My Offensive Husband

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communication, humor, laughter, marriage, relationships

One of the things that I love about my husband is his irreverent sense of humor. He says things that are outlandish and inappropriate because he finds it amusing, and fortunately for him I also find it funny. Most of the time, anyway.

This week, I found myself not appreciating my husband’s humor. Instead of laughing when he made a comment that was sarcastic or outrageous, I felt offended, like he was attacking me. His remarks started to feel like jabs instead of lighthearted joking.

Then, last night, I was cleaning up the living room. My husband, who was relaxing while the baby played on the floor, saw that I had picked up his wallet and keys from the mantle and was moving them. He came over, grabbed them out of my hands, and said, “That’s mine! Don’t move my stuff!”

Now, I knew he meant no offense by this. Believe it or not, he would not have been offended if I did the same to him. In his mind it was a “I’m saying this so dramatically that I can’t actually be very serious about it” kind of thing. I, however, was unimpressed. I’m ashamed to say that instead of responding maturely, I snapped, “You clean it up, then!” and stormed out of the room.

I recognized pretty quickly that I had let a small comment become a big deal, so I went to him a few minutes later and apologized for snapping at him. The comment was, after all, not that big of a deal. Instead of just leaving it there, though, I took a minute to think about why the comment had upset me. I’ve often found that when I get upset about something seemingly small, there is something larger behind my reaction. On reflection, I realized that the comment had upset me because I had started to feel like I was doing more than my fair share of the housework and because I want to make sure that our daughter grows up seeing her parents speaking kindly to each other. Oh, and because I’m very tired, and being tired kills your sense of humor.

I explained this to my husband, and sharing it made me feel like he understood better what was going on in my mind. I’m not sure that we’ve fully resolved this issue, since that is my husband’s natural sense of humor, and that’s unlikely to change soon. Even if he could change it, I’m also not sure whether I would want him to change it. So we are still in dialogue about it, but I think maybe that’s enough for now.

Source: livehappylivestrong.com

We talked on Tuesday about not blowing small comments out of proportion, and after my experience this week I want to add that instead of blowing up, it may help to look deeper and see what is causing the temptation to overreact. If there is something larger underlying the reaction, try dealing with that instead of focusing in on the specific comment, since the comment itself is not the problem. It worked for me!

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Appreciating My Husband’s Humor

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appreciation, friendship, humor, joy, marriage, relationships

Source: blog.chesterniteowl.com

One of the great blessings of my life is that I have a very funny husband. He is often funny intentionally, and even more often unintentionally.

For example, the other day we went to a nice bakery and got some fancy bread. It was expensive bread, and we have a choice between getting a half loaf and getting a full loaf. My husband chose the full loaf, which was a little strange because he tends to be pretty cheap. As we drove away from the bakery, we had the following conversation:

Husband: I decided to get the whole loaf because I know how much you like bread…

Me: Aww!

Husband: …and I wanted to make sure there was some left for me.

I had to laugh, both because it wasn’t what I expected, and because I knew he was right. With the half loaf, he wouldn’t have gotten more than a few bites.

Another example of my husband’s humor happened when our daughter was about a week old. We were discussing our daughter with my mother-in-law, and my husband said, “You know, it seems like she wakes up and it’s all downhill from there.” Again, I had to laugh because his comment was so unexpected, and so accurate. That is exactly what it’s like to have a newborn.

Source: buildyourmarriage.org

Sadly, I sometimes lose sight of how funny my husband is. One of the things that I really enjoy about getting together with friends is that it often helps me remember how much fun my husband is to be around. I see people laughing and smiling as they talk to him, and it reminds me of his wonderful sense of humor.

Whether I’m seeing how much other people enjoy my husband’s company, or just looking for the funny things he says, focusing on the joy helps me to feel refreshed and positive about our relationship and about life in general. If you’ve lost sight of the joy in your relationship, try shifting your focus and see if it does the same for you. You just might be surprised!

How to Keep the Joy in Your Relationship

Tags

affection, awareness, humor, joy, marriage, relationships

The first time I got dumped, I saw it coming. I had just gotten to morning worship at the school I attended, and I saw that my boyfriend was already there. As I watched, he ran up to one of his female friends and gave her a big grin and a hug. And just like that, I realized that my relationship was in trouble. There was nothing romantic about the hug, but I saw in his interactions with her a joy that was missing from our time together. Even though it was my first real relationship, I recognized immediately that a relationship cannot survive without joy. Sure enough, two days later he dumped me.

