Vacuums And Marriage

I remember one time my vacuum flat out broke. Naturally I brought it to the attention of my wonderful handy, manly husband and asked if he could fix it. He took it all apart piece by piece and examined every item. He then put it back together and it still didn’t work. 

The whole time I was waiting for him to just find a blatant obvious issue and say, “Well here’s your problem!” 

But we didn’t get that result, we just had a vacuum that we spent a lot of time scrutinizing, but no change. 

I can’t help but think that’s how marriages go. We can spend A LOT of time examining, analyzing each and every facet of our relationship but can’t find the obvious problem. 

We just keep asking,  “What happened to our vacuum?” 

This question comes up a lot in 1:1 coaching sessions. We find ourselves in a place where we take a look at our marriage and it is absolutely nothing like it was when we first got together AND it is nothing like what we imagined it would be. 

And I want to be clear that I am talking to “Our half” of the relationship. I’m not talking about what husband does or doesn’t do. I’m talking about our role in it all. 

A lot of times what happens is that we are not taking ownership over our portion of our relationship. 

Instead we are delegating our responsibility back on the husband, we are avoiding dealing with our emotions, and we are blaming everyone else. 

Now their might be some real problems that need to be addressed on what the husband is doing. That is when boundaries can be created. 

But I would guess if we are at this point it is because we have NOT created boundaries because we are not owning our role in our own marriage. We are just waiting around hoping, praying, that our husband starts making some changes and fast. 

Now there are two different places we can live in a relationship. We are either emotionally incomplete, or emotionally complete. I’m very well aware of these concepts because I’ve lived them both but I seem to favor emotionally incomplete. 

An emotionally incomplete person (like me) is needy. Yikes! We want to delegate our emotional responsibility to our husband. It goes something like this, “Hunny I need you to make sure that I’m going to bed on time, I need you to make sure I’m eating, and drinking. I just need you to do that for me.” (**This is embarrassing but these are the exact words I spoke to my husband at one part of our marriage. If I could put a crazy eyed emoji face here I would) 

I was trying to make him responsible for filling my basic needs in life! 

And what happens when we do that is we are leaving ourself powerless, we are dependent on other people to feel better. And the flip side of that is when we are blaming other people for why we are feeling bad, we are dependent on what other people do or don’t do to feel better. BOTH of those concepts leave us completely powerless, dependent, and debilitated. 

That’s where I have lived most of my marriage, and life. 

But an emotionally complete person (the one I’m working towards) is responsible for how she feels. She is empowered because she understands her role, she understands where she has control and owns it. She is secure in herself and is NOT dependent on anyone else but herself. 

When an emotionally complete person enters into a relationship she is unstoppable. She isn’t wasting energy trying to control other people but rather she focuses her time and energy on enjoying her husband and family right where they are. Because she takes full responsibility for her emotions and is secure in that role. 

Mommas what happened to your marriage is you took a step back and stopped or maybe never even started to own your own feelings, and understand how that effects your relationship. 

So if you want an emotionally healthy marriage and relationship we want to have two emotionally healthy individuals who show up in their marriage taken care of themselves and what they need so they can love with all they’ve got. They can be wildly passionate, spontaneous, free from the weight of thinking something has gone wrong and instead owning up their role as the strong, sure, powerful women that they are! 

P.S. A lot of times my vacuum isn’t working is because it has my globs of my hair wrapped around the head of it. Owning up to this idea that maybe we HAVE played a roll in the problem allows us to find a solution!