Can You Give Your Whole Self to Your Spouse Without Losing Who You Are?
Becoming One Without Losing Yourself: Finding the Balance Between Love and Individuality in Marriage
Marriage is often described as two people becoming one. It is about sharing dreams, building a family, making decisions together, and creating a life that neither person could have built alone. But somewhere along the way, an important question can emerge: Can you give your whole self to someone else without losing who you are?
For many couples, this question is more complicated than it first appears. Loving your spouse means making sacrifices, considering their feelings, and sometimes putting their needs ahead of your own. But when does that generosity become self-abandonment? And how do you maintain a strong emotional connection without becoming so intertwined that you lose your individuality?
In this episode of Marriage IQ, Dr. Heidi Hastings and Dr. Scott Hastings explore four paradoxes of marriage that challenge the way we think about connection, sacrifice, emotional responsibility, and personal growth.
1. Becoming One: Does Marriage Make You More or Less Yourself?
Many people devote enormous amounts of time and energy to their roles as spouses, parents, and professionals. They become wonderful partners, loving parents, and responsible providers. Yet when asked who they are beyond those roles, they sometimes struggle to answer.
Heidi shares an experience involving a woman in her 50s who was asked to choose a song that represented who she was. Surprisingly, she couldn't think of one. What seemed like a simple exercise revealed something deeper: she had become so concerned with how others saw her that she had lost touch with how she saw herself.
Losing your identity rarely happens overnight. It often happens through small, almost invisible compromises. You stop pursuing your interests, forget your preferences, and gradually organize your life around everyone else's needs.
But becoming one in marriage doesn't necessarily mean losing yourself. Research discussed in the episode suggests that merging aspects of your identities, goals, and shared reality can actually strengthen relationship functioning.
The key is understanding that a healthy marriage can create something bigger than either individual while still allowing both people to grow.
Scott and Heidi reflect on their own relationship, recognizing that marriage has changed them in different ways. Scott has sacrificed some alone time but gained shared dreams, memories, and a sense of completeness. Heidi acknowledges that during the early years of raising children and supporting Scott through medical school and residency, she temporarily lost parts of herself. Later, with his encouragement and support, she discovered new interests, pursued education, and developed a career in the marriage field.
Sometimes we lose parts of ourselves during certain seasons of life. The important thing is having the opportunity and support to find ourselves again.
2. Sacrifice: Loving Generosity or Self-Abandonment?
Sacrifice is an unavoidable part of marriage. However, not all sacrifices come from the same place.
Imagine a woman who cancels a pottery class she has been looking forward to because her husband has had a difficult day at work and needs emotional support. She freely chooses to be there for him because she genuinely wants to help.
Now imagine another woman in exactly the same situation. She cancels her plans because she is afraid her husband will become disappointed, angry, or critical. She believes her own interests are less important than his.
The outward behavior is identical, but the internal experience is completely different.
The first sacrifice comes from love and personal choice. The second comes from fear, guilt, or a desire to avoid conflict.
Research discussed in the episode supports this distinction. Sacrifices motivated by wanting to bring happiness to a partner are associated with greater authenticity and better relationship outcomes. Sacrifices motivated by avoiding negative consequences can negatively affect personal well-being and the relationship.
Scott also shares a personal experience of agreeing with someone's criticisms simply to keep the peace. Although he initially believed he was being a peacemaker, he eventually felt terrible because he had abandoned his own beliefs.
That experience reminded him that being kind doesn't mean agreeing with everything or avoiding every disagreement.
The real question isn't how much you sacrifice, but whether you remain free to choose what you give.
3. Emotional Connection Doesn't Mean Taking Responsibility for Your Spouse's Feelings
When you love someone deeply, seeing them struggle can be incredibly difficult. Your natural instinct might be to step in, fix the problem, or do whatever you can to make them feel better.
But there is a difference between supporting your spouse emotionally and feeling responsible for managing their emotions.
Heidi recalls noticing how Billy Evans responded whenever Elizabeth Holmes became emotional during questioning in the documentary they watched. Rather than asking whether she wanted to continue or needed a break, he would immediately intervene and remove her from the situation.
This raises an important question: Can we become so sensitive to our spouse's emotional state that we feel compelled to fix anything uncomfortable?
