In a moment, one of these pairs will begin to handle their conflict constructively, working
toward a solution for their differences.
The other couple will let the conflict handle them so that hostility mounts and a solution
is farther away than ever.
See if you can tell which one of these couples is...
My boyfriend and I have been together since 2010, so that's what it does in years.
And I have been writing down the things that we get in fights about, and they're all
extremely stupid.
So the big one is recycling, which is that I don't recycle.
You don't recycle Olga?
I don't recycle.
I have to fess up that I don't recycle.
Bold.
Yeah.
He gets really mad at me for that because he loves the earth as people should.
But I also get really mad at him for stupid stuff, arguably more stupid than recycling.
One time I bought this nine pack of flosses from Amazon because I felt like we weren't
flossing enough.
And then I put them all around the house in places where I would think if you have a spare
moment, you could floss.
Then I got home from this long work trip and I went to go try to find a floss that I
thought I had like strategically placed all around the house.
I couldn't find any of the flosses that I had distributed.
In my insane, exhausted brain, I decided it was because my boyfriend had found all the
flosses and thrown them away or destroyed them just to spite me.
I went ballistic.
I was like, I can't believe that you would find and destroy all the flosses.
I'm going to go broke buying floss at this rate.
My perception that he was not cooperating with me about the floss was just so enraging.
And I remember I wrote down in my journal.
I actually said, I don't even know why we ever got together in the first place.
Oh my God.
What's going through your head when you're having that reaction?
Do you feel like it could be indicative of something deeper or do you really take it
at face value?
Is it really just about the gentle cleaning or about the floss?
There's always a moment, at least for me, where you're like, is this a sign that it's
all wrong?
Is the floss like a sign that we weren't meant to be together and that this whole thing
has been a mistake?
I've wasted all my childbearing years on you.
I'm like going further and further down this horrible trajectory with this floss destroying
ban because I'm not insane and we're both on the mortgage together.
I don't break up with him over that stuff.
We calm down and count to 10 and do our yoga and like have a conversation about how I'm
going to pause and think next time about whether someone would actually destroy nine
flosses intentionally.
Yeah.
Clearly, you're still together.
So you're able to resolve the flossing and dental and recycling issues pretty well.
How do you do that?
How do we do it?
Hi, I'm Olga Hazan, staff writer at The Atlantic.
And I'm Rebecca Rashid, a producer at The Atlantic.
This is How To Start Over.
Today we explore what makes marriage work, why some people struggle to compromise and
how to start over in marriage, whether that means ending your marriage or revamping the
one you're already in.
To really have a person in your life who you trust more than you've trusted anyone
before it's magic.
I mean, before I met my husband, okay, wow, I haven't cried in an interview in a long
time.
This is good.
Before I met my husband, I never had that.
In school, I met the woman that would eventually be my ex-wife and my son's mother and she
felt like a good choice.
And I actually don't think that she was a bad choice, despite the fact that we're not
still married.
I didn't quite execute my part of it very well.
We're going to sit down with two people to hear about their marriages, to help answer
our burning question.
How do you know when it's time to break up?
We're going to talk with Heather Heverleski, an author and advice columnist, and Matthew
Frey, a relationship coach and author, who have had two very different experiences of
marriage.
So why did you marry Bill?
I married Bill because I was in love with him and we had great sex and he was an adult
with a job which was amazing and unbelievable to me at the time.
And every time I tried to not marry him, I would sit around in my house thinking, if I break
up with this guy, my friends will never talk to me again.
This is Heather Heverleski.
The author of Foreverland, a memoir about her marriage, which Wartsenall is going strong.
She's also an advice columnist for Ask Polly on Substack.
You land in this place of, uh oh, I can't walk away from this because it's obvious that
I'm supposed to be with this person.
It's just crystal clear.
And every time I meet anyone else, I'm just going to think, too bad you have to date this
guy because you squirted up with that person who was perfect for you.
