There always seems to be this lingering conundrum: How much should you hang out with your wife? You hang out with her too much. She feels like you’re suffocating her. You can get too much of each other. Don’t hang around her enough, and you face a decreasing intimacy.
It’s almost like that Clash song should you stay or go? Definitely can come across as a case of damned if you do damned if you don’t, so how do you balance out personal space and togetherness? Why is bouncing out of these two such a challenge?
Understand why you want personal space.
Men need time to think things through on their own. Yes, we do have our friends that come in and help from time to time, but we are often solitary creatures when it comes to processing our day’s big life choices, and such. We often have times when we need to withdraw into our fortress of solitude. We may do this just by hanging out in our workshop or our Man cave. We may go out to our favorite lookout, or someplace that we can be alone.
Personal space is just that. It is a place where we can sit, think, and process today’s thoughts, events, and emotions. When we are alone we don’t have to worry about being interrupted or pulled away from the task at hand.
This often can create some problems with her wife. This is because she will often see this as us pulling away. This isn’t the case, but she worries when her man withdraws to do their own processing of their thoughts.
There is also the adage, that absence makes the heart grow fonder. This is again because when we are around our wife too much, we have a tendency to get on each other’s nerves. We struggle to try to reach for our spouses’ desires and needs. While woefully neglecting our own needs in the process.
Understand why you want togetherness.
Now this is something that many men want a lot of. We want to be able to spend quality time. We actually do enjoy and yearn for the opportunity to spend time with our wife. But we also get pulled away from all of the other demands that life provides to us. From work to kids to personal time our attention is often divided. Add to that the numbing aspects of roommate syndrome, and the ability to spend time diminishes.
Togetherness is a combination of several different types of intimacies. Yes, there is physical intimacy involved, where we get to sit with our wife, maybe put our arm around her shoulders, hold her hand, or even more touching. There’s also intellectual intimacy, emotional intimacy, and experiential intimacy that gets rolled up into the experience of togetherness.
And most of us men understand why we want the ability to have time with our wives. It allows for thoughts that we love to appear. Gives us thoughts that we are connected and connecting. With these thoughts, we are able to have stronger relationships with our wives without the fear that something is wrong.
Why do we struggle with these two states?
The reason why we struggle with these two states in our lives is because we believe it has to be one or the other. We believe we have to give up our personal time to spend it and have togetherness. Or we wanna be together with our wife, but our wife really isn’t having that right now.
That’s all fine till we add emotions into the mix. As with most stuff we humans do, our emotions make things messy. We often want to believe that we influence our wife’s emotions. This need to try to manipulate and have her wife feel better is where the desire to appease his wife and try to fix things. The appeasing and the manipulation don’t work because our wife has her own emotions.
We wanna try to fool ourselves into believing that we can achieve an actual balance between togetherness and our alone time. This belief will cause a lot of pain because we will fight with ourselves to achieve something that is not possible.
We will try and aim for balance without even actually understanding what this balance actually means. We won’t even fully understand what the balance between personal time and togetherness actually looks like. And so without even knowing what our destination looks like, we will be blundering around without any Sense of direction.
The root of our suffering
To not bury the lead, the root of all our suffering is our thoughts about our circumstances. In this case, our circumstance is wanting to have personal time or wanting to have time together. This can become a bit stressful because we are constantly looking at what we believe our wife wants.
Yes, we do want to take our wife into consideration, but at the same time, we have to put ourselves in for consideration too. Sadly, many of us men sacrifice ourselves in our own needs for that of the family. Thinking that we are doing good for our family when in reality we are putting on everybody else’s masks thinking that we will be able to hold our breath long enough.
This is one reason why we feel that we are stretched in so many different angles. We know we have our dedication to work, and our dedication to our family also. We have our friends, we also have ourselves to take care of. And when we do not take care of ourselves, we cannot take care of work. We cannot take care of our friends, and we surely cannot take care of our family. So it is imperative that we take personal time and set aside time to be together.
Who is in control of this? The answer is ourselves. To make some tough decisions and accept that our wife may not like our own decisions. If we are working so hard to control and manipulate and take care of the other person in our relationship, this is where codependency starts to rot away the Caring and love of our marriage.
We create codependency
With codependency, we put the other person first every single time. This is because we don’t want to upset the other person. We want them to be happy so that we can feel happy. We want them to feel accepted so that we can feel accepted. We want them to feel affirmed so we can feel affirmed. Because we are so busy worrying about the other person we forget about ourselves and we start eating away at our foundation so that we can have the other person tell us what we want to feel.
