These are four little words that can make all the difference in your relationships and not just with your spouse. Marriage can be a journey of self-discovery with your spouse sharing navigation duties. Sometimes you get good directions and sometimes you don’t. But as long as you’re talking, you are not alone on the journey.
Asking yourself what can I do? or asking your spouse what can I do? can help you get out of communication traffic jams in your relationship. By asking the question you are opening up to discussion, both positive and negative. Sometimes, the worst negatives you can get are when you just ask yourself and you forget to consult your spouse.
At the risk of being deliberately confusing, just asking the question doesn’t solve problems. What it does is help you to generate solutions with your spouse and with yourself.
For example, we are not with our spouse 24/7 nor are we mind readers. There are a lot of times when our spouses are wrestling with issues and problems that we don’t know anything about. They don’t have to be major problems, in fact – a lot of stressors are minor issues that pile up. They can make us cranky.
Well an obvious solution would be to communicate. Communication is great, but it doesn’t solve everything. The reason it doesn’t solve everything is that sometimes you can’t talk a problem better or fix the problem.
Recently, my husband took a contract to write some technical documentation. He’s been looking for a permanent job, but while he is in the process of job-hunting; he works as a contractor. He enjoys the challenge of a new assignment, but something about the new job was not sitting well with him.
Unlike with previous contracts, he did not talk about this one much. He also did not seem to be working on it as diligently as I know he is capable of. I’ve seen him when he gets going on a writing assignment that involves technical training – the man has a brilliant mind and he’s a really gifted when it comes to teaching.
I don’t mind admitting that I get tied up with my own work and writing. So sometimes, little things slip by me. A week into his new contract, he was idling at the kitchen table and not working. I’ll admit, I jumped to an erroneous conclusion and I asked him what was up? Why wasn’t he working?
He shook his head at me and told me that he was waiting on some responses from the work he’d already submitted. He couldn’t move forward until he got the responses. I accepted that and went back to work. Later that night he came out and asked me how I would feel if he dropped the contract he was working on. You see, without going into a lot of detail the job he was hired to do was the type of work that would get other people replaced in a company. He understood that from the second day on the assignment.
They didn’t tell him that, but he knew the style of work. He’d seen it done at other companies before – but he’d never been so closely involved. It was eating him up. He hated doing this. He didn’t care that it would happen whether he was doing the job or not. He did not want to be the one downsizing a person’s livelihood.
What can I do?
It was all I could say, but it was the right thing to say. I gave him an outlet. I listened. I couldn’t fix the problem and I couldn’t talk it better. But I did help. I helped him.
So, what can you do?