And I mean, of course, perfect, you know, I mean often in what that ends up meaning within
a marriage is, this is the perfect man to torment me for the rest of my days on Earth.
It's not really that easy to capture a marriage without being reductive.
Even when you say, my marriage is happy right now or we're getting along great right now,
really all you're doing every time you say anything about a marriage is you're taking
a snapshot of either an idea or a belief or a point in time that is about to change.
With Bill, when I met him, I was very clear about the fact that I was going to show him
my flaws in addition to my qualities.
And so when we were emailing back and forth before we met each other, I sent him this email
that basically said, I'm a bossy, demanding woman and you just need to know that up front.
If that doesn't sound good to you, then you should just move on because that's who I am.
Apparently, I can't change it.
So it worked for us.
That story reminds me of I had an ex-boyfriend who one time told me, the thing I like about
you is that you're not anxious at all.
And I'm probably the most anxious person who's ever lived.
And I told my mom this, I was like, he thinks I'm not anxious.
Isn't that so great?
And she was like, you better slowly start introducing him to your real personality or
else, he's going to freak out once he figures out what you're really like.
So I think that a lot of people think the main threats to marriage are things like cheating.
But you talk about a lot of like day-to-day stressors that can really test people for people
who haven't read the book.
What were some of those lower level BS stressors for you?
I mean, some of the things were really caused by me, created by me.
Our biggest conflicts were sort of more created by very stressful emotional circumstances.
Like, I leave for the first time and he has the baby.
And when I get back, he's holding the baby on one arm.
And the baby's limbs are dangling over a boiling pot.
And he's stirring the boiling pot with his other hand.
And I say, what am I looking at right now?
Like, what am I even seeing?
And he's like, calm down.
And then I'm like, oh, like freaking out.
Yeah.
Immediately angry.
So the situations where we disagreed about something that was happening and the kids are
there, those were the situations that were the hardest for us and are the hardest for
us.
When we're both feeling like we're failing, one of the primary challenges of a marriage
is when you feel like you're failing, do you blame your spouse or do you say,
it's okay, we're in this together.
You know, I've got your back.
I grew up in a small town in Ohio, conservative, religious, I grew up going to Catholic school
for 12 years.
When you're from the town I'm from and raised in Catholicism the way that I was, what you
do is around your college years, you're trying to find the person you're going to marry.
This is Matthew Frey, a relationship coach and author of This Is How Your Marriage Ends.
In his article for The Atlantic called The Marriage Lesson That I Learned Too Late, Matthew
implied that his wife left him because he sometimes left dishes by the sink.
I grew up in an environment where my friends and I would sort of playfully mock each other.
We'd call each other names.
We didn't mean them.
I love my friends almost the way that I love my family.
Now, it was a very sort of like locker room thing to do, playing football, playing basketball.
And I brought that same sort of sarcastic, playful mocking to my relationship.
And one of the things that she asked me to do was not do that to her and given that my
intentions were pure and that I thought it was ludicrous that I sacrificed, if you will,
single them in the rest of my life to say, I want to be with you.
Like I choose you over everybody else for the rest of my life, you're my person.
That to imply that I intend to harm or that this is actually a bad thing for me to be
doing, I thought she was the one that was inappropriately or unfairly complaining about some benign
behavior that really wasn't bad.
And I'm like, why should I have to change like who I am and what I do just because you're
interpreting it the wrong way?
How old were you when you got married?
I was 25.
Okay.
So pretty young.
And how long were you guys married?
We were together for 12 years, told them married for nine of them.
How would you describe to someone a total stranger why you're marriage ended?
I would say I spent 12 years of our relationship, nine of them married, not allowing my wife
to think and feel the things that she thought and felt any time I disagreed or that they
became inconvenient for me on some level.
Anytime she made a request for change and I didn't intellectually calculate that the
problem was a severe she was making it out to be.
Or if I didn't sort of organically empathize with the emotional experience she might be
having, I always chose me over her.
When you're an article, you highlight that you left dishes by the sink.
