Welcome back to Good Life, a newsletter about navigating our modern culture and staying sane in the process. This week, we discuss happy marriages and how easy it can be sometimes to turn the ship around.
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Have You Tried Flashing Him?
The truth about healthy marriages is that you have to be playful with each other even when the moment doesn’t seem right for it.
On Tuesday, my husband sat me down to deliver a hard truth about how I was handling a situation. As soon as he started chastising me, I knew everything he was saying was right. I had been looking at the situation through the lens of how this person was affecting me, while ignoring important context for their behavior, mainly because I wanted to justify my reactions. I wanted to be a victim of their brutality without caring about whether I held any of the blame.
It didn’t take much for me to see the light. He was 100% correct, and I hadn’t put up a fight. I was actively agreeing with everything he said, yet he just kept beating the dead horse. He wasn’t getting the context clues that I was not going to argue with him, and that I knew he was right. I could have gotten mad at him for his unrelenting pursuit. And if I am being honest, in any other circumstance, I likely would have.
“Why is he not listening to me? I am agreeing with him, and now it’s borderline attacking me!” If I had leaned into this line of thinking, we would have been in an argument this week, rather than having one of the simplest, yet most fun weeks we’ve had as a family in a while.
So instead of falling into that trap, as he was advancing, a thought popped into my head: Should I just flash him and get this over with?
Without thinking through the pros and cons of interrupting his speech, my shirt goes up.