How to Get What You Want from Your Relationship
Hi there, I’m Maggie O’Connor at Breakthrough MFT helping you reach your breakthrough moment.
Today I want to talk to those of you out there who are dating and wondering if this is the right person for you…
So the other day I went into a donut shop and I asked for a quinoa salad… I really insisted, although the lady behind the counter was saying to me, “We don’t have it, I’m so sorry… is there something else you want?”, and I just really didn’t want to leave without my quinoa salad!
This sounds ridiculous to anybody who’s listening, but…
Sometimes in dating, we find ourselves looking for what we need from someone who just doesn’t have it!
We’ll spend all kinds of time and energy trying to help them to understand how good it could be… how great this thing is if they would just try it. We even make excuses why they just don’t check that box. We don’t spend enough time wondering what’s important to us about it, and checking that out with our partner!
So what do we do about this? How can I be helpful?
I want to suggest to you that a little curiosity goes a long way. How are we gonna do that?
Number one, you’re going to identify your need and what’s important about this to you.
Number two, you’re going to check the evidence – is this person, is your partner handing out quinoa salads to everybody and not giving any to you?! That’s informative!
Number three, you’re going to ask them about it. This is really hard, this is the moment of truth.
You’re going to do it like this – identify your feeling first (i.e., “this didn’t feel so great to me when you… (fill in the blank).
What’s that about?”)
Number four, you’re going to be quiet you’re gonna really listen to the answer. Know that they’re always going to tell you what you need to know but it might not be what you want to hear so from something like, ‘I love you babe, but family time skiing it’s not my thing’, you could hear “I love you babe” and leave it at that, and you’re going to be disappointed. But if you really listen to the truth of, it’s not their thing you can…
Number five use this to make a decision about whether you accept it.
Accepting means ‘no harm no foul’; this means no resentment and this means I’m not gonna get it from you, so I’m okay getting it from somebody else. And if one of us feels lonely later we can have another conversation…
You can acknowledge that this is gonna be a source of conflict in the relationship but we don’t want to change it yet…
Or, we’re gonna change the nature of the relationship, and that doesn’t mean we have to end it but the nature of the relationship needs to change, if you’re not going to be able to get your quinoa salad from the donut shop.
I‘m Maggie O’Connor, hoping this helps you to ‘break on through’.