You talk about how it was like indicative of larger problems.
Can you talk a little bit about your household's approach to dishes and why you were kind of
leaving them by the sink and why that became a problem for your ex-wife?
Yeah.
The dish by the sink was actually a drinking glass by the sink.
I would drink water to like take vitamin supplements and things like that in the morning.
And I just left the glass there because it seemed so inefficient to put it in the dishwasher
like over and over again.
And she just said, what if you did?
What if you just did?
Like for me.
And I refused.
I fought like a child because I thought my preference that the glass should be there
was equally valid to her preference that it should be in the dishwasher.
My brain was like, this is not a harmful thing.
This is something she's definitely sort of like over dramatizing.
That in and of itself is disrespectful and it was painful.
So these are two people who both experience the petty BS that comes up in a long term relationship.
With Matt, the glass he left by the sink became something his wife couldn't ignore.
And perhaps something indicative of other deeper issues.
And while Heather saw her husband holding the baby while stirring the pot, but they were
somehow able to work through it because they decided to see it as a problem to tackle
together rather than something to blame on each other.
So you can see how this common problem, my spouse isn't doing what I want them to do,
led to dramatically different outcomes.
But it still doesn't explain how to act on these sorts of issues.
Why are some couples able to overcome these petty grievances, but others can't?
In Heather's eyes, a strong marriage requires a willingness to be open and flexible and
maybe pay less attention to your partner's quirks.
Marriage is not static.
I mean, I think you have eras where things feel a little flat and different eras that
feel sort of like, oh, we're rediscovering each other.
This is fun.
Or we're better friends now.
Or we found a new activity that we really enjoy together.
And it's kind of bringing us closer.
But if someone's like, you know, I feel like we're in a rut, things aren't going well.
Do I break up?
Do I work on this?
Are there ways to actually work on a relationship without just totally ending it?
There are lots of ways to make a relationship better.
It's mostly just a question of do these two people really, really want to stay together?
And I think that when two people really want it and they're both capable of not change
at an essential level, but just growth or openness or just to appreciate and make space
for the particular emotional folds of the other person's experience.
You know, we talk about like he's got to do more housework.
She's got to make more money.
A lot of times with marriage, we end up talking about these really concrete economies.
It's in whether they're functioning and, you know, how many resources do we have?
And who's in charge?
And who's the CEO and who's the manager?
But really, it's the mood of a marriage that matters the most.
And when you know that you're not bringing good things mood-wise to the other person,
when you know that you're not showing up and asking them to tell you what they really
love the most and what they really dream of and what they really long for, if you're
not capable of doing that, if you can't make space for someone to imagine themselves
the way they always wanted to be or when you can't make a space where they feel the
most like themselves or feel loved, then you have to ask yourself, what kind of a partner
am I that I can't do that?
Like, why can't I try?
You've written that marriage requires amnesia.
Do you feel like most people judge their own relationships or their own partners like
too critically or like not critically enough or maybe the trick is not in like being
critical or not critical, but in just like forgetting the person's flaws?
I wanted to describe a day where you're just allergic to the person you're with.
And on this morning where Bill was walking around the kitchen and he had a cold and he was
just making the most revolting, awful sounds, non-stop.
There were two sounds a minute and so I started to write down the sounds and I started to
laugh and I wrote the first part of this chapter about how weird it is to share a house with
someone for the course of your entire life and to have to hear their particular sounds
for the stretch of your days on Earth.
Once I was down with it, I gave it to Bill and he laughed and we thought it was really
funny.
The amnesia part is just like, you need a mute button, you need a fast forward button.
For people who are hypercritical, which I would sadly put myself in that category,
you have to learn to not observe so closely, just let someone be.
You want to shove your partner into like that fantasy realm that you created that you
were imagining, that you were kind of like savoring by yourself.
You want to put them in there too and see if it works.
Instead of always saying, my fantasy is this precious, perfect thing and my reality is
this high definition, snarly, smelly man.
