Week 10: Seeking to Understand

The marital poop detector, as defined by Gottman in our reading is very important and vital to marriages.  What exactly is this?  It is when you are able tell the other spouse that something isn't right.  Just like when you can smell "poop” you can tell when something isn't right.  There was a study that spoke about being unhappy in your marriage and how this can be tied directly to the expectations that we share with our spouses.  While this ended up being proven wrong, Gottman speaks of other studies which share opposite opinions on this subject.  As Gottman stated, "really people with the greatest expectations for their marriage usually wind up with the highest quality marriages," (Gottman, 2015).  I feel this is true.  That isn't to say that their marriage won't have problems or won't end in divorce, but I feel that if you have goals and expectations you have a vision of the future.

 How might one try to incorporate this into their daily married lives?  You must make sure that you don't dwell on negativity.  We must not hold onto grudges and let the negativity stay.  We need to make sure we recognize when it is there, call it out (poop detector) when it does come in.  We need to focus if and when it comes on making sure it leaves, so it doesn't leave any lingering effects or "smells" in our marriage.

 If I had to choose the one thing I learned the most from this book, it would be to treat my spouse with more respect than anyone else.  Treat them as if they are visiting your house, how you treat guests.  You tend to be overly kind and nice and give guests the benefit of the doubt.  However, how often we find ourselves being nit picky with our spouses, and getting irritated for minor infractions.  When if they were a guest, we would probably just let it go off of our back and give them the benefit of the doubt.

 I was just thinking about how my husband and I address each other and it makes me sad.  It isn't that I'm making a conscious effort to be mean or rude, but its almost like you put your guard down and have no filters.  This isn't good.  We need to always have these "filters" on, so that we might be able to give our spouse our best self.  Not the worn down, irritated spouse who nags them about every little thing.  If a guest spilled something, we wouldn't flip out.  We would offer to help clean it up.  That is how we need to be towards our spouse.  Treat them how we want to be treated.  Treat them as if they are the most important and precious thing in the word.  They are, and they should be treated as such.  Why would we treat them in a way we don't want others to treat them or even ourselves?  When we think about things this way, we take a step back and realize that we have room for improvement.  When we focus on kindness and serving others, there is a change that takes over in the relationship.