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A couple had just celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary and were asked, while at dinner, “What does it take to stay married for 60 years?”
The old woman carefully placed her fork on her plate, dabbed her lips with her napkin, and quietly but firmly answered, “It takes a whole lot of puttin’ up with!”
Her husband just nodded, and kept on eating.
The happiest couples go far beyond just puttin’ up with each other. They cultivate the capacity to expand happiness with each other.
The difference is similar to knowing where to put the fertilizer when you have a dead spot in your lawn. There’s no point in fertilizing the middle of the dead spot. That grass is already dead.
You should put the fertilizer on the green, growing edge around the dead spot. That allows the healthy grass to grow into the dead spot and bring it back to life.
Some couples, in a misguided attempt to ‘work on’ their ‘issues,’ focus all their energy and intensity on what’s wrong with how they relate to each other. Sometimes a counselor or a well-meaning friend will encourage this focus, exhorting the couple to deal with things directly, to get to the root of things, to solve a problem once and for all.
Unfortunately, what bedevils most couples aren’t things that can be fixed that way.
When an ‘issue’ arises from a fundamental personality difference, you can’t ‘just deal with it’ and make the problem go away. There’s no ‘solution’ to being different, because it’s not a ‘problem’ that can be solved.
When your partner sees things altogether differently, because he’s a male, or because she’s an extrovert, or because he’s a night-owl, or because she’s an intuitive feeler rather than a rational analyzer, this is a difference in perspective.
You don’t solve that kind of difficulty, you cope with it. It takes some puttin’ up with.
You learn how to acknowledge, first, and then later on to value the difference in perspective.
But you shouldn’t stop there if you want to be happy. Puttin’ up with the difference will keep the chronic frustration from becoming raging anger. But if you want to be happy, you’ve got to learn to expand happiness together.
You’ve got to learn how to make the occasion for friendly companionship, for light-hearted delight in each other. You’ve got to find a way to like spending time together, doing something that feels interesting enough to both of you.
This effort is easy during the euphoric romance stage, early in the history of relationships. It’s not so automatic and unconscious later on. You have to intentionally plan for fun, deliberately design some cheerfulness. You have to choose to do things like you do with friends.
Friendly activities are actions that expand happiness, in small increments. You don’t expect to do things with friends that will be incredibly, overwhelmingly curative of the relationship between you. You just plan to do things that will be fun, things that are mostly an excuse to hang out with each other, so you can enjoy your companionship.
Friendliness is accumulating enough happinesses that you generate a strong sense of wanting-to-be-with, not just tolerating the putting-up-with of your differences.
Cultivate time and fun-sharing with your spouse like you would with friends, and your friendliness fertilizes delightful companionship.
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