Midlife Mastery Journal » partners

Button, Button, Who’s Got Your Button?

Les Brown — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 16:16:39 +0000

Intimate relationships create virtual minefields for the midlife transition. In a sense, it’s no wonder that so many aren’t able to withstand the pressures that come with transitioning from adulthood to maturity. The effects of the massive hormonal changes that occur in both women and men during this period of life can’t be underestimated (and I’m afraid that only recently I’ve been brought up to date on the full effects of andropause, sometimes known as ‘male menopause’). During a period of life where, at least for men, the dominant feelings are restlessness, irritability and discontent, adding hormonal disruptions to the mix can prove to be explosive.

Human beings may be ‘made for’ intimacy: after all, our family units tend to survive into adulthood and beyond. Regardless of how someone may define ‘family’, those intimate relationships constitute the core of any meaningful human existence. At the same time, family members — be they in your family of origin or your family of choice — hold a powerful weapon: they know where your ‘hot buttons’ are hidden, they know how to push them and often, when push comes to shove, they’ll do it. Of course, you also know where theirs are hidden, too, so when yours get pushed, you have the chance to push back. Ouch!

Let’s turn our attention for the moment to (what we hope is) your most intimate and, at the same time, most vulnerable relationship: your spouse or partner. I hope that, once upon a time, you fell madly, passionately in love; or, at the very least, at one time you grew to love and appreciate one another above anyone else. Rational, healthy people don’t generally decide to form permanent relationships with people in whom they have only a passing interest and nothing else in common. It happens often enough, but I want to confine my discussion today to relationships between moderately healthy people. For these relationships, something more than the superficial has ‘clicked’ and, therefore, something worked.

To set the stage for midlife, you have to fast-forward a number of years (generally 3-5). You can think of yourself and your partner as two gears, turning in opposite directions, but working very well together so long as the teeth of one gear smoothly mesh with the teeth from the other. Of course, not all the teeth mesh perfectly . . . vive la difference! At first, our differences provide a yummy spice to the relationship. However, over time, these differences, these uneven teeth in both people begin to chafe. Like a minor rattle that seems easy to ignore when everything else is humming in perfect harmony, in time the humming becomes just background noise, and all you can hear is that cursed annoying rattle! Ironically, the more smoothly a relationship functions, the more disrupting the trouble spots may seem.

So, when you put it all together, what have you got? Trouble! First, you’ve got a relationship that’s functioning well except for a few rough spots (that are unavoidable). Then, you’ve got two people who’ve been bruising under those rough spots for some time, and, for whom they’ve taken on a bigger-than-life energy of their own. On top of this, you’ve got one (or both) parties going through the midlife re-evaluation on every level: mental, emotional and social/spiritual. Now add on the not-exactly-coincidental hormonal disruptions in both partners. Now that you’ve got two hair-trigger tempers facing each other down in the confines of relationship and . . . finally . . . hand each one the other’s ‘hot buttons’. And you thought World War III was just theoretical! What do you do?

First, let me tell you what you don’t do: whatever you do, don’t press that button! Face the facts: you can’t ‘fix’ the other person, especially by going on the attack. You can’t change his or her mind. You can’t ‘get’ the other person to modify his or her behavior to suit you. You can’t ‘win’ and you can’t improve the situation by playing the innocent victim of a cruel attack.

You also can’t run away. Since at least half of the problem resides in you, when you try to escape, you bring the cause along with you. Can you find a new relationship that works better? At least for a while, you’ll have different areas of disagreement, so the old areas will certainly feel better . . . at least until the new areas become old and you’re back where you were with nothing solved.

Relationship experts far and wide will give you the same advice: get your finger off that button, regardless of how often the other presses yours. Change your mind: you’re not a victim and your partner’s not to blame. Accept the fact that both of you are in pain, that neither one of you can fix the other, and that you may have to do this all by yourself, or with the help of someone outside the relationship (like a therapist), because the one you love and trust the most isn’t available to you right now. Most of all, you can remember that pain isn’t a tragedy, it’s an invitation to change. Pay attention to it. Find out what it’s trying to tell you. Why, after all, does that ‘hot button’ of yours exist? What weakness, insecurity or self-doubt does it access? Find that out, deal with what’s going on inside you, and you’ll grow regardless of the outcome of your relationship problems.

Will this approach save your relationship? No one can predict. One thing’s for sure: it’ll save your side of it. It’s impossible to say whether or not your partner has the commitment, self-knowledge, stamina and determination to assume the same responsibility. If he or she does, then you’re golden: growth happens, the ‘hot buttons’ are disarmed, some salve is rubbed on the chafing areas, you rediscover the beauty of the harmony that the two of you make together, and that once-annoying rattle just becomes another part of the symphony. And remember: midlife doesn’t last forever. If you can both do the tough relationship work ahead of you and hold on through the hormonal roller coaster and process the internal reorientation of your life, you’ll have it made! Ideally, someday, when the two of you are once again playing, "Button, button, who’s got the button?" you’ll both laugh and realize that your answer will be: Nobody!