This week strategy is about an important way to keep the joy in your relationship: stay playful. One way to stay playful is to look for the humor in everyday situations. As much fun as it can be to have special date nights or trips with your partner, it can be tough to do when you have been together for a while, and especially after you add kids to the mix. Appreciating the humor in the things that happened while you’re with your partner, though, does not require extra time or energy. All it requires is the willingness to pay attention. When your partner says something funny, laugh with them. When life throws you a curve ball, laugh together at your bad luck. When something happens that strikes you as amusing, share it with your partner.

seriouslymen.com

Whether you have a lost your sense of humor in your relationship, or just find yourself drifting that direction from time to time, shifting your perspective can lead to a much happier, healthier, more peaceful relationship. You have nothing to lose and much to gain by staying playful with your partner.

Shut Up: Learning to Speak My Mind

Tags

awareness, baby, bravery, communication, honesty, humor, intimacy, marriage, perspective, relationships, vulnerability

I’ve always prided myself on being an open person, at least in my relationships. People who are meeting me for the first time often assume that I’m a mild-mannered person, and are surprised to find that I have strong opinions and don’t mind expressing them once I get comfortable. If we are close, and you want my opinion, all you need to do is ask, and frankly you might get it even if you don’t ask. In the last few years, though, I’ve realized that I’m not as open in relationships as I thought I was.

source: jervisdabreo.com

 

What I’ve realized is that I’m really open about things that don’t matter too much to me or that are relatively surface level issues, but when it comes to the really deep things, the issues that strike to my heart, it is much, much harder to express myself. Even now, as I think of examples to share with you, I’m struggling to find something that I feel comfortable sharing, and I have shared a lot here already that many would feel uncomfortable sharing.

I first realized this quality in myself about a year ago when I realized that I had gone almost two years without clearly expressing to my husband my desire to start a family as soon as possible. For the first year of our marriage, kids weren’t really on my mind because I was establishing myself in my career, but after that starting a family started to press on my mind more and more, especially as I reached the dreaded 30 years, and then passed it. By the time I finally started to express my need clearly, about a year ago, it had become a pressing need for me, but my husband was shell-shocked. Because I hadn’t expressed my need clearly and emphatically, it felt to him like it was suddenly coming out of nowhere.

Source: quickmeme.com

 

Ultimately, my reluctance to clearly share my deep need for children earlier created a situation where my husband needed to adjust to the idea that it was time to have kids much faster than I had adjusted to the idea. Obviously, we did eventually get on the same page (seeing as I’m pregnant and all), but it created more stress for him, and more stress on our relationship, than it needed to.

Moving forward, I’m planning to be more intentional about pushing myself to share the deep things, the difficult things, with my husband as soon as I become aware of them so that we can have an easier time staying on the same page. I invite you to join me!

Come On Get Happy: A Song List

Tags

attitude, happiness, humor, perspective, stress

Since we are focusing this week on putting a positive spin on difficult situations, I thought it would be fun to take a break from our normal programming for a dose of positivity. With that in mind, I have gathered a collection of songs all about focusing on the positive and getting happy. Enjoy!

1. Judy Garland and Barbara Streisand – “Happy Days are Here Again”

A golden oldie. A duet by two of the greats, including a funny interlude at the beginning where they jokingly trash-talk each other.

2. Johnny Nash – “I Can See Clearly Now”

This song is a good mellow song for giving you motivation to shift your focus to the positive.

3. Little Richard – “Get Rhythm”

A fun, active song that makes you want to move, along with a video with some fun old school dancing.

4. Jimmy Soul – “If You Want to be Happy”

A kooky, silly song that gives some wacky advice for how to be happy.

5. Pharrell Williams – “Happy”

The newest classic in the happy song genre, and becoming a classic for a reason.

2c. Results for “Learn to Laugh at Yourself”

Tags

communication, humor, intimacy

Here we are again, at the end of another week of reducing the little stresses in our relationships. This week our goal was to practice using humor to deal with our partners recognitions of our faults.

 

As I mentioned at the beginning of this week, I was not very excited about the strategy. I tend to take myself too seriously, so I knew this would be a struggle.

 

On the plus side, I realized while focusing on this that my husband and I have a lot of humor in our relationship. We laugh at a lot of things together, often things that don’t make sense to anyone else, but they make sense us. So we had a lot of humor this week, and I tried to intentionally take things in a humorous way when I could.

 

Sadly, though, this strategy never really clicked for me. The problem was, I really did care about the issues my husband brought up, so it felt artificial to laugh about them. I felt like I was ignoring his concerns or trying to brush them off. 

 

To be fair, that is not what the strategy is about. The idea is to truly not be concerned by the fact that your spouse recognizes your faults. Unfortunately for me, I wasn’t able to figure out how to inject humor into the conversation in a way that wasn’t defensive. Although the humor part of it didn’t really work for me, I was able to keep my perspective when some of my faults were pointed out.

