one you can love him and still not choose to be in your most intimate relationship with him. Those two things can both be true at the same time. You can have deep love for him and you can realize that it doesn't work in the intimate relationship, because the prevailing line of thinking is if you love him, you stay, if you hate him, you go, and so then you look for reasons to hate him. It's okay to love him. You don't have to hate him in order to end your marriage. Two things can be true at once, my friends, and when we embrace more nuanced thinking, my friends, and when we embrace more nuanced thinking, we can start to have more rich, fulfilled lives and more healthy, loving relationships. I hope that's helpful for you. Until next time, take really good care.

Speaker 1:

because you're struggling to decide whether to stay or go in your marriage and you're serious about finding that answer. It's time to book a Truth and Clarity session with a member of my team. On the call, we'll discuss where you are in your marriage and explore if there's a fit for you and I to work together so you can make and execute the right decision for you and your marriage. Go to clarityformymarriagecom to fill out an application. Now. That's clarityformymarriagecom to fill out an application. Now. That's clarityformymarriagecom.