How well do we tolerate difference and otherness?

For such a long time, I’ve battled with these two things in relationships:

1 - Loyalty to myself and my sense of goodness

2 - Loyalty to the other person and taking care of their feelings

I never experienced both in a healthy, consistent way. I’ve never really known how to.

I care deeply about other people and their feelings, but I never wanted to seem weak and like a doormat.

I watched people do that in my life and I hated it. I wanted to be stronger.

I thought sticking up for myself in conflict was staying loyal to myself.

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Most of my romantic relationships have been pretty conflict heavy, where we were both fighters. It was toxic but comfortable at the same time. We knew what to expect from one another. It became predictable, which somehow felt safe.

I ignorantly contributed my reaction in conflict to my stubbornness, passion, and ability to have hard conversations. “I don’t mind fighting”, I’d think.

And then I met someone who hated conflict. And we got married.

He is equally stubborn and passionate, but handles conflict and disagreement entirely differently.

No yelling. No targeted comments. No eye rolling. (I thought this was normal and expected)

It has been an entirely new world for me.

A lot has surfaced because of that combination.

We learned that I’m fight. He’s flight. Which is just the best.

I’ve learned that the internal battle I was having about proving my goodness while taking care of someone’s feelings, actually created intense conflict in myself that I would project onto my closest relationships, hence the consistent conflict. I wanted to do both things well and at the same time.

The more intimate the relationship, the more I fought for my sense of goodness and worthiness to be known inside of it.

And for my husband, the more intimate the relationship, the more he fought for peace and no sign of unrest — that meant it was safe.

Which means, the majority of the time, when we get into an argument, we’re not fighting about a thing. We’re fighting for ourselves.

For our own worthiness, for safety, for control, for connection.

That didn’t just happen overnight. We’ve probably been living that way since we were young.

So much of our history is thrown into the mix of our present day dilemmas — how we were raised, the culture we grew up in, the dysfunction we normalized, the fears we embedded into our nervous systems, and even the roles we play in our other relationships.

We spend so much time and effort working to understand why the other one says what they say or moves like they do — at their job, around their friends, with their family, in our conflict, etc. And we just keep spinning because there is too much muddled together to pick apart and understand.

In my marriage, most of the time, I’m unconsciously trying to make him more like me and he’s unconsciously trying to make me more like him. It’s more comfortable that way. More predictable. It creates a false sense of safety.

I wonder how many of us continue spinning out in our relationships (having the same fight over and over again), thinking that we’re on the precipice of solving a problem that will bring us each more worthiness, safety, control, and connection.

When in reality, maybe what we’re actually trying to fix is the otherness we feel from each other. The differences we don’t understand. The unconscious reasons we do what we do and think how we think. We can’t tolerate what we don’t know.

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Our therapist gave us an exercise where we took a blank piece of paper and drew a Venn diagram. In one circle was my name, in the other circle was his name, and in the overlapping circle were both our names and our daughter’s name.

She explained that there will be so many aspects in my circle that my husband may never be able to access or even understand — my family history, my experiences before him, my wounds, my deepest fears, all the things that make me want to fight for my life in conflict, etc. And vice versa. No matter how hard we try to analyze the other person’s behavior or motive, we may never achieve the full story. This is super frustrating for us because anyone who knows us knows how much we love to analyze and understand things, especially about each other.

But that’s not the end goal.

What we’re left with is our family circle. Where we get to overlap and come together to build something unique to us. Where we get to write our own story, create our own traditions, and invest in raising little humans together. That’s where we should pour our trust and our belief in one another. That’s where we get to truly see each other and experience one another for who we are today.

We would spend our lives trying to beat the difference out of each other to make ourselves feel more comfortable. But, what will that teach our kids? That we have to be the same to be connected, safe, and worthy? That they have to be just like us to be okay or accepted?

So much pain is caused in relationships (of all kinds) because we don’t know how to tolerate difference.

We continually try to contort others to be more like us even if we truly love and care for them.

We think that will solve our issues.

But in reality, those that are different than us are the ones that challenge us, sharpen us, and love us the deepest.

It’s the love we crave, yet we push away because it’s hard work.

We’ve learned that loving each other well is a balance of regulating ourselves and coming towards the other — trusting ourselves and one another in the process. Sometimes the best way to love each other is to take care of ourselves and finish the argument later. It doesn’t mean I’m not being heard. It doesn’t mean there’s unrest. We don’t have to treat every disagreement as a threat that needs to be conquered. We can disagree and stay in connection. We can show up differently than we have in the past. We can tolerate difference and still feel how we feel.

I have so many more thoughts on this, but I’ll leave you with this podcast interview with two of my favorite people: Dr. Orna Guralnik and Jay Shetty. So many of these truths I just discussed came from my reflection of this interview. Enjoy.