Our thoughts
Any circumstance that we come across in our relationship with our wife, will create a set of thoughts that create a set of emotions. Those emotions will cause us to take particular actions. Those actions will generate a certain result. When we are unintentionally reactive to our circumstances, our results are often the unintended consequences of our thoughts. We want to be closer but our thoughts lead to disagreements, arguments, and acts of victimhood. All of these cause our relationship to be weakened.
Our thoughts also have us believe that our emotions are caused by the other person and again we fall into victimhood by trying to point fingers at who we believe is to blame for our discomfort. When in reality discomfort, our emotional upset is from our own thoughts.
So when we become upset about the fact that we want more personal time or we want more togetherness and we don’t get it our mind becomes overly upset at the fact that it’s not getting what it wants. The thoughts then lead to emotions of anger or resentment, which leads us to start pouting or pointing blame, and that leads our wife to not want to have more togetherness or to think that it’s not fair that you get time to go and be alone. So you see, our thoughts when we’re being unintentional can really shoot us in the face.
What needs to change
So how do you strive to get personal time and together time? The biggest solution to this problem is that you have to work on developing a differentiated relationship. This is a relationship where you are your own person and your wife is her own person. You both do your own thing, but you are also a team. This means that you have your own thoughts and your own emotions. Your wife has her own thoughts and her own emotions. And because y’all are two separate people you both love each other for being that individual person.
To do this requires four important skills.
Emotional independence
You have to have the knowledge and the ability to have your own emotions. Your wife has no power over what you feel. You have no power over your wife’s emotions either. So your emotional well-being is dependent completely upon you. This could be scary, especially to a nice guy. However, when you understand that your life and your emotions are contingent upon you, you’re not turning to your wife, wondering why she doesn’t make you happy anymore. You know you’re the one who’s responsible for your happiness and fulfillment. You are then free to love your wife completely.
Self-regulation
Being able to regulate your own emotions is another skill that is important to have for a differentiated relationship. This way you are not depending on your wife to make you feel good. You’re not depending upon your wife to affirm that you should be happy or you should be mad or you should be sad. You know you have all the skills to handle any and all emotions you may feel. You don’t have to turn to coping mechanisms when you’re feeling anxious. You don’t have to turn to means of coping with feeling upset lost or lonely. This allows you to have full control over your own faculties. You can be mad about something and you don’t have to turn to your wife so that she makes you happier. You can be mad and experience the emotion of anger. Process that emotion, and go about your day.
Healthy boundaries
Another important skill is being able to administer healthy boundaries and then uphold those boundaries. Code-dependent people often do not have boundaries because they’re too busy busting through the other person’s boundaries because they can’t stand how they feel. A codependent person will blow up and not be able to self-regulate because something didn’t happen the way they expected it to happen.
If you need 30 minutes to unwind and you sit in the car when you get home, a person with healthy boundaries won’t take the fact that you have some time alone personally. They accept the fact that you have this routine. And they will have their own boundaries that they set and that you will respect. This can take work if you’re not used to it and the thoughts around boundaries can often lead to emotions that have to be processed to fully understand what the person is asking.
Conflict resolution
The fourth skill a differentiated relationship needs is the ability to resolve conflicts. This is because again humans have emotions, and those emotions make life messy. That doesn’t mean that we cannot get along and figure out how to resolve a problem. We do have to go through conflict from time to time. Nice guys and other codependent people shy away from conflict because of what they make conflict mean. Conflict is nothing more than a disagreement. When you can go through, have a lively or even heated discussion, and come to an amicable resolution you will find that you and your wife’s relationship becomes even better and stronger.
You also want to be able to accept the third time that you and the wife won’t sync up. You may want to have time together and she may want to have alone time. What do you make her rejection of your desire mean? If you have these four skills in place, it won’t mean life and death. It will just mean that she isn’t in the mood to get together, or that you’re going to have to do your alone time at a later date.
When you find yourself getting upset, one of the big questions you wanna ask is what are you making the circumstance mean to you? Because when you can start answering that you’re going to find that life is working a lot more in your favor. You’re going to find that the little things don’t upset you nearly as much. You’re gonna find the 50-50 lifestyle is always at work and that you’re OK with that. You accept disappointment and you handle rejection better. And with all that it allows you and your wife to come together in a more loving frame of mind. This means in the long run that you will actually have more opportunity to have that physical intimacy that men desire.
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