This person's weak spots are actually beautiful too and they're lovable and the stuff that's
really gross, I'm just going to try to not notice as much as I can.
You're like, quote unquote, day job, you're an advice columnist.
I'm sure like a lot of people have written into you wondering if they should leave their
partner.
What are some of those typical, I maybe want to get divorced or break up feelings?
I've been running Ask Polly for 10 years and sometimes people are just adding up all
the traits of a person and they're sort of saying, I want someone who's more educated
or I want someone who's more fun or more adventurous.
Like my boyfriend, sister and a home to my children, my boyfriend's always working.
I want someone who has different ideas about how to raise kids than this person has.
Those are hard letters to answer because a marriage is built by two people.
It's not just like a combination of two people's traits and when two people are committed
to each other and they're really in it, they can create anything they want from that.
In many ways, obviously money is a giant stressor and can be extremely limiting when there's
not enough of it.
Having different groups of friends is one of the things that typifies like this relationship
is not assigned.
It's a sign that the relationship might not work.
I wanted to talk about the blowback to your book, which I really love the book.
I thought it was actually like a really positive view of your marriage.
It seems like they are upset that you said anything negative about your marriage.
I think a lot of people do only talk positively about their spouse.
Where do you think that blowback came from?
Why do you think people have this rosy or sweet view of marriage typically?
I think people want to keep marriage in a very clear binary where there are good marriages
and bad marriages.
If your marriage is good, everything should be easy.
If your marriage is bad, it's doomed and you should get divorced right now.
A lot of married people understood and a lot of married people were like, that's not
how I run my marriage.
My marriage is perfect and I never have feelings of anger or rage.
I'm never disappointed in my wonderful, perfect, glorious spouse.
The thing is, maybe some people really do have great, really effective rose colored glasses
that they always use with their spouse and that's what works.
They have the best sex in the world because they're always looking through these filtered
lenses of this beautiful person.
In some ways, they're basically saying the same thing, which is, I prefer this filter.
It helps me to love my spouse more when I reject the idea that there is any hatred in
any marriage except a bad one.
I take Heather's point.
I think it's easy to fall into the trap of believing there's one perfect person out
there for you.
Assaultmate, if you will.
When we're trying to decide whether it's time to end things, it can be easy to see any
conflict as a sign that this is not the perfect person because if it was, the marriage would
be smooth sailing.
People research suggests that this belief in soulmates can actually impact whether we
think our relationship is capable of change or if it's doomed.
I often go back to wedding vow.
I mean, people can all sort of recite it off the top of their head.
Spike W.S. Lee, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, spoke with me about the concept of
love frames and how different perspectives of love can determine how well your relationship
can weather conflict.
Specifically, people who see love as a journey tend to take the good with the bad.
One of the traditional forms of the wedding vow, I take you to be my wife or husband to
have and to hold from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer,
and signer-friendly health.
I mean, so it talks about all of these ups and downs in the relationship.
So difficulties are expected.
They are part of the process.
And when they arise, when these sort of difficulties arise, you are supposed to hold on to each
other and work out the solutions.
So in a journey frame, these conflicts become sort of more meaningful.
They are part of the growth process.
In love fiction, happily ever after really appears only at the end of the novel.
It doesn't appear in the middle because after they're happily ever after, there's not
much of a story to tell, right?
Before happily ever after, it's all to twist and turn conflict that makes the story interesting.
Whereas for people who think of love as a perfect fit, well, when conflicts arise, I
like questioning, are we really such a good fit?
Did I choose to write partner?
They are more likely to think about like alternatives, who else, maybe I should be dating instead.
And so the proactiveness, the commitment, the engagement in maintaining a relationship,
those behaviors are more positive when people have a journey frame than if they have this
sort of perfect fit frame of love.
For Heather Haverleski, taking the good with the bad may be the secret to her successful
marriage, or at least her ability to see her husband for who he is and not idealize
what he should be.
But for Matt's relationship, the journey had simply come to an end.
