Speaker 0:00

Now you can love each other deeply and still be slowly destroying the marriage you've built together. That may be difficult to hear. But love alone will not teach you how to communicate when you're hurting. It will not teach you how to repair broken trust. It will not teach you to navigate conflict or stop repeating the patterns driving you apart. A successful, healthy, conscious marriage takes more than love. Love may bring you together, but what does it actually take to build a marriage where you both feel loved?

Speaker 0:42

Hey there, welcome to Before and Beyond I Do, real talk about marriage at every stage. I'm Susan Ortolano, Intuitive Relationship and Marriage Coach. We have another meaningful episode for you today, and I'm so glad you're here. So let's just dive in, shall we? It's Susan here, and this is Before and Beyond I Do, your station for marriage education and transformation, the curriculum no one ever taught you in school. Buckle up today because this is some real talk here, and our episode today is called What's Love Got to Do with It? And yes, you're thinking about the Tina Turner song, and that was the inspiration. But today we're talking about a truth, a truth that many couples don't realize until they're already hurting. Now, loving your partner and knowing how to be a partner are two different things. I hear this all the time, but Susan, we love each other. And I believe you. Beneath the arguments, the resentment, the disappointment, and the distance, there may still be a tremendous amount of love between you. So why is it so hard if love is there? Now we are handed this beautiful idea that love conquers all. And when love doesn't conquer the misunderstandings or the distance, we start wondering: did I marry the wrong person? Have we fallen out of love? But let me tell you, there's another question worth asking. Have we learned how to build a marriage that can hold the love we have? Most of us enter marriage knowing we love the person, we want a life together, and we make a commitment and we mean it. But we also bring our histories, our wounds, our habits, expectations, ideas about what a husband or wife should do. We bring the ideas of what closeness should look like, how disagreements should be handled. And sometimes we don't even know that we have expectations until our partner doesn't meet them. Underneath it all, we have this belief. Just because we love each other, we're gonna figure it out. And then life happens. And the we will figure it out method just doesn't quite work the way we expected. So let's get real here. You're tired. There are bills to pay, you've got responsibilities, you've got competing needs. One of you wants to talk, the other wants quiet. You ask for help and feel dismissed. Your partner hears criticism and gets defensive. One small disagreement becomes the same argument you've had twenty times before. And you're both thinking, if you just love me, why can't you understand me? So notice what's happening. Something you haven't learned how to navigate together has become a question about whether or not you're loved. If you love me, you would fill in the blank. You may hear that in your head. You may even say it out loud. And then you try to prove your love or get your partner to prove theirs while the actual problem remains unresolved. Now, who taught you how to recognize your needs and communicate them clearly? Who taught you how to understand your partner's needs when they differ from yours? Who taught you how to take ownership without falling into shame or turning around and blaming? Who taught you how to make agreements, repair hurt, and balance being an individual and being part of a couple? Many of us were expected to just know these things just because we were old enough to get married. But being old enough to make a commitment does not mean we've learned how to live that commitment. Now, before we get into what I call a recipe, a recipe for a successful marriage, we need to look at the word intention. Now I have a confession. I'm a dating marriage reality show junkie, but I call it research because of what I do. Different shows, different countries, different languages, different cultures, you name it, I'm in. But if you look at intention on a reality show, is somebody really there to find a partner? Or are they just there to be on television and build a personal brand? We can't know everyone's motives from an edited TV show, but it does raise an important question. Are these two people there for the same purpose? Now, this intention matters in everyday life too. One person wants marriage, the other wants a casual situationship. One is sitting there thinking, let's build a beautiful life together, and the other one is thinking, let's enjoy this and see how long it lasts. Now, there may be attraction, affection, wonderful conversations, but sometimes people's intentions are just not aligned. One may think, oh, once they love me enough, they'll want what I want. But love doesn't guarantee that someone will choose the same future you're choosing. And this does not stop mattering once you're married. You both said I do, but what did each of you intend that marriage to be? A partnership where you keep learning and growing together? A comfortable arrangement where you each fulfill certain