Episode 124: Can I be married and free?

Hello, loves, this is Sharon Pope, and this is the Loving Truth. Today I want to explore a topic with you that's getting a lot of conversation inside of my community. There's this idea that marriage and freedom are incompatible with one another.

Like there are some women inside the community that are ready to just shun marriage altogether because they feel like if they are married they have no freedom. And I'm like wait a minute, wait a minute, pump the brakes here. I think that freedom has to be part of a healthy and loving marriage. I don't even think it's optional. I think we have to have it. But in order to have it, we have to understand it and we have to acquire some skill sets to be able to navigate those freedoms between two people being in their most intimate relationship with each other over the course of decades.

So think about it like this. Look, if I only love you when you are behaving the way I want you to behave, you're doing the things that I think you should do and you're not doing the things I don't think behave.

You're doing the things that I think you should do and you're not doing the things I don't think you should do. My friends, that is not love and that's not a healthy relationship. What that is is control and manipulation, right? When you're not doing the things that I want you to do, I'm going to withhold love and then I'm gonna be loving towards you when you're doing the things that I want you to do, like that's not a healthy relationship.

Okay, if I only love you when I have that magical loving feeling, well, that's not love or a healthy relationship either. To be honest, that's kind of wishful thinking. Or what if I only love you when you promise to stay with me and commit to me that you will never, ever leave? Well, that's not love, right? And it's not a healthy relationship either. That's fear and it's codependency, right.

So we need to have freedom as part of our marriages, because otherwise we create the codependent, controlling dysfunction that leads to the challenges inside of our relationships, because here's the reality At the end of the day, we're just two human beings who are trying our best to love one another and navigate life together, but we're still human beings, and human beings need choice, they need freedom, because if you don't have that, then you're going to feel trapped or you're going to feel imprisoned, and I don't think any of us got into marriage so that we could feel like we're imprisoned.

We don't want our marriage to feel like a prison sentence. None of us walked down the aisle and said I can't wait to begin this stretch of life as being imprisoned. We didn't come in with that idea, but then somehow we translate it into I have to give up my preferences, I have to give up my needs, I have to suppress my choices and my freedoms in order to make this relationship work or feel good, and then ultimately, it's what leads to it not feeling good. So when we exercise our freedom of choice inside of our most intimate relationship, here's what this means.

It means we're going to hear some things that's difficult to hear. We're going to hear things like I disagree with you, I think you're wrong. That's probably not the best way to say it, but we're going to hear things like that we might say we don't want the same things, or my priorities are different than your priorities, or I see this differently, or I think we should parent differently.

We might also hear things like I don't love you anymore, or I don't want to have sex tonight, right. We're going to hear things that are really difficult to hear and so and we're going to have to say things that feel difficult to say because we're not trying to hurt our partner. So then we suppress that, we don't say the full truth and our partners don't want to hear those things from us because it's so hurtful.

It hurts and we can't bear to hear those things from our partner, which means we don't feel comfortable navigating that kind of unsafe territory or we can't navigate that territory because it feels unsafe. It doesn't have to be unsafe If you know, as a couple you can navigate those things together.

But most of us don't have those skills. We don't have the communication skills to have direct, open, honest conversations. We don't have the skills to be able to set healthy and loving boundaries for ourselves and be able to honor our partner's boundaries that they set for themselves. Right, where was that class? Right, we didn't get classes on your most intimate communication with your partner and we didn't get classes on setting loving and healthy boundaries, and most of our parents they didn't get training on it either.

So we didn't have that behavior modeled for us. So there's no shame here in not knowing what we don't know or feeling like we don't really know how to navigate these things. But this is why we shut down the freedoms and the choice inside of our relationships to the point where we can't have these kind of really important conversations.

But here's the thing I think if you're going to love someone deeply, it means you need to know them deeply, right? Because if you only know the shallow end of them, then the depth of your love is only going to be the shallow end, right? You're not going to love them deeply.

So in order to love them deeply, you have to be able to know them deeply. And to know them deeply means you're not just going to see the warm, cuddly, agreeable parts of them. You're going to occasionally see the challenging, confronting and even triggering parts of them.

Because we have to be able to see and know our partners at a very deep level if we're going to have the kind of depth of love inside of our marriage, the way that most people genuinely want but are afraid of actually achieving or going there. And here's the reality If I can't own my no, then I can't own my yes either, right?

I want you to think about this for a second. So let's take the example of that. I disagree with you, so if I don't feel like I can express a different opinion than you. Then when I tell you I agree with you, do you really trust my words? Or am I just telling you what you want to hear, or what you need to hear, or what I need you to hear, so that you won't get upset and we won't have an argument? Right, that's very, very different than me just expressing what it is that I really believe or what it is that I really feel.

Or let's take another example. Let's take the example of when you have to decline your partner for sex, for whatever reason, or maybe no reason at all, right, but if I cannot own my no when it comes to sex, then how in the world can I own my yes? So when I say yes to you, how can you trust that? If every time I say no, then there's punishment involved, I get the silent treatment, I get a bunch of pouting, right? We have to be able to own both our yes and our no.

Another example might be that I choose to. Let's say that I choose to end the relationship, or I choose to stay in the relationship, even though it doesn't feel good, even though I no longer love you, whatever, but I'm going to choose to stay because I feel trapped, because I feel imprisoned.

And so that brings up an interesting question that most people don't ask, which is okay. You have some ideas, you have some beliefs around why you're trapped. So I'm going to choose to stay in an unhealthy relationship because I feel trapped. How will I support myself? What if I'm alone forever? What if it negatively impacts the kids? I mean, all this stuff right, you have lots of beliefs and reasons for that.

But here's an interesting question for the partner. If your spouse is staying with you because they feel trapped, not because they're choosing you, how do you feel about that? And if you feel fine with that, what does that say about you? Does it say that you're also terrified to hear the truth, for your spouse to have choice, that you'd rather just live out your days in denial, put your head in the sand, pretend like things are okay, just so that you don't have to walk through a difficult circumstance, like I think that there's something really rich to be able to dive into there when we start taking away, peeling away those choices.

And if you think about it, the relationship we have today is really just an outcome of the I don't know 10,000, 20,000 choices that both of you have each made over the course of the last 10 or 20 years right. Every little choice that you have made and every little choice that your partner has made and you bring that to the relationship is what has brought you to this place right here in your marriage today.

Now there's good news and bad news about that. The bad news is you're probably, if you're engaging with my work, not feeling great about your marriage. But the good news is is that you do have the opportunity to create change in that marriage. You can create new choices. You can make new choices. You can even make choices to get equipped to be able to navigate these really difficult conversations and being able to set boundaries for yourself. But you gotta get equipped to be able to do that so that you feel safe, being able to navigate what feels like some tumultuous waters with your partner sometimes, so that you can ride those waves together and so that you can feel more free in your marriage.

My friends, we don't have to throw marriage out because we feel like it traps us. We need to rethink how we're showing up inside that marriage and the choices we're making inside that marriage. Even the choice to not have the difficult conversations is still a choice that has helped lead us right here, right. So I think that marriage and freedom have to go together. If you want it to be healthy, they've got to go together. I hope that that gives you something to think about. I hope it gives you something new to sort of chew on in your own relationship. Until next time, please take really good care.