For his wife, staying in the relationship was more painful than leaving.
How did you guys actually know when it was time to divorce?
Because I think a lot of people go through rough patches and they're kind of like, is this
a rough patch?
Is it just our relationship?
Was there like a final straw moment or what actually happened that led to filing for
divorce?
Sure.
I don't want to speak for her when trust has been eroded in these subtle nuance ways
that I tend to talk about.
It's vulnerable to a major trauma, a job loss, a health diagnosis, a death of a close
family member or a friend, something like really bad happens and then boom, suddenly
this realization sets in that my relationship is not a source of safety and comfort and
reliability for me.
So I feel like I want to leave.
And so unbeknownst to me, trust had been significantly eroded and then my father and
law died out of nowhere one night.
My wife's father and it was shocking and awful.
But I thought it was just life happening, his life was always going to happen.
But what I believe happened is that she recognized in that moment, for however many years we'd
been together leading up to that nine or ten years, Matt isn't a safe person, a safe space
for me.
She said it at dinner one night.
Matt, I'm not sure.
If I love you, I'm not sure if I want to be in this marriage anymore.
I moved into the guest room and patted like a child because I thought she was sort of being
unfair and quitting on me.
Rather than accepting any responsibility for anything I'd done or not done had resulted
in her feeling that way.
So there was just 18 months of whoroughiness and no growth.
She had to make decision.
I opted out of doing anything.
She had to make the hard decision to quote unquote break up the family to sacrifice time
with her son for the rest of his childhood, which must have been an incredibly difficult
choice to make.
So it's like when should people leave?
I don't know when that is and I don't know how people decide, but I suspect it's that
moment when the pain of staying in the same place feels like outweighs the promise of
hope of something different because this is too bad to stay.
And I think that's what she eventually decided was it was too bad to stay.
So she kind of put you on, I don't want to say probation, but whatever.
She was sort of like made you aware, she's unhappy.
And it sounds like when she said that she was unhappy, you sort of discounted that, you
said you pouted.
Were you opposed to getting divorced?
Like you didn't want to get divorced?
Yeah, no, no, I didn't want to.
I wouldn't have characterized my relationship as pleasant and healthy.
It was miserable, truly.
And my parents split when I was four and my parents lived 500 miles apart from my entire
childhood.
This idea of getting divorced and putting your kids through that was something I was
hypersensitive to.
And so a huge part of that was like, I'm failing at the most important thing in my life.
I'm going to lose so much time with my son.
I'm going to be part of putting my son through the same thing that I went through that I
thought was really awful as a child.
I wanted her to like magically get back to the person that I married.
The fun, happy person that the majority of our relationship, at least from my blind
perspective, always was.
You know, I just hindsight.
Yeah.
So I sent your article to my boyfriend.
He was like, yeah, well, you know, this is how I feel about the fact.
I'm really bad about recycling.
I like, really, this is going to get me canceled, but I like really forget to recycle
all the time.
And he like loves recycling.
He like thinks is really important.
He was like, well, you know, you never recycle.
And this like reminds me how you don't recycle.
And so then I like listed a bunch of things that he doesn't do that I wish he did.
I think your experience is totally valid.
And I could completely see how that would lead to a marriage ending.
But I also think some people might say like, look, in any couple, you're going to have
fights about like dumb crap.
I'm wondering like, how to know the difference between the two?
How to know when it's the same fight about the recycling for the millions time versus
this person is not being heard and you're in danger of like losing your relationship?
I don't think it matters what that thing is, whether it's a dish by the sink, or the
recycling, or the position of the toilet seat or anything like that.
These so called petty grievances, I think are what destroys trust and love in the average
relationship.
I think our inability to have a successful conversation about it, to repair whatever's
wrong is what's an issue is what sort of hurts on an emotional level.
I just have this strong belief that it accumulates over time.
And again, we can have the petty fights, I think, for three years, for five years, for seven
years.
And everything seems fine.