 

I had a good chance to do this in the first few days, when my husband was looking through some old pictures and said, “You were really skinny then!” Now, I should point out that my husband is not the sort of husband who makes fun of his wife’s weight. He is supportive of me being healthy, and he actually prefers my body closer to the upper range of its healthy size. So his comment was not an insult. But, thanks to societal pressures, (darn you, societal pressures!) my initial instinct was to take it as a criticism. Instead of reacting badly though, I took a step back and recognized that he did not mean it in a bad way. He was stating a fact, in the same way that I do when I look at the old pictures. We are both still a healthy weight, but we were skinnier when we first started dating. That’s me on the right in the picture below, back in the tiny days.

 

 

I think that the intention of the strategy is good. Being realistic about the fact that your spouse will recognize your faults is certainly helpful. Using humor in this case didn’t really work for me, except in a few instances, but maybe it would work for other people. The one place I could see it being useful is in public, when it is usually best to move the conversation as quickly as possible back to safer topics. Either way, I definitely plan on working to become less defensive, which is really what this strategy is about.

 

What do you think? Is the strategy good one? Does it just encourage us to ignore our spouses concerns, or does it help us not to take ourselves too seriously?

Does Being Wonder Woman Make You Defensive?

Tags

books, communication, humor, intimacy, relationships, wonder woman

Hi there! If you missed out on the intro to this week’s strategy, “Learn to Laugh at Yourself,” check it out here. If you’ve already started using this strategy, hopefully you have been finding some positive effects in your relationship from trying to laugh at your mistakes instead of getting defensive about them. Here are a few resources that may help you as you try out this strategy.

Source: dailyworth.com

1. First, a book. This week I finished reading “Wonder Women: Sex, Power, and the Quest for Perfection,” by Debora Spar, and while I didn’t read it intentionally because of this strategy, when I sat back and thought about the book, I realized how beautifully Debora’s message goes with this strategy. Her essential argument is that as women have gotten more rights and more equality with men, we have convinced ourselves that because we can do more things, we have to. Instead of letting go of the things that our mothers (or grandmothers) had to do, like keeping an immaculate household and being exceptional parents, we have raised the standards on those things even higher than they were and added all the new roles and responsibilities on top of what we were already doing. Our goal, of course, is perfection. I disagree with some of Debora’s ideas, but the basic premise of her book feels sound to me. As women, we try to be everything to everyone and to do everything perfectly. And, naturally, if you are trying to be perfect, it will be very difficult to keep perspective when someone points out a failing. I’m not sure that “Wonder Women” has the answers to the problem, but it opened my eyes to some of the ways that I set myself up for failure by attempting to reach perfection in every task I encounter.

2. A Christian perspective on why we shouldn’t take ourselves too seriously:

http://www.reclaimingthemind.org/blog/2013/05/dont-take-yourselt-so-seriously/

 

3. Practical steps for learning to be less defensive:

http://www.selfgrowth.com/articles/Defensiveness_The_Poison_Pill_to_Relationships.html 

I especially love this quote from the article: “Defensiveness, ultimately, is not about protecting ourselves from other people. People get defensive because they don’t want to experience uncomfortable feelings within themselves.”

4. Tips for dealing with criticism:

http://www.gretchenrubin.com/happiness_project/2012/08/7-tips-for-handling-criticism/

2a. Learn to Laugh at Yourself

Tags

communication, humor, intimacy

Welcome to the second week of our journey towards moving beyond focusing on the little things in our relationships! This week we will focus on the second strategy in “Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff in Love,” a strategy which is all about learning to laugh at yourself.

As the Carlsons point out, your partner knows you better than anyone else in the world. That means they know the good things, but it also means that they know the bad. And when they point out the bad, it can be very difficult not to overreact. You want to say, “No, I don’t do that! I’m not that way! What are you talking about?” 

 

I’m not sure where that impulse comes from, except possibly from the desire to pretend that our partners don’t know about our faults. If we are self-aware at all, we know about our faults.

That doesn’t mean that we want other people to know them, though. So when our partners point them out, we are dismayed, as if the faults never really existed until they mentioned them. The truth is, though, that because your partner spends more time with you than practically anyone else, they know more about you than anyone (except possibly your mother).

 

This strategy suggests that instead of reacting angrily when your spouse points out a weakness, you should learn to react with humor. Reacting angrily will only prolong the focus on your issues, so the less seriously you take comments of this sort, the less problems it will cause. In addition, your partner will feel more comfortable telling you when they have a problem, which can be difficult, but is essential for your relationship.

 

Source: solarphotographers.com

 

To be honest, I am not looking forward to this one. I tend to take myself much too seriously, so I know this will be difficult. 

 

What do you think of this strategy? Do you think this is a healthy way to respond to criticisms? I have my doubts, but I will give it a try before I judge. Wish me luck, and good luck to you as well!