Scott explains that sitting beside someone who is suffering without trying to take away their pain can be psychologically difficult. Sometimes, however, what your spouse needs most isn't a solution. They simply need your presence.
Instead of immediately asking, "Are you okay?" or trying to solve the problem, consider asking:
"What's coming up for you right now?"
"Do you want to talk about it?"
"How are you feeling about that?"
Sometimes the most loving response is simply acknowledging what your partner is experiencing and allowing them the space to process it.
The episode also highlights three possible signs of enmeshment: feeling like an extension of your spouse, suppressing your feelings to avoid conflict, and struggling to express your own needs and opinions.
Healthy emotional connection means caring deeply about your partner without believing you must control or fix everything they feel.
4. Becoming More Yourself Might Temporarily Make Marriage Harder
Perhaps the most challenging paradox is that discovering who you are can sometimes create tension in your marriage.
When someone who has spent years organizing life around everyone else's needs begins expressing personal interests, opinions, and boundaries, the relationship naturally has to adjust.
Heidi shares how she eventually established a boundary around her morning routine, asking Scott not to interrupt her meditation, prayer, and scripture reading before 8 a.m. Although she had previously struggled to say no, she realized that protecting her personal time was perfectly reasonable.
Scott respected that boundary, demonstrating how a marriage can make room for individuality without sacrificing connection.
Of course, giving your spouse more space can bring uncertainty. What if they develop interests that don't match yours? What if they start making decisions you wouldn't make? What if they become more independent?
These possibilities can create fear, particularly when one partner already feels insecure in the relationship.
The answer isn't to swing from complete emotional dependence to rigid independence. Both extremes can damage a marriage.
Instead, couples need to find a middle ground where individuality and intimacy can coexist. This requires intentional communication, curiosity, mutual respect, and a willingness to understand each other's changing needs.
When boundaries or differences create uncomfortable feelings, start by examining your own reactions. Rather than assuming rejection, ask your spouse to help you understand what's happening.
Loving Someone Without Giving Yourself Away
Ultimately, a healthy marriage shouldn't require either person to disappear. The goal isn't to become less connected, but to become more capable of loving each other as whole individuals.
You can support your spouse without abandoning your dreams. You can make sacrifices without betraying your values. You can care about their emotions without taking responsibility for controlling them. And you can become more independent without becoming emotionally distant.
Heidi and Scott leave listeners with three important questions to consider:
Do I know who I am beyond the roles I fulfill?
Can I give generously while still recognizing my own needs, values, and choices?
Can my spouse and I become more fully ourselves without threatening our connection?
They also suggest a simple activity for couples: choose a song that represents something essential about who you are, beyond your roles as a spouse, parent, or professional. Share your choices with each other and talk about what those songs reveal.
It's a small exercise, but it can open the door to meaningful conversations about identity, personal growth, and the parts of yourselves you may have forgotten to share.
Perhaps becoming one in marriage shouldn't require us to become less of ourselves. Instead, it should invite us to bring our whole selves into something greater.
Because wholehearted love isn't about losing yourself in another person. It's about becoming more fully yourself while building a life together.
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Well, and one of the risks of giving somebody space is, what if she starts suddenly having her own ideas that she's never expressed before, and what if they don't match your own?
But what if he never comes back? Ah. What if the space gets to be too great? Therein lies the mystery, my love, of this paradox of life that we call marriage. What if the little birdie flies away and never comes back?
Last night we were walking into this very dark movie theater trying to time it just right so we didn't have to see any of the previews. And after trudging over popcorn and trying really hard to not step on people's toes,
we snuggled into our little love seat there at the movie theater, watched the documentary You Can See Everything. This is a really super fascinating film that follows the disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes and her partner Billy Evans during the 34 days leading up to her federal prison sentence.
Me being me, I found myself looking at everything through the eyes of what's a healthy relationship, what's an unhealthy relationship? in my head, every time Billy would make decisions for Elizabeth or speak for her, I just wanted to scream, "What the heck, dude?
She's capable. She's an intelligent woman. Stop trying to control her." And when she was just okay with him doing that, I just wanted to get up close into her face and say, "Wow, what are you doing? You can do this." It just looked so much to me like enmeshment, and I was going absolutely crazy. But it did seem to spark some questions in my mind, Scott, about are there times that maybe you and I are a little too enmeshed in our relationship?
