We Two

Acceptance means living with limitations, accepting your partner’s behaviors

By Dr. David Sanford

Dr. David Sanford is a couples counselor and relationship coach, practicing in South Portland. He was for 24 years the “Partners” columnist for the Maine Sunday Telegram. He is currently at work on a book about day-to-day love. His Web site is www.marriagesupport.com.

How can you live with what you don’t like about your partner, if your partner’s disagreeable traits aren’t likely to change? You could leave your partner, of course. That is what plenty of people do, when they decide not to tolerate any more what they don’t like about the person they are with. But let’s say you are not going anywhere. You consider yourself committed to the relationship.

What do you do then? Basically, you’ve got three options: You can spend your time yearning for a better relationship, presumably with someone other than your partner; you can become resigned; or you can accept the way things are. The following story will illustrate the differences among these three options.

Imagine that you live in a rented apartment in a large city. You have a tiny back yard that goes with the apartment. You don’t like your back yard. It is full of weeds and strewn with bottles and rusty, old cans.

Concerning your ugly back yard, imagine that the same three options are available to you yearning, resignation and acceptance.

1. You can dream about the farm with ample garden acreage that you wish you owned in the country yearning.

2. You can pull the shades down on the rear of your apartment and never look at your ugly backyard, in hopes that ignoring the mess out there will help you feel better resignation.

3. You can get rid of the bottles and old cans, dig out the weeds, apply fertilizer, plant seeds, water regularly and make the best itybity city garden you possibly can acceptance.

When you have decided against leaving your marriage or relationship, acceptance means refusing either to console yourself with idle dreams of something better or to settle for bitter resignation.

It means embracing the situation, despite its limitations, giving up the fantasy that you can change the other person or that someday you will leave. Instead, it means making the decision to live as fully as you can with what you’ve got.Why practice acceptance? There are three reasons.

First, every relationship is limited, and doing relationships well like doing politics well means practicing the art of the possible.

If you choose not to leave, accepting what you can’t change is a much better possibility than resentful, angry resignation.

Second, once you accept what you don’t like and can’t change, you gain access to all that is available in the relationship companionship, comfort, mutual support, sharing (assuming that the relationship provides these benefits).

One additional reason to practice acceptance:

The more you criticize your partner for traits you don’t like, the more resistant your partner will almost certainly become and the less chance you will have of getting the changes you are pushing so hard for. On the other hand, the more your partner feels truly accepted by you, the more open to your wishes he or she is likely to become.

Growing a relationship only occurs when you strive to accept its inherent limitations. If you decide to follow the path of acceptance, you will probably need to make a fundamental change of perspective.

You will need, henceforth, to balance your natural tendency to be driven by wants and expectations with a new willingness to look for and pursue opportunities. In an opportunity-focused relationship, you look for moments of possibility. Gone is the habit of lamenting what you don’t have. In its place is a sensitivity to those occasions when what you do have can be shared, enjoyed and often expanded.

For example, you wish that your partner enjoyed reading out loud together, but he doesn’t. With as little resentment as possibility, you let that possibility go, reminding yourself that there is plenty he would like that is outside your range, as well.

On the other hand, you both enjoy exploring new places. Taking advantage of what you do have, you take trips whenever possible an occasional weekend trip, more frequent day trips, even one-hour walks through seldom visited parts of town, when free time is in short supply. In short, you withdraw energy and attention from what you don’t have together and lavish it on what you do have.