He wants to go fishing, and she wants to visit her mother. But the world is going through a coronavirus epidemic, and one of you is afraid that traveling or meeting with relatives increases the risk of infection. How to find a common language when planning a vacation? Is it possible to learn to listen to each other?
How to spend holidays or weekends? For many couples, the process of negotiating this topic becomes a difficult test. Even before quarantine, we had a million reasons to quarrel: he wants to go to his parents, she wants to go to her aunt. He is planning a trip to Lake Baikal, and she wants to lie down on the couch at home. But everyone says that it is extremely important for him to experience this experience with his beloved, and is offended that he is not delighted at the thought of meeting your beloved grandfather.
Needless to say, in the new year, conflicts have become especially acute. Added to this were controversies about the pandemic, which only added to the difficulties. For example, your partner wants to fly to Vladivostok to see his parents, but you are afraid to go so far and use public transport. Or your wife wants to invite her grandmother over and you think it’s not safe. After all, your children went to school and can infect an elderly relative.
“If you and your partner are arguing about whether you should travel or invite relatives to your place, and the epidemiological situation has become the main reason for disagreeing, there are two ways to help resolve the conflict,” says family therapist Hannah Williamson.
1. Conflict from the heart
In fact, the conflict only indicates that you and your partner want different things. Two people will never agree on absolutely everything, no matter how much they love each other. Therefore, when a partner does not want the same thing as you, you should not take it to heart and think that something is wrong between you. Not at all.
On the contrary, conflict provides an opportunity to get to know your partner better. Why does a loved one want to spend the holidays differently? What is the reason for such desires? Maybe something in his past or present makes him insist? Ask each other about it. Try to empathize with the other: it can have a wonderful therapeutic effect.
You take the place of your partner, trying to understand what emotions and feelings formed his position. What is behind his decisions, what is the root cause? For example, a husband insists on inviting his parents to visit because he misses them, or feels guilty about the past holidays when he insisted on traveling and did not visit them, or is afraid that he will miss the opportunity to see them and never see them again … These feelings – fear, guilt, sadness – most often underlie conflicts.
“When you understand how your partner feels, you get to know him better and it’s easier for you to support him. Just ask questions, and then listen carefully and try to really hear the other, ”advises a family psychologist.
Let the partner speak out, let him tell everything that is on his mind. Do not interfere with him, do not argue, do not correct, do not report the latest news about the number of cases. Remember: this conversation gives you the opportunity to get closer, to really get to know each other. Do not miss it, trying to convince your loved one that he is wrong.
2. Side view
The second technique is to stop seeing the partner as the problem. YOU step back and look at what is happening in a detached way, not connecting it with the personality of your spouse or spouse.
For example, you think: “Why does the wife not understand that her parents are over seventy, and it is dangerous for them to come to a family where there are two schoolchildren who communicated with a bunch of strangers?” If you take your dispute from this point of view, then it is clear that the problem is in the wife, in her unwillingness to realize the obvious. In this case, you need to fight with your wife. But you are one family, and marriage is not a battlefield.
Together you can figure out how to cope with the difficulties that come to you from outside. This technique allows you to see that the problem is not in the partner, but in the environment, in the current situation. And this problem is before both of you, as something completely separate. The most pressing challenge we face today is the virus, the pandemic, the quarantine. She was not invented by her husband or wife, she came “outside”.
Instead of letting this problem come between you, sit down and think together about how to deal with the difficulties. Ideally, you should think like this: “My father-in-law and mother-in-law are elderly people, and it is dangerous for them to meet with children, as they can get sick. On the other hand, the wife has not seen them for more than six months, and then they will not meet on holidays either. She is sad and hurt. Therefore, our task is to figure out how to protect her parents from illness and at the same time make the wife miss them a little less.
Perhaps you will rent separate housing for elderly relatives and ask the children not to kiss their grandparents. Perhaps your wife will go to visit them herself, taking precautions.
Believe me, one way or another you will come up with a way out of the situation, because there is one. You just need to look for it, and one head is good, but two, as you know, is better.
Both of these techniques allow you to experience the conflict not as a destructive force, but as an opportunity to get closer, to know each other better, to unite, to create your own history of overcoming and victories.
“I am not a general practitioner or a virologist and I cannot save you from the coronavirus. But your union from it may well be saved by a simple opportunity to change your point of view. Try it and see if these simple techniques work,” says the family psychologist.