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Those we love can hurt us most

By Jerry Eaton, LMSW
Executive Director
Catholic Charities

All relationships involving love are very important to us and to those we love. Yet, even within deeply committed relationships there are problems. Over the years I’ve worked with many couples in marital counseling and the ones who are the most successful are the ones who work on their own response to their spouse rather than simply complaining about them.

We get married with a mutual goal of being thoughtful, kind and loving to one another so we can have a successful life, marriage and family. Over time the pressures and situations of everyday life see us slowly moving away from being as thoughtful, kind and loving as we should be and we begin to take each other for granted.

While this is happening to us, it is also happening to our spouse. Both of us still need our spouse to be thoughtful, kind and loving and it bothers us when they aren’t, without realizing that we aren’t being as thoughtful, kind, and loving as we need to be either.

I’ve written two articles based on quotes for the book Life Lessons.  The first article was about how we withhold love when we are measuring how unloved we are. The very act of sitting in judgment measuring whether our loved one is being as thoughtful, kind and loving as they need to be takes us out of being thoughtful, kind and loving ourselves. The second article was about how much emphasis we place on the behavior of our loved one while not putting much emphasis on our behavior – “how empty of me to be so full of you.” What we are focusing on isn’t our behavior but the behavior of our spouse and who can’t find fault with not only their spouse but with any other human being?

No one can hurt us more than those we love and respect and when we are hurt we often tend to feel bad about ourselves while needing to defend ourselves with our loved one. Often we do this emphasizing their misbehavior, by measuring their lack of love, and that takes us out of being thoughtful, kind and loving. As this happens to one spouse it tends also to happen to the other spouse.

Resentments, increasing arguments, and deepening hurt over time undermines the love of two good people. The relationship between spouses is also something that children see and learn from. A couple that learns to focus not on each other’s faults but on being thoughtful, kind, and loving is setting up a good foundation for the future of their children when they marry. They are likely to use the same pattern of being thoughtful, kind and loving in their relationship with their children.

There is nothing easier to do than point out the faults of others because none of us is perfect, or even close to perfect.  In relationships it is often the faults of others we tend to see and emphasize while minimizing our own, or while ignoring our own, or excusing our own because we wouldn’t have acted the way we did if we had been treated correctly. We can all do this and be like this, but it really doesn’t end up with us being happy, healthy or successful in our most important relationships.

If instead we work on being thoughtful, kind and loving, even as we take on the very real problems that come up in our most important relationships, we have a much better opportunity of being happy, healthy and successful. If a couple has an agreed upon goal of being thoughtful, kind, and loving and each spouse works on their own behavior to achieve this goal what better way of insuring a successful marriage is there?