SML #187 - the light and the carafe
LESSONS LEARNED
At lunch this week a friend told me he met with a friend of his recently.
Let's call my lunch friend "Chuck."
The friend of Chuck said he was getting divorced. They had a conversation about it.
Chuck said when he got back home, his wife asked him how it went.
He told her, “He turned the light off.” Meaning his friend was done, out. In his heart and mind.
Chuck said, “I never used that phrase before until that moment. But that’s how it felt, like the light was off to him seeing anything anymore.”
That phrase grabbed me.
I’ve never turned the light off in my marriage relationship, but, in the old days I turned it off in certain instances or times.
Ever get so mad or frustrated you just can’t look at them? That’s turning the light off for a bit.
Silent treatment? That's turning the light off on responding.
You can turn the light off on the possibility that they could be right. I’ve done that.
The light doesn’t just go off on its own. I turn it off.
But we don’t turn it off for no reason. We’re mad and frustrated and tired and offended and all the other stuff.
I don’t want to turn the light off in anything, big or little.
Something that helps me stay away from the light switch -
Picture a carafe inside your soul. It’s for holding love.
The carafe is kind of a crazy way to think about how it feels to be in your marriage right now.
The carafe is how you feel overall about each other, how you feel in your relationship, how connected you feel.
The level of love inside your carafe goes up and down.
Disagreements, head-bumpings, arguments, disrespects, all make withdrawals from your carafe.
When the carafe is low, little things can turn into big arguments.
Love and attention and positive things make deposits into your carafe. Things like a kind word, a favor, patience, apologies, holding your tongue.
The carafes inside Brenda and I have been overflowing for years.
This doesn’t mean we don’t bark and snarl at each other, or that we don’t have some serious head-butting, or that we don’t have seasons where we’re bugged by each other.
It just means those things don’t have a big effect on how we feel about each other.
The normal daily withdrawals of life only have a minor effect, because our carafes are so full and because we’re always adding to it.
I’m not saying we’re always nice-nice. I’m just saying we’re very secure with each other.
When we first meet and get married, it’s easy to fill the carafe and keep it full.
As we stay married, getting mad and being hurt and offended happens easier and easier.
The love carafe slowly empties faster than it gets refilled.
And it can stay low for a long time which makes things worse and worse. I’ve been there for long years in the past.
But we can refill it. And it doesn’t take big stuff to do it.
John Gottman studied thousands of couples for 40 years and says one big way the carafe gets filled or emptied by us noticing each other -
“Couples who were unhappily married missed 50 percent of the positive things the other partner did. It wasn’t that the happily married couples were doing more sweet or helpful things for each other than the unhappily married ones—they were simply better at seeing their partner doing them.”
Brenda and I made teeny progress in that over a long time. It didn’t have to take that long.
We can start by trying to notice one simple positive thing that helps us feel a little better about our spouse. And then another. And another.
Repeating small positive things fills the carafe.
WORTH REPEATING
“We spend countless hours making up our minds about others. An unceasing exchange of opinions about people keeps us distracted and allows us to ignore the truth that we ourselves are the first ones who need a change of heart and probably the only ones whose hearts we indeed can change.” - Henri Nouwen
WORTH TRYING
Three more questions I just added to my 'collection' of connecting questions…
We’ve done the first two of these, just informally at a meal. The first one ended up in a conversation.
1. What’s the best compliment I’ve ever given you and why? What kinds of compliments do you like to receive?
2. Name three clothing items that you love seeing me in.
3. If you were to give me one piece of advice about how to make our relationship stronger, what would you say?
Thank you for reading!
"May he grant you your heart's desire and fulfill all your plans." - King David
You matter
Gary
JUST IN CASE . . .
The Simpler Marriage Instagram is a bite-size on-the-go version of the kinds of things you get in this letter. Not the exact same content, but the same approach. If you’re on IG, you can see and follow HERE.
If you find the tone or attitude in these letters helpful, I wrote A Family Shaped by Grace from the same posture you get here. Everything in it applies to marriage, but it shows how it also applies to kids, grown kids, in-laws, etc. Here it is.