You May Not Need Couples Therapy: Why You Should Ask for Feedback in Your Marriage
You know those suggestion boxes that businesses put out asking people to submit feedback of their experience? Wouldn’t it be fantastic if we approached marriage in the same way to get a true assessment of how the relationship is going?
You’re probably thinking, “Heck No!” but I ask you to consider the therapy costs you’d save if you implemented this into your relationship. Think for a moment, of how putting this small act into play could actually help you understand your significant other’s feelings, and how that would save you from emotional trauma down the line.
It might sound like a comedic notion, but it’s one I’ve recently embarked on in my own marriage. In my previous writings, I’ve mentioned how covid, a near-death experience, and life changing surgery have helped me learn and understand my spouse in new ways. I’ve even told you that things are going well, but as a true self-saboteur, I couldn’t help but wonder when the bottom would fall out. Naturally, this had me wondering if it was really going as wonderfully as I felt it was.
So, I endeavored to find out. I started asking him questions about our relationship with each other. I’d ask him, “Has my personality changed for the better or is there a part of me you hope I’d recover?” and “What are some things you think I can be doing better?” Sure, it sounds like a rom-com movie, but asking him these kinds of questions helped me uncover his truths in a way I’ve never seemed to notice or hear.
The funny part about it is that I’d ask him questions in the most unanticipated moments of our life together. After sex, after eating, even after laughing or playing Call of Duty together. He’d always ask me why the questions came up the way they did, what prompted them, and the only answer I could give him was, “I guess I’m worried this is too good to be true.” To his surprise, I cared enough about our marriage to ask him for his thoughts on our relationship.
But let’s be honest, most women are not taught to care enough to ask their husbands for feedback and it’s mostly because we are the dominant force in the family. We handle the bulk of the household duties, manage our kids’ schedules, handle the finances and bills and budgeting…I mean we pretty much handle everything, so we don’t necessarily have time to ask how our husbands are feeling about the relationship. I used to be guilty of this, too.
In truth, we hope everything is going well and that THEY CARE ENOUGH to ask us how we’re feeling about it. This is sad because so much of a relationship could be saved from failure if we just embarked on asking for feedback from each other.
Of course, society plays a role in this kind of thinking, always making us think that after the romance is done, the relationship is done. The therapy propaganda doesn’t help either because it has us believing that the only way to get through is to pay hundreds of dollars per hour for an outsider to help us understand our relationships. The more honest answer, the thing we all fear admitting to ourselves, is that the whole time we’ve been in a relationship together we didn’t really learn about each other in ways that mattered.
With that in mind, I began making sure I asked him for his feedback regularly. Being the man that he is, he thought he’d be in the dog house for being honest, but in his case, he was wrong because I was honestly wanting an authentic response. I wanted to know how I was doing. I needed to understand where I was failing and which areas I could do better in. After a few months of this, he started to notice that I had heard his feedback in a real way. He saw changes in me that benefited us both, including things like flirting with him, looking at him with lust in my eyes, and giving him more flexibility when he screwed things up.
As a result, he returned the gesture and began implementing my feedback as part of his growth. Because of this newfound understanding of each other, it had me questioning my own common sense skills, i.e. “Why didn’t I think of doing this sooner?”
There was a period of time where we tried couples therapy, separate and together. But it wasn’t until recently that I discovered several things. Most importantly, the questions our therapist posed to us could have been asked by ourselves to one another. Had we taken the time to ask these questions all along, we could’ve helped our marriage much sooner. Secondly, the animosity that grows between two people because of a lack of listening to each other, could also have been thwarted had we just been honest about our feelings all along. Thirdly, the money we would have saved could have really helped the financial strifes within the earlier parts of our marriage.
Knowing all of this now really helps me understand my role in our marriage more clearly. I’m not just here to raise our kids or to be his wife, I’m in this marriage to be with my best friend, so I have to treat him with the same respect. Further than this, because I opened up the pathway to more authentic interactions with our feedback of each other, we’ve both grown closer, more in touch with our marriage’s goals, wants, and needs, and we’ve become the best versions of ourselves.
And so, I posit this question to other couples. What would asking your partner for feedback do for your relationship?