Enmeshed? I don't know. It might seem that way to other people. Well, who gets to decide when a marriage is too close, when two people, when two spouses, when two partners are just too close to each other, and when they need more space from each other. I know there's a lot of people out there who would like to render their opinion.
If I want to give my entire self to you and to my family, is that unhealthy? Isn't that part of what marriage is all about, becoming one?
Or is there a point where giving ourself completely to another person actually causes us to lose ourselves? Well, that's a hard question. The one thing I know is that a scintillating marriage requires us to be a little bit different.
We need to act a little bit differently. We need to look at our spouse differently than we look at other people. And so sometimes that might look like enmeshment to other people. sometimes it might look like we're just giving up too much of ourselves to other people. I don't think it's up to other people to determine how good our marriage is.
So me determining what their relationship was or what's healthy or what's unhealthy isn't really my business. At the end of the day, that's right. Only they get to decide that. Well, today we're going to explore four paradoxes that really make us think about and challenge what we know about becoming one or being one in marriage.
So to begin, let's explore this question. Can a person be genuinely happy in a relationship that still limits their individuality? 'Cause in that movie last night It seemed to me like he was not letting her make decisions or be who she was, but what do I know?
ultimately they're the ones who get to decide their relationship, not anyone else.
So I've had quite a few clients, mostly women, who devote an enormous part of their life, of their energy to their families, and they're loving parents and spouses. They're accomplished and they're responsible. And for men, maybe it seems a little bit more like their focus is on their career,
I ask them, "Tell me about yourselves outside of those roles, outside of being a parent, a spouse, whatever your career is, tell me about yourself," some of them really wrestle with that question. And they start asking themselves, "Who am I?" Yeah. So recently I was talking to one woman in her 50s, and she told me that she was in this class where the teacher asked them to identify a song that represented who they are to the rest of the class, and it was so hard for her.
She couldn't even think of one song, not one song that was like, "This is who I am. This is talking about me." And that really bothered her so much that she couldn't think of what she liked and who she was. And it wasn't so much her inability to choose a song that really concerned me, it was what that moment revealed in the broader context of her life pertaining to distress over what others thought of her.
Hmm. So here's a question, then. How does somebody slowly, over time, lose contact with their identity and not even realize it? Uh, I think little by little, right? Just little teeny, tiny giving up just little bits of yourself.
You don't even notice it consciously, right? I think when we are so invested in other people that we don't even stop to think about what our preferences are, what our desires are, what our interests are, that's where we start losing some of that. I agree.
Do you think sometimes that actually looks like poster child for being a great mom or a great wife when underneath maybe there's some real struggle with, self-understanding, self-development? Yeah. And that's why we do what we do on Marriage iQ. Identity, that's where it begins, right?
So that leads us to our first paradox, and that is- Paradox. I love it. Mm. Becoming one. does it erase us or does it make us into something better than we would be otherwise? Great question. All right, so let's look at it.
So there's a 2025 review by Lydia Emery and colleagues at the University of Chicago that found
that merging aspects of identities, goals, and shared reality is generally associated with better relationship functioning. So this new term merging, I'm merging me with you, and then we have this we also. And generally, when we're aligned on all those things, we have better relationships. Now- Say what?
So Scott, in your opinion, how can spouses expand each other's horizons, develop shared identities, and build something that neither could have created on their own? I think it takes a plethora of things. It takes intentionality. Okay. Communication.
Okay, so here's another question for you then. Do you think that you've become more yourself or less yourself because of our marriage? Yes. Agreed. I would say the same thing. Tell me more. Well, I'm not the same person. How can I be? You know? So are you more or are you less? I mean, give me some examples.
Well, I am less, isolated. Okay. I, I do tend to like being alone sometimes. Okay. And that has not been the case in our marriage. It's just been less, less of my own alone time. I still have some, but not as much as I used to. there's a trade-off for that, right? Okay, what else? I think it's like it's an investment in our relationship.
That trade-off, the return is much greater than me just spending my alone time with myself. What do you have more of? what's the more? shared dreams, visions, memories. Mm. Okay. I am highly, highly sentimental person.
I reminisce a lot on our memories together. Not memories of me alone, but us, and it brings me great pleasure and significant meaning that is really hard to put into words. But is a feeling of completeness and wholeness that I cannot have by myself. Okay. I would say for me, the more and the less were time dependent on the period of our relationship.
