9 Steps to Managing Conflict, #2: Don’t Expect Your Partner to Read Your Mind
I’m dealing with this in my clients all the time. And for good reason. It’s a tough one.
Let’s say your anniversary is coming up – better yet let’s say it’s an important one like your 10th anniversary. You’ve been thinking lately how special you’d like the evening, or day, to be. You’ve been fantasizing about what your partner might do for you, or buy for you, or what he has planned for the two of you. After all, you’ve been together for ten years and that’s a big deal. Maybe you even plan buy your partner a nice gift – without planning anything yourself thinking, if he’s going to plan a special day I need to do something nice for him. So you’ve spent all this time and energy and feeling imagining how great this day is going to be. But you don’t tell him. And you don’t tell him because you’re thinking, “I want to see just how special I am to him. If I tell him what to do, how will I know that I matter to him? That’s like giving someone answers to a test.”
So if this is a test to you, what you’re actually measuring is your partner’s ability to read your mind – NOT how much your partner loves you and cares about you.
One of my measures of how much my partner loves and cares about me is whether he’s listening and paying attention to me.
And if you like surprise here’s what I suggest: “Honey I’ve been thinking a lot about our anniversary coming up. It feels really special to me. You are special to me. We’ve been together for 10 years and that’s such a big deal to me. I want to make our celebration special too. Part of me wants you to surprise me. Would you be willing to do that? If you are willing, I want at least part of that surprise to include [insert here what’s MOST important to you – flowers, a gift, a trip to the spa, sex, whatever is MOST important to you].”
If you’d like to learn more about how to manage conflict in your relationship, call me.
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