How Decluttering and Clear Communication Can Save Your Marriage.
This past week, I joined one of my closest friends, Krista Lockwood of Motherhood Simplified, on her podcast, Motherhood Simplified. She is a decluttering expert, and we are working together to bring you a week-long Decluttering Challenge that starts on February 14 (more on that later).
In her latest episode, How to Get Your Spouse to Help Declutter, we discussed our upcoming challenge, marriage, and how to communicate more effectively with your spouse.
The following blog is from that conversation.
Krista is bringing the decluttering side of the challenge, and I will show up as a guest expert to teach you how to get more help from your spouse.
First, I want to give you some background on Krista and how these two things go together. Then, we will talk about the most common things that you might be experiencing in your home with your spouses, like struggling to get support and active help from them.
In 2013, Krista and her husband moved from Alaska to Florida with only one suitcase per person. They had three kids, so each had a suitcase filled with toys and clothes. That was it. Her day-to-day life as a mom was 24/7 chaos before that. What she learned, in short, was that the clutter had a big impact on them, and it made things a lot harder than they needed to be.
In Florida, their life was chaotic, and she felt like she was cleaning up all the time. She could never catch her breath. She would wake up in the morning, bombarded by yesterday's messes and yesterday's to-do lists. Then she would go to bed at the end of the day feeling like she was more behind than when she woke up.
It was this never-ending cycle. Getting out from under our clutter changed that.
She felt like she was the only one cleaning and was the only one who noticed the messes. It didn't matter if she asked her husband or if she didn't ask him. Things were just always a mess. They never knew where anything was. She felt like it was all on her in part because she didn't adequately communicate her needs.
When they got to Florida and out from under the clutter, she clearly saw that her husband did many things, but she was unable to notice it before. There was so much clutter and so much inside their home that it didn't matter how much either of them cleaned up. It was never going to be enough.
Even if her husband came home after work and completed an entire laundry list of chores, she would then be annoyed that they couldn't spend time with the kids. Something was always going to fall through the cracks.
Decluttering helped her get clarity around that in her marriage. Decluttering didn't solve everything, but it did bring some things to her attention. She realized he was helping. There were no dishes in the sink, and the laundry was put away, but she was still annoyed at him.
What was really going on there? That's what we are going to dive into today. We'll discuss how we communicate with each other, how we connect with each other (or don't connect with each other), and how to fix that. According to Krista, decluttering is a gift to all moms, but it's also a gift to your marriage.
When asking for help around the house, we often find ourselves resorting to some of these tactics.
Spoiler alert: they don't work.
Nagging
In my experience, it's a control thing. I've asked you to do something, and you didn't do it within the timeframe that I pre-decided in my mind, I'm going to continue to ask you, but really I'm just trying to get you to hurry up and do it on my timeline.
When I ask my husband to do something if it's not urgent, I ask him once, and if it is urgent, I let him know. I allow myself to know that it will be taken care of. Then I don't feel the need to ask again because I trust him to get it done.
It's being less of a mom to your spouse because, with kids, you have to do that. You have to remind them, "I told you to put your dish in the sink, I told you to get your clothes off the floor, you're supposed to put your towel away after you take a bath" all of that stuff you have to do with your kids. It is not nagging. They need repetition to learn. Grown men don't need us to repeat ourselves to know what to do. Not in the same way, at least.
Another reason we tend to resort to nagging that is always under the surface is that we low-key don't think that he's going to do what you ask him to do.
We have this low-level expectation, "he's not going to do it anyway, so I need to keep repeating myself, and then eventually I'll just have to do it myself."
So then either they will do it resentfully because of the nagging, or they will resist doing it because of the nagging. It doesn't work.
Krista then had a really great insight. She shared with me that nagging really wasn't her thing. Hers would all be in her head. She would bottle it up and nag him (in her head) but not tell him. So she would only nag in her head, so to her, she was nagging him all the time. When she finally did decide to say to him or ask him for help, she did so with low-key expectations that he was not going to do it; she would tell herself, "nothing is ever going to change," even though it was only in her head and she had never said it to him.
We sometimes forget that if we are in healthy relationships, our spouses want to help! She realized saying all this in her head was not the same as having a direct and honest request that would make it real. She let him know she was not doing this because she wanted to control him. She didn't need to be his boss. She was asking him because it made her feel secure. She wanted to feel like he had her back.
Another word on repetition
Krista had some other great thoughts on repetition too. She noted that it's a different kind of repetition than with your kids. If you've been living a certain way with somebody else and trying to form a new habit, not only are you having to change yourself, but you're also asking them to change the way that they've been living and acting and behaving.
