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It's OK to not fix everything
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Published: September 17, 2009
If you are like me, you have a long "to do" list for the house or apartment you occupy. Some of mine include a burner on our stove that will not work, a faucet that leaks, half of the family albums unlabeled, a kitchen floor that needs cleaning and polishing ... I could go on and on. However, with all these "unfinished problems," we still manage to enjoy the house and yard. Most days are pleasant and enjoyable despite those lingering "problems" that need attention.
Our marriages, according to Dr. John Gottman of the University of Seattle, are a lot like the houses we live in. He states, "In the course of studying more that 3,000 couples, we discovered that even the most happily married couples never resolved 69% of their conflicts."
This means it is a myth to believe we can't be happy unless we solve all of our problems, as a couple. If for instance, we focus on all the "problems" in our house and yard, we could make ourselves miserable.
This analogy can be applied to the way we view our marriage. If happily married couples never resolve 69% of their conflicts, we need to learn to enjoy our marriage relationship, although it is far from perfect. We can still be relatively happy, even though he never apologized for forgetting to pick up your Sunday dress from the cleaners and she never understood what he meant when he said, "We need to work on our marriage."
We can enjoy a trip to the beach, although she is still peeved that he had to work overtime and they didn't get away until late in the evening and he is upset because she doesn't understand how fearful and insecure he is about being downsized in a new job that isn't going well.
If Gottman's study is true, couples need to learn to live alongside dangling ends and unfinished conflicts. If we can compare the list of unfinished business in our home to the unfinished and unresolved issues in our married life, this might help us relax and realize our marriage is not aboard the sinking Titanic.
Garrison Keillor, the PBS talk show story teller, once told a story on his program and purposefully chose not to give it an ending. The story was about a mom whose teenage son was becoming a groupie of The Grateful Dead. She tried to wean him from following the group. One night he camped out at the ticket booth to make sure he got a ticket before they sold out. He came home dog tired after a night on the grass. While he was sleeping, his mom came in and found the ticket lying on the lamp table. She picked it up and looked at it with disdain….
He ended the story with this comment. His phone and e-mail server was inundated. What happen? Did she tear up the ticket? Did she give in to a losing battle?
Mr. Keillor was forced by his listeners to give an ending to this story with a dangling end. But he concluded by saying, "Here is the end of the story but I am convinced that my life is filled with dangling ends." Life, he said is an on-going drama made up of multiple dangling ends.
So it is with marriage. You can love someone in the midst of stories that are unfinished. That is the beauty and wonder of committed love.
Dr. Bill Mitcham is the Director of the Marriage Maintenance Center in Davidson. He can be reached at 704-408-4178 or e-mail bmitcham@bellsouth.net.
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