Your spouse understands you. That’s the problem. + New personality type posts
Dewey vs. Truman (The Great Debate) by Norman Rockwell (1948)
People go to marriage counseling because they think their partner doesn’t understand. But your spouse understands you just fine; they just don’t like what they understand. They don’t like that the thing they’ve explained to you forty times has somehow failed to turn you into a different person.
The evidence for lasting effects of marriage counseling is much less impressive than the cultural faith we put in it. Therapy can change how you understand someone but it’s not very good at changing who that person is. Which means the useful question is not: How do I get my partner to change? It’s: What if they don’t?
I coach a lot of couples, which you might think is shocking since two men divorced me. But I have three useful qualifications: disappointment, adjustment, and personality type. I have extensive experience with the first two, and it takes me about five minutes to tell two people what they will fight about for the rest of their relationship.
The thing you most want your partner to change is usually the thing you’ve decided is unreasonable. But if it were merely a bad habit, they’d have changed it already. The quality you cannot stand now is attached to the quality you loved in the beginning; distinctive parts of someone’s personality are the parts you notice first and the parts you keep noticing forever.
But this doesn’t mean you made a mistake, because there are no conflict-free personality matches: Opposites cover enormous amounts of territory for each other, but each person spends a lot of time operating in the other person’s blind spot. Similar people understand each other more easily, but they want control over the same territory while neglecting everything neither one likes doing.
Here’s a couple I coached this week (who agreed to be an example).
He’s an ISFJ. She’s an ENFP. They want to spend more time together, so they’ve started meeting at the gym. This is going terribly.
The ENFP walks into the gym and looks around for something that interests her. Maybe today she’ll do sit-ups because she can suddenly envision herself having great abs. The ISFJ has arm days and leg days. He knows which exercises produce which results. He looks at her wandering around the gym and sees inefficiency. She looks at his program and sees imprisonment.
Neither of them is doing the gym wrong. They disagree about what it means to do anything well. For the ISFJ, mastery comes from depth: learn the proven method, repeat it, refine it, get better. For the ENFP, mastery comes from understanding possibilities: make connections, try something interesting. Once the concept is obvious, endless execution feels like overkill.
This same fight shows up everywhere: vacations, children, money, restaurants, businesses, the kitchen. The useful part of personality type is that the argument stops being evidence that your spouse is insane. Ask this important question: Does your partner actually like doing it their way? Usually the answer is yes. No one is secretly waiting to be rescued by the other person’s superior system.
Good couples coaching doesn’t eliminate the conflict. It eliminates the fantasy that the conflict will disappear once the other person finally understands. This is why the most useful couples counseling might happen before marriage, when you can ask: Do I want to have this fight for forty years?
Most of us don’t ask. So later the work becomes coming to terms with what we chose. Which brings me back to my primary qualification for couples coaching: disappointment.
You can survive an astonishing amount of disappointment once you stop treating it as evidence that something has gone wrong. And sometimes disappointment is just what reality feels like after you finally understand it.
Personality Type Office Hours
My next personality type office hours will be Friday, Sept. 18, at noon Eastern. We’ll talk about using type to decrease conflict in relationships. There will be disappointment. But it’s a group, so there will also be schadenfreude.
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