The Moment (Screw You Nicholas Sparks)

There are some defining moments in every relationship. There's the moment you fall in love. There's the moment you realize they love you. And there's THE MOMENT your partner screws it up and lets you down. In this episode, Randy and Beverly talk through the moment Beverly let Randy down... because he ain't no Nicholas Sparks. Listen with your partner and talk about the moments in your relationship. 

Heart Versus Head is a podcast about relationship styles and how those relationship styles influence communication in the most important relationships. The hosts - Randy Hampton and Beverly Craddock - are a married couple who are sought-after relationship coaches, award-winning authors and regular people who (like everyone in relationships) are just trying to stay connected through all the noise of life in the modern world. You can learn more about the couple and their work at HeartAndHeadCoaching.com, where you'll learn to fight better and connect again.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Heart vs. Head, a podcast that helps couples communicate and fight better. Here are your hosts, Randi Hampton and Beverly Craddock.

SPEAKER_01 0:22

Hey everybody, it's Randy and Beverly. Welcome to Heart vs. Head. We are talking about something this time around that I think is kind of interesting. I think it happens in every relationship. It's kind of the moment. There's really two moments in every relationship. There's the moment you realize that this person is amazing. There's this moment, fall in love, and you start to envision your life moving forward, that this person's going to be there for you, be there because they support you and all these things. And that's an awesome moment in a relationship is the moment that we fall in love. And then there's another moment. And I think this is where a lot of our trouble comes from in relationships. And Beverly, you can tell me if I'm wrong. You're wrong. Thank you. I think there's a moment in our relationships where we realize that our partner is is capable of letting us down just like everybody else has let us down.

SPEAKER_02 1:28

They're not just capable. You're sugarcoating it, and what you want to say is, it's great, and then it's not because our partner has let us down.

SPEAKER_01 1:40

And there's a moment we recognize it, and I think that's important. And it's important as a couple to be able to talk about those moments Because if you really sit down and just kind of get in touch with your history of your relationship, you'll find the moment. There's a moment when all the wonderful, amazing, unable-to-hurt-us feelings that we have with that partner get kind of tromped on. And it's not an intentional moment. Let me give you an example. Let's just stop making it vague. Years ago, back when I was in my late 30s, I was going through a divorce and ran into Beverly. And it was amazing and wonderful. And all these things went very, very, very well. And I was happy. And one of the things that had happened in my divorce was I'd really found my passion for writing again. I think if anybody along the way in life says, okay, what do you want to be? I love writing. I enjoy telling stories. I'm a storyteller. And so it was kind of a passion. And so when Beverly and I were dating, I fully engaged in that passion. I would get up early and write before work. I would do these things. And I was working on a novel. And then Beverly said, well, why don't you try something a little more mainstream? Those are marketable. Can you write differently? I was

SPEAKER_02 3:35

sending query letters. I was all in. I spent every night, hours, he's writing, writing novels over there, and I'm his agent, so to speak. And I'm sending out all these query letters, just really talking about his amazing novels that he's written.

SPEAKER_01 3:55

And then there's this moment where Beverly goes, well, you know, and I don't know why you can, I'm not going to try and answer for you, Beverly, but there was this moment where Beverly goes, well maybe it's not that good your passion doesn't come through and i know what she was trying to say but i know how it felt and i think in in in that moment there was part of me that went oh she doesn't believe in me and i think there was part of me that gave up And I think that those moments in all relationships damage us, but we don't identify them, we don't recognize them, and we don't communicate about them. Because I don't know, Beverly, I think we've talked about this maybe once or twice before, but it's not something that we've ever really deeply dived into about the moment. So, from your perspective, Beverly, what was going on in my moment?

SPEAKER_02 4:57

Well... It's really funny, and I think a lot of listeners will understand this. First of all, I didn't say that your stories weren't good. Never said that. I knew by watching you and seeing the devotion you had to writing and that passion, how it lit you up, that fire inside of you, I loved all of that. The only issue that came up was as his agent, so to speak, I noticed that the query letters were coming back. People were saying, Not interested. Not at this time. I was just a supportive partner. And as I was reading through, I read his novel five or six times because I also have a background in communication and writing and journalism. And so I was able to help him with editing. One of the things, though, that I had noted, there was one criticism that I had of his writing. And it makes sense now, 15 years later, because knowing what I do about hearts and heads, I'm the heart. We've said that many times on this podcast. As the heart, when I read his novels, they weren't that descriptive, the adjectives, the way he talked about love scenes. For example, there was part of the novel that had this love section to it. And he wrote about it, but it was from a very head perspective. It was very logical, very stick to the facts. And what I wanted Randy to do was I thought thought to myself, if he could just get into the passion, he feels passion in our relationship. When he's in love with me, when he's intimate with me, it's there in reality. I wanted him to write that. And I knew from other novels, I'm more of a romantic novel reader. Don't