So Well, we came into the relationship with my daughter from my first marriage, and then started having our own children, three more after that pretty quickly. You were gone a lot for med school and residency for seven years, and I had to invest so much into the household and into them that I really, I think, lost parts of myself.
But once they were all in school, then I started being able to do things, I think, because I was with you, encouraged by you, financially supported by you to do jobs that maybe didn't make as much money- Mm-hmm ... but that were filled with enjoyment for me. Kind of paved the path of my, eventually ending up in the marriage field, and more education too.
So I would say in the last 15 years, a huge amount of who I am is because of you, that wouldn't have been there otherwise. I would say in the first 15 years, I lost a lot of who I was. So maybe just knowing it's the timing and the intentionality. Yeah. I like that. And the investment. So maybe there are some years where you do lose yourself.
It was my choice to give everything I had to my young children and to you to support you through school. Did you resent that? No, not at the time I didn't. Later, I kind of went through periods where I resented it because I missed out on a career- Yeah ... for quite a while, but, you know, that, that was my choice.
To me, being with our children was more important.
if becoming intertwined is often good for marriage, according to that research, why does enmeshment sometimes cause so much harm, too? So let's talk about that when we are looking at paradox number two, sacrifice. It can be loving, or it can be a s- form of self-abandonment.
So let me give you an example using two different spouses with the exact same scenario. Okay? So the first one I'm gonna use she 'cause I'm a she. She cancels a pottery class that she'd really been looking forward to because her husband had some really hard things happen at work that day, and he really could use her support to navigate and talk through some of them.
She freely chooses to put his needs first above her own, which would have been very helpful to relax, to create, to do all those things, but it was her decision. Then we have the other woman, same thing, but she cancels her plans again because she's afraid that her husband is gonna be really disappointed that he couldn't go to the game with his brothers, or she feels guilty about doing something that he sees as frivolous, or maybe, she doesn't want him to be mad at her, or she believes that her desires aren't as important as his desires.
So same sacrifice, different internal experience. What do you think about that? You know, I'm tempted to say, well, of course the first lady is more emotionally intelligent. She's more in tune with what she, defines as sacrifice 'cause it's an intentional sacrifice. I'm intentionally sacrificing for my husband.
I am doing it 'cause that's what I wanna do. We've talked about this in other episodes. However, I think that many of us are not going to be emotionally intelligent all the time. In fact, none of us are. Right. You know, there are these situations where, yep, y- yet again, I have to cancel my plans to support my spouse and
That can feel heavy- Well, the- Really heavy psychologically ... and the first wom- woman could have said, "Honey, I am so sorry you had such a really, really hard time at work today. I'm gonna go ahead and go to my pottery class, but could we spend like the last hour before we go to bed really helping you process this
Or she could invite him to pottery. Yeah. That's another good one too. I mean, she can still make the choice regardless of whether it's to do what he wanted or whether she knows in and of herself she really needs this to keep going. Yeah. Right? So there's some really interesting research by Impett and colleagues that backs this up, and they found that sacrifices that are motivated to bring happiness to a partner Were really associated with greater feelings of authenticity, which means like being real, being genuine, being true, and better relationship outcomes.
On the other hand, sacrifices that were made and motivated by, trying to avoid negative consequences like conflict or punishment or having no food in the house, I'm doing this because if I don't do it, we're all gonna starve to death. those kinds of sacrifices really, have negative outcomes in relationships and negative outcomes for our own wellbeing.
So it sounds to me like coming to life with an abundance mindset and coming to life, showing up in life with a scarcity mindset. And an agentic mindset, which means agency. I'm going to choose what I do, not feel like I have to do this. Right. Yeah, one is from a positive point of view, I am blessed with so many things, and one is I don't have enough.
Well, and I have no choice. me- And, and that, that really leaves them no choice when they don't have enough. Right. So Scott, Does sacrifice sometimes become self-betrayal? It most certainly can. Yeah. I think, when we're not true to ourselves Okay When we're not true to who we are, and nobody else knows that but us.