roles? Friends with benefits, that's kind of rough for a marriage there. A shared household with co-parenting, we can use the same word, marriage, and carry very different pictures of what we're actually agreeing to. Even the sentence, I want this marriage to work, needs clarification and needs a conversation. Because what does work mean to you? What kind of relationship do you want us to have? That's a fair question. And what are you willing to do to help us create it? A shared intention gives you a direction. Your actions show whether you're moving in that direction together or not. Then you can ask, what ingredients do we need to build the partnership we both say we want? And ingredients have ingredients, ingredients, ingredients have nuances. Now, love does belong in the recipe. Of course it does. And love shows up throughout the recipe, learning your partner's needs and honoring agreements and owning your impact and making time for the marital friendship and intimacy. But a thriving, conscious marriage also needs other ingredients. First, commitment. If you don't have commitment, you might as well just leave. You might as well forget it, throw in the towel, you're done. Without commitment, it's over. But commitment, the decision to keep showing up and caring for the relationship, especially when love and loving each other doesn't feel so easy. It matters. Self-awareness, recognizing what you bring into the marriage, your beliefs, your triggers, your expectations, your old wounds, your protective patterns. Then there's a word I call respondability. This is the combination of responsibility and responding. This is about taking ownership of how you show up and choosing your response rather than automatically blaming, attacking, defending, or withdrawing just to prove your point. Of course, we have emotional safety. Knowing you can be honest, vulnerable, and authentically yourself without being mocked, punished, or having your vulnerability used against you. That's a huge fear people have. And that's an important ingredient. Communication. I know this is a big umbrella word. Expressing what is true for you and listening to understand what is true for your partner is part of it. And because communication has many different angles and nuances, it does take time to define, to sort, to get skillful at all of it. Because again, it is a big umbrella term for a lot of different things. Trust and respect, treating each other's hearts, boundaries, and agreements with absolute care. Repair. Important ingredient here: acknowledging hurt, taking responsibility for your impact, making amends and following through on change if you say you're going to change. Intimacy and marital friendship, continuing to create emotional, physical, intellectual, and spiritual closeness, and making room to really enjoy each other. Acceptance, allowing your partner to be their own unique person. Now that doesn't erase needs, boundaries, or accountability. It means your marriage is not a project to turn your partner into somebody else. Do not look at your partner and think, oh, fix her upper. And you might be thinking, Susan, I know all of this, but knowing the names of the ingredients and implementing them daily are two different things. And there's another layer. Each couple brings their own flavor, their personalities, values, histories, traditions, dreams, unique quirks, and deep needs. The essential ingredients may be similar, but no two marriages will have the exact same flavor. And you don't get to decide what flavor is good to your partner without asking them either. Now let's go back to the umbrella of communication, and we hear it all the time. You need to communicate. But which part? The actual words, the tone, the timing, what you imply, what your partner hears, and what they decide it means. In terms of listening, do you listen to understand or listen while preparing your response? Do you ask questions, or do you assume you already know the answer? Now let's say your partner tells you, hey, I need more support. You might think to yourself, I'm already doing so damn much. How can you say I don't support you? And you may even say that out loud. But before defending everything you're doing, here's a question you could ask. What would support look like to you right now? Maybe they need practical help. Maybe they just need you to listen. Maybe they want you to check in without even being asked to do so. Now you can sincerely offer one kind of support. Meanwhile, your partner is longing for something else. Even the word honesty needs clarification. One person thinks, you know, I answered your question truthfully. And the other says, but you left out something really important. Why did I have to figure out exactly what to ask? Now we need a conversation about what honesty includes. What information affects both of us? What do we agree to share? How do we distinguish personal privacy from withholding something that affects our partnership? You may each be measuring the marriage against a definition the other person hasn't even heard. So agreeing that honesty and communication matter is only the beginning. You also need to understand the definitions, what they mean to each of you, and how you're going to live them together. So let's take a little pause while you digest that. I'll be right back.