H. Les Brown, MA, FCC

Copyright © 2008 H. Les Brown

Taking Our Anniversary All the Way to Happy

Les Brown — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 17:06:44 +0000

Today, my partner and I celebrate our tenth wedding anniversary (OK . . . I’ll admit it: we were both late bloomers and re-treads). As usual, these annual celebrations present an opportunity to look back over the years, to see what worked well (and what worked not-so-well), to take stock of how far we’ve come, and, most of all to express gratitude to our Higher Power and to one another for our very many blessings. Making a life-long commitment in the midst of the midlife transition does offer a number of advantages over going through the transition while struggling to make a relationship work: at least we had the advantage of leaving most of the starry-eyed stuff in the hope chest of faded memories.

Those young couples who ‘get it right’ the first time are becoming an increasingly rare breed — almost miraculous, in fact. Based on the statistics, you’d think that the harbingers of doom out there are right when they so loudly proclaim that ‘the family is in trouble.’ They blame it on all sorts of pressures and distractions that afflict today’s families and, I’ve got to admint that today’s couples do, indeed have many more pressures to deal with than they did fifty or a hundred years ago. Yet, I don’t believe that you can pin the blame for failed relationships on the pressures of family life alone. Much of it has to be laid at the feet of an increasingly ineffective midlife transition.

Once you’ve accepted the fact that you can define ‘adulthood’ as ‘childhood without the parental constraints,’ you begin to see the seeds of the problem right away: too many people go into marriages that are founded upon little more than hopes, feelings, and wishful thinking. Our cultural preoccupation with individuality and personal privacy does little to disrupt these TV sitcom-style belief systems. Who’ll show you the difference between ‘love’ and ‘romance’? Maybe you’ve seen those facts of life spread across a kitchen apron somewhere: "Kissin’ Don’t Last . . . Cookin’ Do!"? (Remember that jokes are only funny because they’re true.) The difference between love and romance hinges on the fact that love is a decision; romance is a feeling.

Feelings, particularly strong ones, fade over a relatively short time. Mass marketers rely strongly on that fact. If you see or hear a particularly annoying commercial over a long enough period of time, your annoyance will fade, but you’ll remember the advertiser when you’re thinking about their product or service. Romantic love and hate are not opposites: they’re the same emotions only expressed in different directions. The opposite of romantic love is indifference. When romantic love fades (as it absolutely must), what’s left behind should be the decision to commit to one another. Have you ever heard someone say, "I love him/her, but I’m not in love with him/her"? That’s not necessarily a bad thing — in fact, it’s a very important phase of relationship-building — but for many relationships, it spells the beginning of the end.

Since the untransformed adult (really the ‘adult child’) bases most of his or her decisions on what it feels like, when the Cinderella clock strikes twelve, the time comes to cut and run. There’s another factor that I need to mention here, and that’s the rather obvious but sad fact: that one person can’t have a relationship. That implies that if your partner completely gives up on your relationship, there’s nothing you can do all by yourself to save it. It’s only if both of you have entered into the personal transformation that we call the midlife transition that your relationship can similarly transform from a decision based on feelings to feelings based on a decision.

For the sake of argument, let’s shift the scenario from the love of one partner for another, to the love of a parent for his or her child. For the vast majority of people who are capable of experiencing parental love, they experience that love as unconditional. At some point between birth and the teenage years, these parents make a transition from the emotional high of new parenthood to the acceptance of parental responsibility as an expression of their love and commitment to their child. Even should it come down to a decision to throw the youngster out of the house, the pain the parent feels comes from his or her unconditional acceptance of the child. Anger, even hatred, arises from frustration and disappointment in both the child and themselves. Yet, generally, regardless of the circumstances, their commitment to their child remains, holding out life-long hope that the person on the other side of their parental bond will change his or her mind.

I’m not saying that, to have a truly mature relationship, a person has to carry a hopeless torch for a lost loved one. However, when both parties in that relationship decide to carry that torch for the other, regardless of how dimly it may be burning, each will learn a great deal about the other and, in the process, they’ll come to learn even more about themselves. They’ll come to appreciate a little bit more each day the gifts that they themselves have to offer their partners and, therefore their world. In the struggle to bear their relationship through the difficult transitions that they themselves are experiencing, they’ll find that their love has deepened and transformed with it, to the point that, almost at will, they can summon the emotion — the passion — that they feel for one another. Every year, they can stop, think about how far they’ve come, and truly celebrate their choice to maintain their commitment ‘for better or worse’ and to be grateful to each other for summoning the courage to have held on to that commitment for one . . . more . . . year.