And there just comes a point where the pile up of the paper cuts, the pile up of the
lack of validation and the lack of consideration for whichever is sort of the more in pain
partners experience or hell.
Maybe both of them equally, I just think somebody reaches sort of this critical mass of enough,
enough, I'm not doing this anymore.
Have you come up with any ways to better get through to each other about how important
this little stuff can be?
Yeah, I've tried.
And that is, I imagine my son, when he was four, he was a threat to wake up in the middle
of the night, crying, afraid of a monster hiding under his bed.
Dad, I'm really afraid of this monster under the bed.
And all of a sudden, this is stupid.
My instinct, intellectually, is to convince him.
There isn't a monster under the bed.
I might say something like, bud, tough and ob, there isn't a monster there.
Things fine.
I don't have time for this.
Please go to sleep.
Bye.
And I leave.
And so important facts, I'm correct.
There wasn't a monster under the bed.
I love that child more than I love anybody.
I would never, ever, ever behave in a way designed to inflict pain on that guy.
Ever.
But is my son still afraid?
He's still sad.
He's crying.
Except dad abandoned him to be afraid and to cry alone in the dark.
He now trusts me a little bit less.
I just think showing up differently matters.
And so I want to hug that kid.
And I would say, buddy, I don't think there's a monster under the bed.
But I can see that you're really afraid right now.
And I've been afraid before.
And I am so sorry that that's what you're experiencing right now.
Let's turn the light on and let's make sure there's no monster there.
I'm not going anywhere.
And even if we can't fix the problem, we're always going to show up.
And I think that is the idea that correlates most closely with our adult relationships.
And we're disagreeing with our adult partner.
More or less saying there isn't a monster under the bed.
You shouldn't think that you shouldn't feel that.
Even though we believe so strongly we're intellectually correct, is this erosion of trust
that happens?
Same would be true with this recycling situation, like in you.
You just have to intellectually agree in order to have a successful relationship.
And I would say no.
Absolutely not.
We just have to validate.
The difference between agreement and validation.
Is there something you look for from advice seekers to kind of get a sense of can this marriage
or relationship be saved versus I'm your last stop before the divorce attorney and you
should just go there?
Oftentimes two people will be committed, not to the other person, but committed to the
distraction of fighting with the other person instead of getting out and living their
lives.
Sometimes when someone's in that state, they just need someone else to say it shouldn't
be that hard.
And someone is describing a spouse that sounds pretty awful.
But the way that the spouse is being described is a little awful too.
Like there's some mutual awfulness in the picture.
I really don't like to say you're better than that guy.
You should jump him immediately because it's sort of like you two might be a really
good match actually.
It's just you have to turn this awfulness upside down and find the love somehow.
Even each other's desires is precious for a while and see how that feels.
I went to couples therapy with one boyfriend and I used to come out of therapy thinking,
I hate it when he talks.
That mom was my complaint.
I hate hearing him, his facing making sounds at me, I hate it.
And eventually I had to admit, I really can't stand my boyfriend and I need to break
up with him.
But sometimes you don't know that until you're in a room with a third of all witness and
suddenly you're like, and even, okay, if someone is saying, here's how I feel.
Sometimes I feel sad and the person starts crying and you're like, I don't care about
this person's tears.
That's a very bad sign having no empathy.
If you just feel like someone just isn't enough for you, then you can take that at face
value and say, I always feel like this person isn't enough and then be gone.
Move on.
I have to make sure that the impatience doesn't come from actually just from being with
someone who loves you.
Because if you came from a background where people didn't treat you with that much kindness
and that much presence, it can just feel awkward to be with someone who's crazy about you.
It's just unfamiliar.
So you have to ask yourself, can I make this unfamiliar country that doesn't feel like
my homeland at all because of my homeland I'm starving?
Can I make this abundance feel good?
A question for people out there who are single or maybe marriage skeptics.
What's the case for marriage?
To really have a person in your life who you trust more than you've trusted anyone before,
it's magic.
