How Giving Less of a F**k About My Husband’s Thoughts and Feelings Saved Our Marriage
Someone recently asked me how, after 20 years of marriage, my husband and I have stayed connected and committed.
The answer might surprise you.
I stopped giving a fuck what my husband was thinking and feeling. And I started focusing on what I was thinking, feeling and wanting.
I began to love myself. I fulfill my needs and take care of me and now his love is the caramel on the top of my beautiful self love sundae! It is a bonus that I cherish everyday because I don’t NEED it, but I love it!
I had been so thoroughly programmed by the patriarchy and trained by childhood trauma that I never ever asked in any situation what I wanted. I never asked how I wanted life to be.
I was living with all of my energy focused on my husband and my son. I never even considered what I would like or how it would feel to take care of me.
Instead, I obsessed, worried, and tried to control what my husband thought and how he felt all of the time. Not because I’m a control freak, but because I needed him to be okay so I could be okay. I needed him to be happy so I could be happy, so I could feel loved. Deep down I was terrified that he wouldn’t love me on his own.
When you think about it, that’s a crazy amount of pressure to put on someone. To make your own happiness entirely dependent on theirs. To make your own happiness dependent on what someone says or how they say it.
Learning to love myself was the gift that brought me home to myself and transformed my marriage.
If he had a bad day, I took it personally. If he was grumpy, that ugly voice in my head insisted he didn’t love me.
And that reasoning didn’t extend back the other way. If I had a bad day or was grumpy I just had a bad day. Of course I loved him and valued him. I couldn’t see the hypocrisy.
It was a double standard that set us both up to lose.
I feel sad when I remember those days when I didn’t trust anyone to love me. When I did all of the emotional labor in the relationship so that they wouldn’t leave me. And at the same time I shut out the love that they did give me because I could never feel safe enough to trust their love so I wouldn’t let myself feel it.
It was a no win situation for us all.
Thankfully, I had enough self-awareness to recognize that if I continued not to love myself I was modeling this destructive behavior for my son. And I wanted so much more for him.
I set out on a journey of healing. I worked on my beliefs. I cleared out old wounds and swallowed the graceful medicine necessary to heal them. I installed new beliefs.
And over time I reclaimed my loveable-AF-ness. I could literally write a book about how I went from there to where I am now, but once I made up my mind that things needed to change, I told my husband that I would no longer be asking what he was thinking, doing, or feeling. I reassured him that I still loved him and that I would love for him to communicate, but I would no longer be asking, worrying about it, or checking in.
This was terrifying for me because what if he left? What if he was just waiting for me to stop watching to cheat? What if our relationship fell apart because I wasn’t doing all of the heavy lifting?
As hard as it was, I decided it was worth the risk. I decided it was better to lose the relationship than to continue on together if I didn’t feel safe, loved, and supported.
Instead of all of that fear, I started asking myself…
What do I want?
What do I want to do today?
What kind of relationship would I like?
How do I want to feel?
What would be fun for me today?
What kind of partner did I want?
From there, I started to believe that a beautiful relationship could be mine. I started to imagine what it would feel like to wake up being held tight, to dance in the kitchen, to be my full self and still feel loved, cherished, and desired. I envisioned a relationship full of laughter, inside jokes, trust, partnership, passion, and sunlit mornings in bed wrapped up in each other.
With the promise of those things in mind, I took action. I set down my fears and worries about my husband every time they came up. This took practice, but once I did it, the freedom and release were so good, I never wanted to pick them back up.
I made sure I communicated with my husband. I told him what I wanted or how I was feeling about something. My requests were clear. No convincing. No nagging.
I started to enjoy my days without the fear and the worry. I started to enjoy doing what I wanted.
And wouldn’t you know it, a wonderful thing happened. As soon as I put down all of the emotional labor I had been doing for my husband and my son, they started doing it for themselves. In hindsight, it was never that they didn’t want to do it or couldn’t do it. I had never given them a chance to do it.
Since then, they have both blossomed into more of themselves. And their father/son bond has grown, too. Literally, the next day my husband created a support system for himself that I had been nagging him to create FOR YEARS.
My son still cuddles with us. He tells me he loves me and I can feel it and know it. He advocates for himself. He has lots of empathy and he knows he is loveable.
Now I wake up to my husband holding me close knowing that he treasures all of me. We laugh, we dance in the kitchen. We are partners in a way that 22-year-old me could never have imagined.
I have the relationship that I wanted. We still have ups and downs, but the difference is night and day. My husband manages his own support and still shows up for us and loves me unconditionally. Funny as it sounds, he’s now free to have bad days and be human whenever he needs to. And he doesn’t have to worry that my world will crumble if he does.
There are so many ways for us all to win now.
Learning to give a few less fucks about him and a few more about me and how to tune into my desires and then follow them has changed my inner and outer worlds. It has been the gift that brought me home to myself. Learning to love and take care of me makes him a beautiful bonus - the caramel sauce on my self-love sundae! I don’t need it or have to have it, but lucky me, I get to have it, if for no other reason than I want it.
TLDR: Discover how shifting focus from constantly worrying about my husband's thoughts and feelings to prioritizing my own well-being and desires saved our marriage. Embracing self-love and setting boundaries led to mutual growth, deeper connections, and a more fulfilling relationship.
Cheri is a holistic self-love & performance coach, belief healer, the host of the Loveable AF Badass Show and founder of the Happiness Habit.I am here to help you unlock your magic, be happy and loved and have the shoulders back confidence to go for what you want and to enjoy it once you get it!
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