I was driving my wife to work this morning when a friend of ours came up. Not gossip, just the kind of casual morning conversation that ends up accidentally teaching you something.
Our friend is in a tough situation. She’s working hard and paying the bills and running the house and watching her partner drift a little bit. She’s the only income and the only one who seems to be doing anything. He’s home on disability and she’s starting to wonder if she’s being taken advantage of or if she’s just tired.
It’s a fair question because the line between those two things isn’t always clear from the inside.
Something our friend said had stuck with me. She said the behaviors that she’s tolerating in her own relationship are behaviors that she’d never encourage in other women that she loves and cares about.
When I brought that up, Beth made a great point that made me think. There’s a difference, she said, between mentioning something and actually communicating about it. A lot of people don’t know or even realize there’s a difference.
You mention something at dinner. You drop a comment while he’s on his phone. Maybe you leave a note on the counter. None of it counts. He hears every word but yet he still walks away not knowing what you need.
Months go by. The behavior that bothered you doesn’t change and by the time you finally sit down and talk about it, it isn’t actually just behavior anymore. Now it’s a habit. And a defended habit at that.
Because nobody communicated it clearly earlier, the other person created this story where that’s just how things are. Now you’re not asking him to change. You’re asking him to betray something that’s become his normal behavior.
What Beth and I try to do, not always well, is not let it get to that point. We come back to things before they become a bigger problem. I’ve let something stew for a week when I should’ve said it in an hour. But we don’t let it sit. Good couples don’t avoid resentment. They just refuse to let things go long enough to become an identity. That’s the only real difference I can see between couples who last and couples who don’t. It’s not that the lasting ones never get annoyed. They just refuse to let the annoyance become the story.
And though, if you’re someone who’s observant, it befuddles you how another person can completely miss signals that you think are obvious, I tried to remind Beth of something. Two people can be observant people and still miss each other completely.
Your brain filters out signals based on what it’s trained to look for. You might be someone that catches every shift in someone’s mood but yet never noticed the laundry piling up. Your partner might be the opposite. Neither one of you is wrong. You’re just tuned in to different things.
The thing is, when we forget that, we stop asking whether or not we communicated something clearly and instead we start asking, “Does he even love me?”
Then Beth made another great point. She pointed out that if the person who anticipated your every single need actually existed, you probably wouldn’t even want to sleep next to them anyways. The guy who reads your mind and keeps the house clean and does all your taxes is probably also going to be the guy that you’d leave for being boring as hell. We want to be understood by the interesting person instead of being handled by the attentive one and the problem is those two things don’t usually come in the same package.
One more thing worth saying before I get to the part that actually stopped me.
Before you decide someone’s taken advantage of you, I think you have to look at the full pattern. Not just one symptom. You don’t call someone an alcoholic just because they showed up with bloodshot eyes once. You look at the whole big picture, whether or not they’re drinking alone or missing work or lying. You look at the way it bleeds into everything else. It’s no different when you have a partner. One annoying habit doesn’t necessarily mean you’re being used. When you’re actually being taken advantage of, it usually comes with a much wider pattern and just an overall broader disrespect level. There’s no reciprocity, just a general absence of caring.
And underneath all that there’s something else too. When you’re exhausted and you feel like you’re carrying more than your fair share, then your brain starts interpreting everything through that lens. A genuinely fair question starts to come out of your head in a loaded way. “Am I being taken advantage of or am I just too tired to see straight?” Sometimes the answer is yes to the first one. Sometimes it’s yes to the second one. Sometimes it’s both. But I know for sure you definitely can’t figure that out from inside that exhaustion.
But as I alluded to earlier and as the title of this article alludes to, there’s one line that I keep coming back to. The fact that our friend said she’s tolerating things in her own life that she’d never tolerate in anyone else’s.
And of course that’s the thing that would stand out to me. Because of the nature of the work I do, I realized right away that’s not just a relationship problem. That’s a midlife problem.
You tell your kid to finish what he starts and meanwhile you’ve already quit on three things this year. You lecture them about accountability while you’ve been ducking your own accountability for years. You watch your buddy stay in a job that he hates and you want to just shake him and the whole time you can’t even see that he’s watching you do the exact same thing with something else.
The standards that you hold everyone else to are the same ones that you stopped holding yourself to a long time ago.
So I think that ends up being the real audit. Not whether or not your partner is a freeloader or not and not whether you’re being used. It’s just whether you’re still actually living by the rules you tell other people to live by.