Marriage Moats-Bouncing
Published: Sun, 12/04/11
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 I send out a passel of marriage moats each day, but lately a slew of them have bounced. I contacted the provider to ask for a solution, and they said they are working on it. Harumph.
It is frustrating to carefully construct a message and then have it end up in spam, or the trash or wherever orphaned emails land.
The other day someone asked if they could talk to me. My barriers went up. I knew it would be prickly. He stated his carefully worded complaint, and it bounced off of my defenses.
"The reason I did it was... The reason I am right is.... The reason you are wrong to think that is... "
Later I realized that he was only saying this to offer helpful feedback. He assumed that I wanted to avoid hurting people.
I apologized, and thanked him for what he had been brave enough to say. Whoosh. John Gottman identifies the Four Horsemen as particularly toxic to marriage. One of them is defensiveness. For a long time I thought he was nuts. Defending yourself is a good thing.
But after a few years the notion has seeped into my thinking, as I notice the consequences of defensiveness. It assumes that your partner is the enemy. When I mention to John that the article he said he would write is late, he sometimes throws up a wall. I back off, but the article is still late. When he mentions to me that my writing has a grammatical mistake, I sometimes get feisty. He clams up but the error wins. It is different when he says, as he does with remarkable frequency, "Tell me more."
Photo by Rhys Aslpundh
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