No one can hurt you more than the ones you love. Love requires trust, honesty, and vulnerability. And these very things make it possible for us to be hurt deeply.
Flip it around: To be someone's beloved is to be given the power to inflict greater pain on them than their worst enemies. Learning to wield this power responsibly is one of the great lessons of loving.
This week's Gospel tells the story of the magi who, after finding Love itself in an unexpected place, "go home by another way" to avoid causing harm.
We know a lot about how to avoid causing harm. In 1983, Dr. John Gottman observed how couples interacted during conflict. He found that couples in bad marriages had four behaviors in common: criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling. In a subsequent study in 1999, Gottman found he could predict divorce with 90% accuracy after observing just the first three minutes of a conversation based on the extent to which couples exhibited these behaviors, which he termed "the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse"
Happy couples may have as many conflicts as unhappy couples, Gottman found. The secret to their success was the ways in which they managed conflict: gentleness, appreciation, responsibility, and self-soothing.
But there is another kind of harm we must also avoid: enabling. Sometimes we need to avoid giving our partners what they want when it isn't good for them.
We are called in our vocation to love our spouse by seeing to their needs and desires. In so doing, we sometimes open ourselves to the danger of mistaking what your spouse desires as what is good for them.
Thousands of spouses accept physical or emotional abuse, allow themselves to be persuaded into forms of sexually exploitative marriages, or enable their spouse’s addictions by rescuing their loved ones again and again from the consequences of their actions. When this happens, you pour yourself out in service that is ultimately destructive for your spouse, for you and for the relationship.
Studies suggest that the majority of partners of people with problems like alcohol dependence engaged in enabling behaviors, such as lying and covering for them, bailing them out of immediate consequences of their actions, alternating between shaming them and excusing their behaviors, and threatening consequences but not following through.
Learning to do no harm to your spouse is a lifelong project that is central to your relationship. And your spouse is not the only beneficiary. As you become more and more effective at doing no harm, you will become an ever kinder, more honest, and more responsible person in your own right.
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