Okay. So you can get a whole focus group all you want, all these audience members watching this movie all you want. They don't know what's in this little noggin or what's in their noggin. Only I know about what I'm thinking about. Only you know what you're thinking about. The problem is sometimes I don't know what I'm thinking about if I don't get with myself and figure out who I am
You know, this story I tell myself is that I am a peacemaker, but I recently had a conversation with someone who, was kinda upset with me because in my peacemaking I didn't take some specific stands on things. And I listened to her, all of her complaints about me for a long time, and I took ownership for them, and I agreed with her, and I said, "Yep, you got a good point.
Yep. I'm really sorry I did that, I did this, I did that." Well, at the end of the conversation, I felt terrible. I felt terrible because I knew everything was not my fault. I knew totally agreeing with everything she said to hold the peace rather than standing by some of the things that I truly believed, exactly like this research said.
I was coming at it from a negative, you know, I don't wanna rock the boat, I'm just gonna take it on the chin. I felt self-betrayed. I literally felt self-betrayed in that moment. How did that feel? Sick to my gut. Okay. Terrible. Well, that's a good learning opportunity, right? It made me really, really think about, okay- we have to be true to ourselves.
what we give or what we say.
The power to choose is really so important when it comes to looking at sacrifice. you have some really good ideas and questions, thank you for those. Oh. That's really awesome. Okay, paradox number three. So being deeply connected with each other doesn't mean that we're responsible for each other's emotions.
Right. So I asked you a minute ago about being emotionally dependent on each other. Well, this really makes me wanna go back to that documentary movie that we saw. I kept noticing how every time Elizabeth would get emotional during questioning, you could see Billy watching, reading her emotions, and he would get really super uncomfortable- Mm
if she started to get emotional or tighten up a little bit. She cried a lot. Yeah, He would immediately step in and try to stop the interview right there, say, "We gotta go out to the ocean," or, "We've gotta meet with family," or, "We've gotta do something," and take her off somewhere else, without even asking her what she thought.
"Honey, are you okay? Are you okay to proceed, or do you need a break?" Never was she given the choice, and ooh, that bugged me so bad. So what are your thoughts about becoming hypersensitive to each other's energy and moods and emotions, so much that we wanna fix anything that's negative for our spouse?
Yeah. Well, it's psychologically easy- Yes ... to jump in. It's just psychologically easy. It's psychologically hard and emotionally hard to sit there and watch you suffering and not taking it from you. But sitting by you, sometimes just my presence, right? Mm-hmm. Not even words. Yeah. and allowing you to move through that emotional trauma.
Which is totally okay. But it's hard. It is really hard. It is so easy psychologically to jump in and, to stable the boat, right? To keep it from falling over, to make sure everything's just right. Yeah. I often, when you would come home from work, as you were walking up the stairs
I could feel the energy, and I could see in your face like, "Oh, was it a good day today? Was it a bad day today?" Whether it's work, the market, whatever it is, and, "Honey, are you okay?" It's what I always ask, and then you'd say a couple of sentences. "Well, what can I do? How can I help you?" You were being helpful, right?
I- is that okay? Is it? I think it is sometimes. I cannot say that it's not all the time. Is it psychologically easy? It is. Is it my job to fix your emotions? It's not your job to fix my emotions, but does it happen? Yes. And is it wrong? Not necessarily. Okay. Is there a better way? There's a better way.
Tell me. Well- I like the idea that somebody taught me of, "Hey, what's coming up for you?" That way you're not asking a closed-ended question. Right. "Are you okay?" But, "Hey, what's, what's coming up for you?" Or, I- I feel a shift in the energy. Yeah, Do you wanna talk about it now or not really?
I don't like, "I feel a shift in the energy." Okay. Because that tells me, I'm putting off something negative. Okay. That's fair. And, now, that might work for someone else. For me, I don't, I don't think I like it as much as, "Hey, what's coming up for you right now?" Okay. That is... allows me all the room I need if I wanna share, not share, And then instead of me trying to fix it, just saying, "Oh, gosh, that's hard."
Yeah. Or, "Ooh, wow, how do you feel about that?" And not in trite ways, right? We don't want- Not in trite ways ... avoid trite- I hate that ... trite statements. Just, like, really meaning it. Yeah. That's really hard. Geez. Yeah. Well, there's a really great article in Psychology Today by Mark Travers, PhD, that's called Three Telltale Signs of Enmeshment, and here's kinda how it starts.
