Below David covers one of the harder aspects of being in a relationship, conflicts and how to use them to grow ourselves and our relationship.

Transcript:

When is the last straw

Think of one of the last arguments you had with you spouse, your husband, wife, your boyfriend, girlfriend whatever.

Better yet, actually no, think about an argument you had with one of your boyfriends girlfriends whatever, that led to a breakup.

The kind that was the last straw to break the camel’s back.

What actually happened there?

I’m going to guess if you’re a woman, you’re going to say he wasn’t seeing what I was feeling. He wasn’t getting how I felt. He wasn’t understanding, he wasn’t looking at how whatever happened affected us.

Or something on those kind of levels.

If you’re a man, I’m guessing it was something along the lines of, she just couldn’t see the obviousness of what actually happened.

She couldn’t see why I did X or why she was doing X. She just wanted to be stuck in her emotions and not actually look at things logically.

And that is the primary disconnect I see that rolls little disagreements into these ginormous problems that end up impacting or damaging or even breaking up couples.

Men and women come into conflict with different viewpoints

It’s the fact that when we come at a problem or into an argument or debate, men and women are not equal, we’re not the same.

We’re not thinking the same or equally.

We’re coming to it from 2 totally different viewpoints, 2 different ways of understanding the situation.

Women as a primary, fall back into an emotional status. How does this situation make me feel or how does it make me feel about our relationship.

Or, how does it make me think my husband and wife, boyfriend, girlfriend, feels about it.

It’s an emotionally driven stance whereas men, we tend to come at it from what are the facts of what actually happened period and how does that roll into the consequences of what happened now.

It’s more logic based, a this for that kind of thing and when we come to those from 2 different standpoints, what we should be doing, is essentially creating a whole picture because neither viewpoint is complete.

But what we’re also doing is trying to exclude our partner, our boyfriend, our girlfriend, husband and wife from our own viewpoints.

Our own stance, our own opinions. Essentially we’re building off a wall saying, “this is where I stand emotionally, I don’t care about what you think or feel, period.”

So how do we get past that? Well for one, it’s recognizing that we’re coming to the world from these different perspectives, and that’s not a bad thing.

Ladies, your man looking at the situation logically and not being able just to default into understanding you emotions isn’t a bad thing.

He’s looking for ways to fix an actual problem or a solution.

He’s looking at the hard evidentiary things that he can do to actually solve something.

Men, your woman telling you “XYZ happened yeah, but it makes me feel like this,” that’s not a bad thing because there’s a lot more going on in the real world than just XYZ.

The actual physical dynamics of what happened, but there are mental and emotional and spiritual ranges that are affected with everything we do and as a man, you’re not going to get that or understand that complete picture just looking at the physical logics of, this happened so this happened.

Embrace your partner’s different points of view

But if you can embrace your partner’s viewpoint and try to think to yourself for a minute, what is my husband, what is my wife trying to actually get across to me and are we even disagreeing at all or is it a disagreement in how we’re looking at the situation?

Then you start getting to a spot where you can move past the bickering, fighting, bitching and moaning back and forth and actually start turning these problems or issues into things that become growth points for your relationship.

The idea of a relationship without a fight, without an argument, without any kind of disagreements or conflicts, that’s a fallacy.

That’s some kind of imaginary dream that does not exist in reality because anytime you have 2 people, you’re going to have inequalities, you’re going to have 2 sets of different ways of thinking, of looking at the world.

You’re going to have 2 different ways every situation impacts each different person and that’s a good thing because if you are just 2 of the exact same copies, thinking and feeling everything the same, you won’t have a relationship.

You wouldn’t even be human, you would be robots with no will.

The dynamics and differences in how we feel and interpret the world is what makes men and women able to come together and actually make something cohesive because together we’re forming that complete picture.

If we try to understand our partner’s perspective, we can understand why they feel this way.

Or we understand why our woman is so upset or happy and why she feels that way. It’s because these emotional things happened due to whatever xyz logic or physical things that occurred.

And once we try to understand that bigger picture, we can start getting our of our own defensive stance in a relationship that puts up walls between our communication and barries between our partners and start taking it as:

“This is us as a team versus whatever happened. It’s not me versus my wife or me versus my girlfriend. It’s not you versus your man.”

It’s the 2 of you facing the situation together and working through it, building something cohesive.

So embrace your partner’s different point of view.

Embrace the fact that your man doesn’t really give a damn about the emotions of it, he cares about what actually happened.

And guys embrace the fact that your woman doesn’t care so much about what actually happened so much as how it’s actually making you and her feel and feel about each other.

And if you can do that, your relationship will grow into something beautiful.

David N. Brace

David N. Brace is a relationship expert that lives what he preaches having built a 20-year happy marriage. Relationships take work and effort but if we are willing to do so and to keep growing as individuals, we can build something amazing that lasts a lifetime.

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