SPEAKER_01 7:22

say it. Don't even bring up his name. Don't notebook book out on everybody and be like, Nicholas Sparks. I mean, the guy's got it down. Nicholas Sparks. I got to tell you something about Nicholas Sparks. Nicholas Sparks wrote The Notebook, The Choice, and The Last Song, and The Rodeo, or whatever. I don't know. Nicholas Sparks wrote all the love movies, all the books. Too many to mention. God love you, Nick. Nicholas Sparks was kind of Beverly's daughter's favorite author, and they were He's like Gaga over, you know, the notebook and all this. He's mine too. So wonderful. And Nicholas Sparks, Nicholas Sparks, Nicholas Sparks. And I have this dream of I want to be a writer. And they didn't talk that way about me. And so you kind of have this competition in my head with Nicholas Sparks. And so a couple of years ago, I'm looking for a reason to make fun of Nicholas Sparks. I'm looking for something I can use as ammunition. So I go to Wikipedia and I Wikipedia up Nicholas Sparks and I'm like, I can find something. And I'm on the Wikipedia page and I find out Nicholas Sparks and I went to the same place. Bella Vista High School in Fair Oaks, California. We were two years apart. Nick was two years ahead of me. And I was like, because I know we had probably the same creative writing teacher, Mr. Miller, who was famous at the school for being really cool.

SPEAKER_02 9:16

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 9:18

So back to the story. right, wrong, or otherwise, that was my moment.

SPEAKER_02 9:31

Right. Because Randy has a hard time accepting any criticism, even when it's handed out in a very loving, caring, me telling him four times, you're a great writer. I love your stuff. You're so amazing. I think you rock. I have one small suggestion. Could you expand in this area? Could you explore?

SPEAKER_01 9:56

Could you make it not suck? No, that's not what I said. That's what it sounded like. I get it. It's a head thing where we don't do criticism at all. You're right.

SPEAKER_02 10:08

Yeah. So you just completely shut down your whole writing career because I offered one little ounce of advice. And I said it in the most cushioned way because I already knew from other experiences that Randy did not handle criticism. That was the moment. And we have completely two different ways of looking at it. We're each entitled to our perspective and it is what it is. And so to this day, I mean, Randy writes a lot and he still has four novels out there, but he stopped promoting them, stopped really writing new ones. And it's silly.

SPEAKER_01 10:47

We focused on, thank you for saying that it's silly. That sounds like criticism. We focused, she's shaking her head, right? This is what we heads do. We hate to suck. We don't like to be bad at anything. If we're bad at something, we either practice more, hire somebody to help us, or we quit. And I guess I, in a lot of ways, quit, at least on the fiction writing, because I've taken that writing passion. And I've written one book about anxiety, Me Six in the Universe on Amazon, Me Six in the Universe, if you know somebody that's anxious. And then we together in 2018, we wrote The Couple's Rulebook. And so I have been able to, also available on Amazon, if you're looking for help with relationship communication, The Couple's Rulebook. And so it's been good that I've been able to write and put stuff out there, but it really did affect this passion for writing fiction. It affected the passion for telling stories. So as we were talking about different podcast ideas, We got on this concept of the moment. I want listeners to really think about in your relationship, when was the moment? Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's what hurts heads.

SPEAKER_02 12:49

So I would ask you then, when Hart says something that sounds like criticism, what are we supposed to do?

SPEAKER_01 12:57

It is tough because I think we have to recognize that heads typically don't take criticism very well. We know that. That's not the problem. I don't think there's anything you have to do differently, right? And I don't think there's anything you could have or should have done differently because ultimately it was a passing comment, not a defining moment. You weren't trying to make it into the moment.

SPEAKER_02 13:43

kept it a secret and never said anything, then I wasn't helping you at all. I wasn't being supportive of your passion. By giving you one piece of advice, I thought it would change everything. I thought you would just take that example. Here I gave you a different genre. I'm like, you know, maybe this genre is tough. A lot of the query people are writing back and saying they're not accepting that genre right now. They were looking for more kind of military stories. And I said, hey, could you write that? And you were like in my sleep. And so two months later, you wrote this freaking amazing novel and I'm sending it out there. And now we got the genre and then I'm still getting these letters. And so I said, maybe it's just exploring these parts of the novel where you could get more descriptive, not descriptive, but get into the passion, the feeling just a bit more, which I know is your struggle as a head. And that is where you just viewed me as she doesn't support me. She doesn't love me. She let me down and door closed. And it's just very frustrating.