Speaker 13:29

Hey there, Susan here. As you're listening to this, if something's hitting home for you, I'm gonna give you the best place to start. I have these first aid kits. Now these are free and they're designed to stop the bleeding in moments of conflict, tension, and friction, even if you're on Cloud9 planning your wedding. Now, if you are preparing for marriage, the premarital first aid kit will help you navigate those moments and start having the conversations that actually matter. If you're already married and things are feeling disconnected, stuck, painful, all of that, the marriage first aid kit will help you stabilize what's happening and start shifting the patterns that just aren't working. These are things that will stop the bleeding. You're gonna find the right one for you in the show notes, or you can go to www.susanortolano.com and you can download them there. Now, let's get back to our episode today, shall we?

Speaker 14:35

Okay, welcome back. Now we're gonna look at examples. This is an example of how this can play out. Imagine husband. He provided financially, he invested in experiences and travel adventures, he bought his wife beautiful things and took her to wonderful places, and he believed he was showing up as a loving and kind partner. But some of the ingredients he needed most were missing from his experience of the merit. He wanted kindness, he wanted appreciation, he wanted acknowledgement, and he needed to know that who he was and what he brought to their life together mattered to her. Now let's take the wife. She brought important ingredients too. She cooked for him, she brought fun, she brought a spark, and she brought adventure. She encouraged him to stretch beyond what was familiar and showed him possibilities he may never have seen for himself. She was a spitfire. She moved quickly, she thought quickly, she was very quick-witted and wanted a faster pace from him and from the life they shared. Maybe she also wanted more polish in the way he presented himself and interacted with others. She wanted to see him different in social settings. So, from her perspective, showing him what he could do better was helping him grow. But her guidance often landed as criticism. He felt unappreciated for the man he already was. And there was another ingredient that she needed: empathy. Now, this confused him because he believed he was empathetic. He felt he brought kindness and empathy to the marriage. But she didn't consistently experience him that way. She believed she was helping him to be a better person, and he experienced criticism. He believed he was showing care, and she experienced missing empathy. Neither of them fully understood the other person's perspective. And that gap created enormous amounts of hurt between two people who loved each other. This is where the recipe becomes more complicated and nuanced. You may believe you're adding an ingredient because you feel it inside yourself. But if your partner cannot experience that flavor in the relationship, something's getting lost between your intention and their experience. And one might think, but I am empathetic. I do appreciate you. Of course I respect you. And those statements may be very sincere. But the deeper question is, what does empathy, appreciation, or respect look and feel like to your partner? Are you expressing them in a way that they can receive? Here's the uncomfortable truth. If love alone were enough, couples who still loved each other would never ever divorce. But they do. So you cannot throw love into a mixing bowl with resentment, defensiveness, avoidance, and years of unmet needs. Try to stir it all together and expect a delicious marriage to come out of the oven. That's not how the recipe works. But a troubled recipe doesn't automatically mean you chose the wrong person. It just may mean that there are things you were never taught, things you still need to learn about each other, because that's a lifelong process. You may just need to identify the ingredients your marriage needs and whether your partner is experiencing what you believe you're bringing, and vice versa. Now, this is your marriage and your recipe. So you two get to decide what ingredients does the marriage need? Not marriage in general, your marriage. And again, we must get just very specific and go through the definitions. What does respect look like to you? What does respect look like to your partner? What helps you feel appreciated? What helps your partner feel appreciated? What allows you to experience your partner as empathetic? What makes you feel loved, desired, supported, or even chosen? And does your partner define these things the same way you do? Because you can sincerely believe you're putting an ingredient into your marriage while your partner is sitting across from you starving for it. And for those thinking, I don't want to talk about this, maybe you avoid difficult conversations. Maybe you worry you'll say the wrong thing, or that naming what's missing will only make things worth. It is hard to have what I call courageous conversations, but avoiding the conversation may feel temporarily, kind of a temporary sense of relief, but the unmet need remains and the distance can keep growing. That's why I call it courageous conversation. Courage doesn't mean you're unafraid, it means you're willing to have the conversation with honesty, with curiosity, with care, even when it's crazy uncomfortable. And a lot of these courageous conversations are very uncomfortable because we just get that big knot in our stomach when we feel like we have to. And I call it care frontation. Thank you to where I went to grad school. The word carefrontation is different than confrontation. Confrontation is this heavy coming to you know a conversation with something so uncomfortable, but carefrontation is bringing a con bringing something to the conversation with care. It has a different vibe, has a different energy. Honesty, curiosity, and care really do matter. This can't be an indictment, so to speak, of your partner. So sitting down to present a list of everything they lack is not how you want to go about it. You have to be curious about the marriage you're creating, and you have to be curious about what each of you needs to thrive within it. So the care frontation is really important. Or just saying it's time for courageous conversation. That's kind of a nice way to say it, even though there may be those uncomfortable moments, things that are said that may not feel good initially, or something that really feels personal or creates some kind of trigger. That's the those are the uncomfortable moments I'm talking about. But getting to the other side of them feels amazing. So choose a time when you can both be present. You can make an appointment, make sure if you have kids, the kids are elsewhere or asleep. Just put phones down, like create some ambiance or some and some agreements around it. Take turns sharing and do not interrupt. Do not try to defend yourself. Do not try to correct what your partner's saying. Do not try to relate what they're saying to