I mean, before I met my husband, okay, wow, I haven't cried in an interview in a long
time.
This is good.
Before I met my husband, I never had that.
I never had a person in my life who I knew that if I said, I really need your help right
now.
They would drop everything and give me everything they could.
I don't know.
It's easy to feel conflicted about everything.
You know, it's easy to not trust people because you've never trusted anyone.
And it's easy to assume the worst about people because you don't know.
Ultimately, don't know anyone well enough and haven't witnessed anyone for long enough
to see how pure most people's intentions are.
I think the benefit of marrying someone with a really pure heart like my husband, Bill,
is that it makes you look at other people in new, more compassionate ways.
Having a model of a relationship that you can actually improve what you put in comes
back to you basically because you're building something that gets better with effort and
with love.
People feel embarrassed by so many things and it's a great marriage makes you less embarrassed.
You know, it makes you more daring and you bring that energy to other people.
Marriage is like the powerhouse of the cell.
I don't know.
Like the mitochondria.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Exactly.
This pandemic has made a lot of people feel like they wanted to force their spouse.
We've spent so much time together and had so many opportunities for conflict.
But for many people in long-term romantic relationships, knowing when to end things may
come with a better understanding of why things are going the way they are.
Like Spike W.S. Lee told us, the issue may be your perspective of how love should work.
If you see love as a perfect fit or a soulmate, you may believe conflict is just not capable
of being resolved.
If anything, it's a sign that things will only go downhill from there.
People who think of love as a perfect fit, well, when conflicts arise, I thought questioning
are we really such a good fit, you know, did I choose to write partner.
So in a journey frame, these conflicts become sort of more meaningful.
They are part of the growth process.
In love fiction, happily ever after really appears only at the end of the novel, right?
It doesn't appear in the middle because after they're happily ever after, there's not
much of a story to tell, right?
Is the before happily ever after is all to twist and turns to conflicts that make the story
interesting.
Even some of the best relationships have their ups and downs, though.
And many good relationships aren't Instagram perfect, as much as we want to believe they
are.
Maybe some people really do have great, really effective rose-colored glasses that they
always use with their spouse, and that's what works, you know, and they have the best
sex in the world because they're always looking through these filtered lenses at this beautiful
person.
In some ways, they're basically saying the same thing, which is, I prefer this filter.
It helps me to love my spouse more when I reject the idea that there is any hatred
in any marriage, except a bad one.
For Matthew, hindsight is 20-20.
He realized that leaving a glass by the sink reflected a broader attitude that left his
wife feeling unloved.
It's worth considering whether there are small things either you or your partner do that
have spiraled into deeper trust issues, and ideally work on those before they spiral.
I don't think it matters what that thing is, whether it's a dish by the sink that they're
recycling in the position of the toilet seat or anything like that.
These so-called petty grievances, I think, are what destroys trust and love in the average
relationship.
I think our inability to have a successful conversation about it, to repair whatever's
wrong, is what's an issue, is what sort of hurts.
As Matthew pointed out, validating each other's feelings is really important.
You don't have to agree with your partner, but you do have to make them feel heard.
As Heather said, remember that relationships aren't just the sum of two people's traits.
You have to decide that you're going to love the whole person, not just the best 20%
of them.
Maybe, starting over in your marriage means accepting your partner for who they are.
Instead of always saying, my fantasy is this precious, perfect thing, and my reality is
this high definition, snarly, smelly man.
This person's weak spots are actually beautiful too, and they're lovable.
The stuff that's really gross, I'm just going to try to not notice as much as I can.
That's all for this week's episode of How To Start Over.
This episode was produced by me, Rebecca Rashid, and hosted by Olga Hazan, editing by AC
Valdez and Claudina Bade.
Fact check by Anna Alvarado.
Our engineer is Matthew Simonson.
Well thanks to Adrienne LaFrance, executive editor of The Atlantic.
The opening audio in this episode was provided by a 1960s infomercial called Handling
Marital Conflicts.