First of all, you feel like you're just an extension of your spouse, as if your role is to reflect their needs and desires rather than have your own. The second thing that helps you know if you have an enmeshed relationship is that you suppress your own feelings to avoid conflict, just like what we talked about a little bit.
And then the third thing is you struggle to assert your own needs, opinions, and desires within the relationship.
So what you and I were talking about with when you come home, sometimes that's just an ordinary loving concern for each other, right? Yeah. But- You're concerned for me ... when it becomes a constant anxiety driven state- Or you don't wanna see me- Yeah, I can't- ... hurting ... I can't tolerate- You can't ... seeing you having a down day.
Yeah. Right. That's problematic. Yeah, that is. That is problematic for both of us okay, so here's another big question for you How do we learn to care so deeply about each other's emotional worlds without making it our job to control that world? And so to talk about that, we're gonna look at paradox number four. Okay. Paradox number four is becoming more yourself might temporarily make your marriage harder.
Uh-oh. Because I do self-exploration- Ah ... because I've realized that things are a little shaky on my internal self. What if- Yeah ... that's really hard for you? Yeah. that's a risk, isn't it? Yeah. So again, back to this, documentary that we just watched.
Whether it's, whether it's Em- Elizabeth Holmes, or whether it's my client who can't come up with a song that tells them who they are, or whether it's me, 'cause I'm in this place sometimes too,
she begins discovering what she thinks, what she likes, what matters to her, what her opinions are, what she genuinely wants, and can a spouse be supportive of that? Why not? How? How can a spouse sh- show support for that without, fearing that there's gonna be too much space between them?
Giving space. Giving space- Clearing s- ... is the antidote for- Clearing space on a cal- calendar, taking kids to soccer, financially supporting her hobby. Or education or whatever it is. Yeah, like giving that space, making way for your spouse. And so if it's the husband that's really struggling, maybe going through a midlife crisis trying to figure out who he is, does making space do the same thing there?
Yeah. But what if he never comes back? Ah. What if the space gets to be too great? Therein lies the mystery, my love, of this paradox of life that we call marriage. What if the little birdie flies away and never comes back? Yeah. That is a risk, isn't it? Yeah. But marrying me was a risk, was it not? Well, I remember- Saying, "I do."
I remember you coming to me and telling me you wanted to date other people, and- Before we married, by the way ... before we married. Yeah. Yeah. Please make this clear. Right. And I learned from my first marriage, the tighter I try to control things the more he wanted to be free. And so I just said, "Okay."
I think you were really, really shocked. No, it was great. And you never- I, I never went away. You never- I came back, obviously ... you never dated anybody else. Yeah, that's the risk. But we take that risk when we say, "I do." Well, and one of the risks of giving somebody space is, what if she starts suddenly having her own ideas that she's never expressed before, and what if they don't match your own?
So in my world, I would find that very fascinating and quite scintillating actually, that you have your own life. I think that's freaking awesome. A lot of people might agree, and a lot of people might disagree with that. Okay. I think there would definitely be some who would have a lot of fear. Well, to those people who agree and disagree, th- there's always going to be another side, right, of this paradox.
Both things can be true that seemingly don't make sense, right? What if she says no on occasion to whatever you want? She's setting some boundaries, not to keep you out, but this makes me think of, like, you were setting some boundaries with me, but I think you were a little surprised one day 'cause you come down in the morning and you interrupt my morning routine constantly.
And then one day finally I said, "You know what? This is my morning routine time till 8:00 in the morning. Please don't interrupt my meditation, my prayer, my scripture reading, any of that. but I will get together with you before you leave and we can talk about anything."
And you've been really good Yes. But I gave, gave, gave, gave 'cause I didn't think I could say no, and once I really figured out I can set boundaries to respect my time too, that's okay. Like a loyal puppy dog. That's what I am.
So you feel secure in the relationship, but say you didn't, and what if you experienced those boundaries I set or me saying no or my differences of opinion as rejection? What do you say to that person? Well, I, you know, we teach here to t- start with ourselves, right? Like, what am I missing here? And then maybe I can ask you, "Hey, Heidi, I notice this is going on.
What am I missing? This is how I feel." I feel maybe a little bit rejected, or I feel whatever- Yeah, may- maybe we can do a- Is this true? ... a, a Dear Man. Mm-hmm. Is this true? Are you- Is this true? and, you know, help me understand. Getting back to that curiosity principle- Yeah ... of just help me understand.
