Tell Better Stories, Have a Better Relationship (Part 2)

Part 2: Relationship Isn’t a Real Thing.

If you’ve experienced someone close to you – a sibling, parent, old friend, or intimate lover – hold (tell) some story about you in a way that felt harsh, one-sided, dismissive of your actual experience, or perhaps ignorant and devoid of curiosity, or simply lacked generosity in how it portrayed you, then you know the sting of that pain – the pain of exile.

Indeed it is a kind of exile, as their story keeps out the parts of you inconvenient to that story, and that would require they believe a different story. Which only erodes safety and trust, causing you to pull away, mentally, emotionally, if not physically.

Their story is evidence of their (unconscious) inclination to judge you harshly. How could you possibly feel genuinely safe to be your authentic self in their presence?

I myself am estranged from my own father, in part because of a letter he wrote me 3 years ago that gave me insight into the story he tells (himself, and perhaps others) about me. After years of therapy and deep growth work, I’d finally decided to initiate a sincere effort to reconcile with him. We hadn’t been in each other’s lives for 20 years, and I was don’t holding any grudges about that.

Sadly, it didn’t go well. In a letter he wrote to me shortly after my attempt, he told me he didn’t like the man I had become. He insisted I get therapy to heal something that had nothing to do with him. He showed zero curiosity (he obviously missed that I’d already been going to therapy for years).

His story felt deeply disrespectful, and completely dismissive of my actual life experience. There was no room in his story of me for the man I actually know myself to be.

He couldn’t see through his story because he didn’t think of it as a story. To him, it’s just reality.

Relationship Isn’t a Real Thing.

Dr. Stan Tatkin (renowned marriage & family therapist) cleverly points out that a relationship isn’t a tangible thing. You can’t touch it, point at it, put it in a box, or pin it to the wall. It lives or dies by the agreements we make (and keep), the actions we take, and the stories we tell (and how we tell them).

Modern couples into “doing the work” will spend a lot of time talking about agreements, boundaries, needs and desires, daily connection rituals, and other practical aspects of figuring out how to thrive together.

What they don’t often talk about (because they don’t even know they should) .. is actually how to talk about the events and experiences of their journey together.

Couples will debate endlessly over what they see as facts: who’s right about what actually happened in the past, about each other’s (and their own) character traits, each of their perceived strengths and weaknesses, who contributes what (and who doesn’t), what mistakes the other makes, and so on.

They’ll argue like lawyers in a courtroom, certain their version is based in actual fact, tangible reality, rather than fallible perception, memory, cultural bias, pure belief, and a thousand other biases and unseen variables. And they always get nowhere fast because of it.

I’ve seen even otherwise healthy couples completely derail their life together because they couldn’t agree on something each partner saw as so fundamentally obvious a fact.

Hello, my name is Bryan, and I’m a factaholic.

I used to believe that for a relationship to succeed, for my partner and I to get along, we must agree on the most important “facts.” Naturally, as a factaholic, I was sure all facts were important.

Which describes a ”Masculine Values” heavy approach to relationships.

To a more core-masculine person, intellectual agreement is essential for a relationship to move forward. We tend to place Defcon Level 5 Priority on agreement over all kinds of intellect-based things as vital if there is to be peace in the land. We’ve got to agree on viewpoints and opinions of events, the meanings of words, the ideas we hold, what is right vs. wrong, Truth vs non-Truth, and so on.

This is why men, in particular, since the beginning of time will argue (and go to war) over religious and political beliefs despite the impossibility of being able to prove with any reliable finality whether one religious or political ideology is absolutely and always better (or more true) than any other.

We bring this same intellectual fatalism into intimate relationships thinking it must apply there, too. Which is why men also tend to experience relationship as an endless battle ground, as well. Imposing our masculine allegiance to “facts” (as we understand them) onto intimacy causes us to overlook the need to tend to the ”Feminine Values” that bring life to relationship: the drive for connection, and the yearning to maintain a flow of love between us. Facts play little role in creating any of that.

Indeed, after 10 years of marriage and working professionally with couples for longer, despite being a man previously devoted to the worship of facts, I’ve fully accepted that facts are rather tricky things.

Facts are so easily distorted by the unavoidable (and well-researched) limitations of memory and perception.

We humans don’t actually remember things precisely how they happened, no matter how convinced we are that we do. Even a great memory is still affected by the human limits of perception. No person can possibly take in the essentially infinite variables and factors that ultimately led up to any given event coming to pass.

No human mind (nor even advanced AI, as such are the times) will ever be able to grasp the entirety of the childhood influences, cultural influences, environmental conditions, thoughts, feelings, fears, drives, motivations, and so on that are always at play in any given unfolding moment.

Yet argue we will, even passionately, when convinced that we know all there is to know about the what and why of an event, why someone is how they are, why they did what they did, and so on.

Most arguments that endure beyond 5 minutes soon feel utterly frustrating and exhausting because after 5 minutes of rising heart-rates and stress hormones flooding the body like Viking raiders in a monastery, any hope of resolution to the conflict is lost. Any hope for agreement over facts gets overwhelmed by your well-honed, unconscious defenses. Instead of restoring peace, safety, trust, and emotional connection, you are locked in a futile battle to win each other over to your own story of reality.

How often has arguing over facts, over who is right about something, yielded a genuinely helpful resolution to your differences?

Has it ever brought you closer?

To be clear, I’m not suggesting you must throw out facts altogether. Facts have their place (*especially after betrayal, which I talk about in Part 3).

Rather, I simply encourage you to hold them gently and avoid the temptation to work hard to insist your partner accept all your facts. Because that will never, ever be a winning strategy for bringing you closer together.

♦◊♦

In Part 3 (coming tomorrow) … learn the 2 extremely common words every couple should banish from their relational vocabulary, why facts matter to betrayal, and how to get beyond betrayal to a new story.