How Empathy is Destroying Your Marriage (and 5 easy fixes)
We hear about empathy all the time. This skill is the ability to truly understand and experience the feelings of someone else. Therapists are trained on how to communicate it and physicians are told to be mindful of it when working with patients.
This is what you won’t hear:
Empathy is a myth.
Humans can’t feel what other people are feeling. They can’t even see the same objects others are seeing. Take one color for instance. A single wavelength of light. Green. A wavelength of 510 nanometers. Most people, but not all, may agree upon the accepted label of “green,” but does green really look the same to you as it does to me? Scientists say no. After all, humans have different numbers of cones in our retinas and our brains have each learned to interpret this input slightly differently in a way that differs by gender, location and culture. Think about that. One single color.
Now, imagine a complex emotion like regret. Sure, we all have experienced it at some point. But, have we felt it in the same way, physiologically and emotionally? Likely not. Not only are our brains wired differently, but every experience of regret was triggered by a different situation.
What does this have to do with marriage? Everything in fact.
Imagine this.
Your wife just came home after a hard day. She’s tired and doesn’t want to engage with you. After asking a couple of thoughtful questions, you get it. It was a rough day…maybe you should just let her be.
But then you realize, you’ve also had some hard days recently. Remember last week’s big board meeting? You were tired, but came home and still made that dinner for her! You come to the conclusion that she is just being lazy and doesn’t want to push herself.
Its the weekend and your husband wants some intimacy. You’re tired from your week but he keeps hinting at sex, with little sublety. You think, “yeah I know he’s turned on. Maybe we can try. It won’t take too long. Then, you suddenly change your mind. I can keep it together when there are things I really crave and so can he. He can wait.”
Does this sound familiar? The husband couldn’t possibly imagine what it is like to live life as his wife at work, smiling when she doesn’t feel like it, brushing off patronizing comments, working twice as hard for less pay than her male colleagues, and being perceived as rude when asserting herself. Similarly, the wife cannot possibly understand what it’s like to have your passionate needs for connection rejected, constantly distracted by thoughts and desires for intimacy, and blindsided by decreases in his wife’s desire for him since their early honeymoon days. Does this sound familiar? If not, think of your last argument. In what ways did you and your spouse see things differently?
The good news is there is a way to move past this without getting stuck using 5 simple tricks.
1. Stop trying to empathize with your spouse.
The concept of empathy itself does not reflect reality. More problems occur when people think they are empathizing and make the assumption they know how someone feels, apply a value judgement on the feeling based on their own experience, and act on that evaluation. This often results in selfishly doing what they think is best based on their assumption of how their partner feels and their (low) importance rating of that experience. In fact, expressing you understand how they feel and doing something contrary anyway may be more invalidating than admitting you don’t understand at all.
2. Replace empathy with love and support.
Showing your partner unconditional positive regard (love with no strings attached) allows them to relate their point of view without feeling pressure from you or others to behave or feel a certain way and justify their emotions. People dig their heels in when they feel ignored or that their feelings are not cared about or important. To energize your support, consider that if you experienced everything your spouse had up to this point, you would probably feel the same way.
3. No single spouse’s feeling is more important than their partner’s.
This is a tough one to accept, but it’s the logical conclusion of realizing that you can’t fully understand how your partner is feeling. Here are two examples from another context.
Example 1:
A mother from an impoverished community is trying to make ends meet to care for her four children. She has lost family to war and a child to disease. She feels anxiety and sadness everyday knowing that she is stuck in this cycle of poverty.
Example 2:
An upper class college student broke up with his girlfriend of 9 months. She started dating someone else and thought he was too needy. He is sad and anxious thinking about his future without her.
Who is experiencing more intense sadness and anxiety, the mother or the college student? The mother certainly appears to have a lower quality of life, but as it turns out, the student just committed suicide. You cannot tell from the outside how strongly a person feels nor how well they can cope with the feelings they have. The “objective” context and justification for emotion is irrelevant as strong emotion is often not logical. It is fruitless to argue with your spouse about who is more justified in feeling the way they do.
4. Give your partner the benefit of the doubt.
When an argument between you and your partner comes to a head, take a step back and examine why you may be holding firm. Is it because you believe your partner is doing something to spite you or get back at you, or perhaps you feel they always get their way? Guess what? They probably feel the same way. Trust your partner that they would not make something an issue unless it was genuinely important to them, and think carefully to ensure it is genuinely important to you.
5. Flip a coin.
What matters in marital communication is not really the decisions reached by a couple, but how they got there. If you and your partner follow the guidance above, you will often find that one of you will see that there is more room to give. But in the absence of compromise, flip a coin. Its not worth arguing in the long run. Flipping a coin has the benefit of stopping the negativity as well as keeping things even. Often, the positive impact of winning the coin toss will spread to both partners in the long run. But remember, don’t be a sore loser.
The techniques above assume that a couple is in a loving, committed relationship free from emotional and physical abuse. If this does not apply to your relationship, please seek out marital therapy prior to attempting anything you read online.