So it does take time. For instance, Krista finally figured out how to ask for something in the right way or a way that worked for them. She started to communicate why she was asking. It finally clicked for them, but it took years of trial and error.
It's unreasonable to think telling someone something one time will make them change their behavior overnight. It's not realistic. Something I try to do is when I ask for something is to pretend like it's the first time I've asked for it every single time because then it's not delivered with annoyance or any kind of negative energy.
When you're changing your lifestyle and your dynamic, it's going to take some time, and you're going to need repetition. Still, the repetition you need needs to be loving and understanding, not from frustration. I encourage other women to do this because their husbands are not dumb, and it's not as if they don't understand how to do a chore.
Being Passive Aggressive
We're talking slamming doors, cabinets, and in Krista's case, stomping around so he would ultimately ask, what's wrong? To which we usually reply, nothing, I'm fine.
The loudness of the slamming of things creates the negative energy everyone has to live in. Sometimes, slamming things closes the door to any deeper communication because what guy do you know that will ask the question, what's really going on? The men I know would avoid the situation altogether.
It's not our fault. It's perpetuated in TV and movies all around us. We're supposed to take out our anger on inanimate objects; they're supposed to be the idiot who doesn't understand, we don't tell them, but they're supposed to figure it out. Does that sound about right? It doesn't work.
I have a friend who shared a story about her other friend. One day her friend was really angry, and she was making pancakes, flipping the pancakes, and slamming them into the pan because she was being passive-aggressive. My friend said, "I don't know why she gives her emotions to the pancakes." It made me laugh because that's what we do!
We give our emotions to the cabinets and to their drawers and the doors or whatever it is that we're slamming because we're used to be being passive-aggressive.
It might feel good at the moment to make a snide remark or a snarky comment when they say something, but ultimately, it won't get you what you want. It's not an effective way to move through your relationship together.
We have addictions to our emotions.
If we're used to getting mad at our spouses for not helping the way we think they should, we have a tough time seeing them as someone who does.
When Krista had all that clutter and didn't even realize that her husband was actually helping, she had to break her own addiction of seeing him as someone who didn't help her. We don't always realize that's what we've done, but that's an important piece because it's a chemical thing in your brain. You have receptors in your brain that want the emotion of anger that your spouse has not been helping because you've been doing it for so long. You have to start to shift away from that.
Awareness is big.
Being aware and recognizing, oh shoot, I did it again. Not to beat yourself up but to recognize that that's a thought pattern that I don't want to have anymore and I'd like to change. Then from there, you can change it. Like any addiction, it is changeable but takes work.
Do we fall into these patterns? Yes. Not only are you trying to change your default settings, but you're in a relationship with somebody and essentially asking them to change their default settings too.
One last story. Have a conversation with yourself first.
We were at the farmer's market, and my husband took off ahead with our oldest while me and our youngest were still behind. She's smaller and walks slower than everyone else.
I found myself getting really irritated that he had gone so far ahead of us. So I stopped myself and asked, "what is my actual problem here? Because it's not that he is walking up ahead because he's actually still with one of our girls. It's not that he's not helping. So what is it?"
I pulled this string and unraveled this entire series of thoughts. I realized that it was that I didn't like feeling left behind. Being left behind makes me feel unloved. I finally thought, "that's not why my husband walked ahead with our oldest. So I can just let that go because I'm taking an action that he didn't even really think about very personally, and I don't need to do that.
Within seconds of me going through a whole series of thoughts, he stopped and turned around to see where we were and then waited for us to get to where they were. I didn't have to yell out at him. I didn't have to make a big fuss.
It's so important to have the conversation with yourself first because I didn't end up needing to tell him anything in that particular instance. Later on, if it really, really bothered me, I could have said, "so you know, when you walk off, I get triggered and, it bothers me,” but I didn't even feel the need to do that. It was all me.
If conversations like this resonate with you, I invite you to join the Motherhood Simplified Decluttering Challenge!
This week-long challenge will:
help you declutter some hot spots in your home
figure out how to get your family on board with helping
help you feel like you have a good rhythm to keep up on your daily chores
For only $10 you will receive a week-long live decluttering challenge with two bonus workshops:
✨ How to Get Your Kids to Help Clean Up with Krista Lockwood
✨ How to Get Your Spouse to Help Clean Up with me!
The dates:
February 14 - 21, 2022
Join here!
Would you like to continue the conversation? Join Married & Manifesting Facebook Group where we talk about it all. It’s a private Facebook Group where we learn and grow together and serve as each other’s sounding board when things happen. It’s fun, it’s safe, and IT’S FREE. Hope to see you there.