Yeah. I think we have to navigate it very carefully, really communicating if negative feelings come up for either of us because otherwise, if he gets fearful, If we're emotionally enmeshed, I'm gonna back off and quit trying to figure out who I am- And that's why with enmeshment- ... and just go back to lockstep.
Yeah, enmeshment, you... there is no leeway. You can't- You can't break out ... you can't break out. You can't figure out who you are. You just have to stay- 'Cause anything that's done outside of that both enmeshed opinions is seen as, you know, blasphemy really. Yeah. So there's some research by Kim and Woo.
a study of 400 married couples in South Korea found emotional fusion and reactivity was associated with marital disfa- satisfaction. So when they're enmeshed, when they're reactive to each other's emotional state, generally speaking, they had really bad relationships, but then when they tried to figure out who they were and be self-assertive when they were so rigid with that, that was really bad, too.
So here on the one side they're overreactive or they're too enmeshed, so they swing to the other side of I need my autonomy- Why do we always do this, my love? ... and that's miserable, too. This is human nature. Yeah. We just swing- We can't find that balance very easily ... from one to the other. So the goal isn't replacing self-erasure with rigid individualism.
It is, just like you said, finding that middle ground where you can have a self and where you can have some autonomy, but you also have that connection and intimacy. I think that takes listening to Marriage iQ every single week and becoming a more intelligent spouse Well, here's a question for you, our listeners, to give us your opinion in the comments.
If one person has spent 20 years, 30 years organizing the marriage around everyone else's needs, what responsibility does the other spouse have when that person begins to find his or her own voice? So that's what we were just talking about there for a little bit. We would love to hear your opinion on that.
Because we think you can actually give your whole self to someone else without giving yourself away. I love that idea ... that goal of self-differentiation isn't to have your spouse less. It's to become more capable of loving them from a place of identity, integrity, freedom, and conscious choice.
So let's circle back to the documentary one last time. Okay Our initial question was whether Elizabeth and Billy could be happy in a relationship that appears to just be so terribly enmeshed.
And what it really comes down to is this question: Can both people continue to think for themselves and choose and disagree and grow within their own relationship? And the documentary didn't really show that. No, it leaves you hanging, of course. Of course. So yes, that is, uh, you can see everything. It's out in theaters.
Very fascinating. start your own conversation. Let's give our listeners some questions to reflect on as we finish up this episode. Okay. Do I know who I am beyond the roles I fulfill? Can I give generously of myself while recognizing my own needs, my own values, my own choices? Can my spouse and I become more fully ourselves without threatening our connection?
And my question to all three of those- Mm-hmm ... is sometimes. I'm working on it. Scott, remember the lady who couldn't think of a song to describe- Yeah ... who, who she was, Could you do that if I ask you right now? A song that describes me? Yeah. I can tell you there's a song that I love listening to.
What is it? Well, it's Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto Number Two, and the theme song from, Sabrina lately. Okay, those are really awesome ones. There are no words that would describe to someone else who they are, but- Maybe I don't need words ... maybe. Okay. That's really good. So when she told me that, I couldn't think of any for myself either, which is kind of funny.
So- And it's okay to choose to change the song, too. Oh, yeah. You don't have to have it for your whole life. Through different periods of time. Yeah. But this is kind of a fun activity that's also assignment for our listeners this week. that's an assignment for you, our listeners this week. So these are some I came up with 'cause I've had some time to think about it.
I really like Brave by Sara Bareilles. I think there are times that I've really had to be that way. Um - I think Brave I also like because that's a lot what I try to help women do that has a great message. Yeah. I like Stronger by Kelly Clarkson.
And I think if I look more forward looking on what I want to be and where I want to be guided, I would have to say Girl on Fire by Alicia Keys. So you and your spouse this week, try to identify some songs that represent something that's essential about you, and not just a role that you play, but who you are at the core, and share it with your spouse.
Share it with each other. That'd be a fun activity to do.
becoming one in marriage shouldn't require us to become less of ourselves, but it helps us become more of ourselves. Perhaps it invites us to bring our whole selves into something greater. And with that, we hope you have a wonderful week, and we'll see you on another exciting episode of Marriage iQ