SPEAKER_01 14:54

We bring this topic up because I want partners. I want couples. I want listeners out there. Talk to your partner. Talk about the moment. Have a conversation. What are the moments in your relationship where your partner zinged you and maybe they weren't even trying to do it? And that's typically the case is they're not trying to let us down like that, but they do. Fine. Find the moment. Now, I got to say something else because part of the moment was my mistake. Let me tell you how. When we believe that our partner is everything to us, we create this expectation that they're always going to support us and they're always going to come through and they're always going to say the right thing and they're always going to love us and all of these things. Beverly may be the absolute as a big giant heart. Beverly may be the perfect target audience. for Nicholas Sparks. But when it comes to reading novels about soldiers coming home from war and kind of the action adventure of it, She's not the target audience. But because I love her, I wanted her to love what I was doing as a head writer. Beverly doesn't sit around and read authors like I read, like John Grisham, who's a great writer. John Grisham is a head writer if you read his stuff. I think sometimes because we expect our partner to support us and love us no matter what, maybe it's not their thing. Maybe my mistake was in trying to make Beverly into a lover of the genre too. She doesn't have to like my writing. She doesn't have to find it as passionate as what Nicholas Sparks or some other writer focused on that. It doesn't have to be that because maybe that's not the audience that I'm looking for. But I wanted her to love it. I wanted her to like it. And my mistake maybe was trying to put that on her when she's not even capable of that.

SPEAKER_02 16:51

What you say is very true. And when I think about that moment for me, where you let me down early on in the relationship. And I'm not going to tell the story because we have a lack of time. But I want listeners to know that we all do it. And Randy also let me down. Mine had to do with the people I care about, which is, of course, what would happen to a heart is he mentioned something about my son in a way that he was trying to, again, be helpful, just like I was being helpful with the advice on the book. At the time, it didn't hit me that way because I viewed it as criticism, as an attack on someone that I cared very deeply about. And so I became very defensive, shut down, and that was when I realized that Randy was no longer on the pedestal, that he had let me down.

SPEAKER_01 17:50

That is a great example because ultimately, when it comes to your son, when it I love these kids like they're my own. I was just going in head parenting mode and saying, here's what I think, or here's what I would do, or here's how I would be tougher because I'm a head. And it just, it didn't hit. We're actually going to, we're going to dive deeper, maybe into that moment in a future podcast. But maybe one of the, in the next couple of podcasts, one of the things we want to talk about is this idea of you were a better boyfriend. You were about So we're going to talk about why is it when we're dating and then when the relationship settles into something serious, does it change and how that affects relationships? And maybe that story is good for that one too.

SPEAKER_02 18:48

So in conclusion, what I want to say from the heart side, actually it might be from both sides, is that recognize that at some point in the relationship, your partner will let you down. All humans let us down. It's human nature. None of us are perfect. We let people down. They let people down. Not that you want to expect that, but know that it will happen. When it happens, perhaps take a moment and recognize that this is a trigger for you. For example, Randy's we've already looked at is a criticism, something that was a personal issue for him that he could not get passed. And for me, it was a heart feeling defensive about a person I care about. And that is, again, a personal thing that I needed to address. So fast forward, and here we are relationship coaches 15 years later, the same thing, it still happens, we still let each other down, that maybe probably not as frequently, we know each other better, we talk about things better, more frequently, more in depth. However, I would say that we still do hurt each other, let each other down. And some of the difference is that when it happens, we're both each as individuals able to look at it and say, either I disagree or I get that, or that's just, we're able to kind of look at the other person and see the limitations in the moment and not just bring it on and feel that hurt, but rather to examine it and realize that it wasn't intended as hurt And what is my part of this that maybe I still need to work on?

SPEAKER_01 20:33

Because if you can talk about it in those moments, if you can really talk about it and be honest about it, you'll find out that your partner's not actually trying to jack you up. It just feels that way in the moment. Beverly, I love you a ton. And I am so glad that you're my partner. Same. That's it for this. Guys, we'll talk to you soon. Thanks for hanging out. Heart vs. Hand.

SPEAKER_00 21:11

Thanks for listening to Heart vs. Head. You can learn more at heartandheadcoaching.com and check out new podcast episodes every Wednesday. If you have a question for Randy and Beverly, send an email to info at heartandheadcoaching.com.