“It just struck me that hypothesizing about possible reasons for a spouse’s behavior could be seen by friends and other bystanders as making excuses for the spouse.”
This is from a frequent Assume Love commenter, and I am thrilled she asked me to reply.
Our purpose when we Assume Love and look again at why something upsetting happened is to get closer to the truth, not to make our spouse look better.
Why do we (and our friends and bystanders) need help getting to the truth? Because we’re human. We were born because our ancestors avoided death long enough to give birth to the next of our ancestors. Two very human instincts protected them, and they passed them on to us.
These instincts protect us from two life-and-death mistakes. First, overlooking a predator or natural disaster about to kill us. Second, getting separated from the herd, because we humans are social animals. We protect each other. We find or grow food together. We create ways to protect our extremely vulnerable young until they can take their place in our society.
That second instinct is at play in our friends and friendly bystanders who try to protect us from ignoring what might be a very real threat to our life or health. It’s also at play when we react to something like a forgotten birthday or an unkind word from our life partner almost as strongly as if they brandished a knife at us.
Our relationship with the person we married protects our young. It protects our status in society. It protects our access to food and housing and care when we’re injured or ill. Even “drifting apart” is a very different level of threat when our lives are as entwined as marriage makes them.
And that’s why that first instinct kicks in, to protect us from imminent danger. Our minds automatically, instinctively, become laser-focused on the threat, on evidence to confirm the threat, and on other possible threats, to the exclusion of almost all other thought. This is no time to think of love, to be creative, or even to remember what today’s date is and why it matters.
And yet, in most marriages, the threat is not as imminent as a tiger snapping a twig just 20 feet from us or the rumble of an avalanche or the feel of fingers gripping our throat. We have some time to think before we act.
We have time to Assume Love, to ask ourselves, “If I knew for certain that my spouse still loves me as much as ever right now and still the same good person I so admired when we chose to marry, what else besides what I fear right now might explain this?”
Just asking the question stops that automatic tunnel vision. Now we are free to explore these possible explanations. Do they fit the current evidence? Do they fit what happened last week or last month or in our spouse’s childhood?
We are not required to find any of these explanations true or to accept one in denial of evidence to the contrary. But we now have a much, much better probability of recognizing what’s really happening and making a rational plan to deal with it, even if it’s exactly what we initially feared.
And let’s not leave our family and bystanders back in protection mode, remembering only our initial fear and hearing an explanation that could be nothing more than an excuse. Share the evidence if you can. Share your relief and renewed love for your spouse if you can’t share your evidence. If your bystanders are unlucky enough to have had only bad experiences in relationships, they might still worry that it’s an excuse, so, either way, please thank them for their concern for you and enjoy your reassurance that you’re still a valued part of the herd.