something you're experiencing. Kind of like, you know, somebody says, you know, I don't feel you're being very respectful. And then you say, well, I don't feel you're XYZing. That's not how these conversations work well. And honestly, you do not have to solve everything in one sitting. You're not going to. So you can begin by asking each other, what ingredients do you believe you bring to our marriage? What ingredients do you appreciate most in me? What feels as though it might be missing for you? Then you want to go deeper. What would that ingredient actually look like in our everyday life that would really have our marriage thrive? That's where you start to get specific. And at the very beginning, you can say, let's talk about the ingredients that we want in our marriage. Because again, it is your marriage. And the only two people that have to agree are the two of you. Now, if your partner says they need empathy, resist arguing that you're already empathetic. Because that's what happens sometimes. Somebody says, hey, I really need empathy. And you're like, but I am empathetic. You don't need to fight for it. You just need to listen. And you can ask what empathy would sound like, feel like, and look like to you. Get curious. Ask those more specific questions. And again, you may think you're bringing it, but your partner isn't experiencing it. So something is getting lost between what you think you're bringing and how they're experiencing something, and vice versa. Now, if they need more adventure, more affection, more of a team energy, or even more fun, this is an opportunity to get curious about how they would experience it, not the fact that you feel you're giving it. The purpose is to understand each other's direct experience. You can acknowledge that something isn't reaching your partner without deciding that everything you've offered has been worthless because it hasn't been. And understanding a need doesn't require agreeing with every request. You both get to have needs and boundaries. This is a negotiation when you talk about ingredients. This is about finding the win-win, the common ground, the center point that works for both of you. And then the next step is finding what you can willingly create together that actually feels like it's going to work and that you actually can do. So choosing one ingredient, one I keep missing up that word. Choose one ingredient. And then you got to practice, you got to implement. Otherwise, it's just talk. So once you understand what an ingredient means to your partner, then you get to decide how you'll begin adding more of it. You do not have to remake the entire recipe overnight either. That's impossible. So start with choosing one. Let's just say appreciation is the ingredient and it's missing. Then you both need to name one thing that you appreciate about each other on a daily basis or the frequency in which you decide. If it's determined that empathy is missing, practice listening before defending yourself or trying to solve a problem. Ask a question like this Do you want help thinking this through, or you do you just need me to listen? That's asking the more specific questions. One of the things I teach my couples when it comes to listening is somebody who's receiving, asking the question, how would you like me to listen? Or the person who's talking can say, here's how I would like you to listen. That way it's clear how that listening needs to happen or what the other person wants. Now, if fun has disappeared, and I hope it hasn't, plan an experience that gives you both an opportunity to laugh together, feel playful together, or just enjoy each other again. If affection is the thing that feels missing, talk about the kinds of physical touch and closeness you want and enjoy. Get specific. Make it something you can practice because just saying being more loving, please be more loving, that's pretty vague. You gotta get more specific. Something like this. Hey, when I tell you I've had a difficult day, could you just put your phone down, listen, hear me out, and just hold me? Now that gives your partner something they can understand and actually respond to. Then pay attention. Is your recipe really creating connection? Does something need adjusting? Because you may not get it right the first time out. And a conscious marriage isn't created by getting the recipe perfect just that one time. It's created by continuing to notice what's how it feels, communicating about it, practicing it, and continuing to make adjustments together. Because again, that may need to happen. And you just have to be consistent. One thoughtful gesture can feel amazing, but you cannot add an ingredient one time and expect it to flavor the marriage forever. It's kind of like going to the gym. You're not going to go once, do a few crunches, and walk out with six-pack abs. It just doesn't work that way. I mean, it would be nice, right? But you have to practice and be consistent. You got to keep strengthening the muscles. Marriage works very much the same way. One meaningful conversation or one really great date night cannot undo years of disconnection or dissatisfaction. Your partner only begins to trust change when they experience it repeatedly, and you too. Consistently really turns a loving intention into something you and your partner can count on. And counting on something, knowing that you can depend on these things, is what brings that emotional safety. Now, love gives you something worth caring for. The marriage you create depends on how you care for it together. And caring for it together is really important to the process. Now that means learning the basic and unique to you ingredients, understanding what they mean to both of you, and putting them into practice often enough that they become part of your life. So my initial question, what's love got to do with it? Everything? Maybe nothing. Because loving someone doesn't necessarily mean they feel loved by you. But the difference lies in whether the love you each believe you're giving is the love you both feel you're receiving. So before we close this episode today, I want to invite you to get into action. Think about what we talked about during this episode. What is one specific action step you can take in your partnership today? And if you want to share what happened when you did, you can email me at Susan @ Susanortolano.com, and your action and results may be featured on an upcoming episode using your first name only because I like to keep your privacy. Now, if you're ready to go deeper with this work, go to www.susanortolano.com. You can check out the services I offer. And know that all links and resources are in the show notes. And if this episode resonated with you, be sure to follow, share it with somebody you love, and leave a review, hopefully a nice one, as it helps this message reach more couples. So I will say until next time, this is Susan Mortolano, intuitive relationship and marriage coach. This is Before and Beyond. I do real talk about marriage at every stage. And always remember marriage success is an inside job. Bye now.