You.

Tuesdays are widely understood to be the worst day of the week. It’s partly why I choose to send out a letter on this day. Monday is ok because you’ve got the adrenaline of a new week, it feels like a fresh start. Wednesday is hump day. Thursday is almost Friday and Friday is Friday so that just leaves Tuesday. Meh.

So, if you woke up today, realised it’s Tuesday and then also realised that you were feeling rage towards the person you woke up next to, please know that I see you. I see you HARD. Bless them. They haven’t even opened their eyes yet and already you find yourself fantasising about the slow and painful manner in which you will facilitate their exit from this world.

These feeling could be down to any number of reasons. Hormones, a fight, lack of sleep, feeling unheard, unseen and taken for granted. Whatever the reason and however intense the feeling of impending violence, I want you to check your thinking.

This was something I’ve had to learn over the last 3 years and it hasn’t been easy. I used to be so unhappy with my relationship and I truly believed that if I could change him, or find someone new, I’d be happier. I used to sit down with my girlfriends and talk about all the things he did (or didn’t do) that made me so unhappy.

‘He doesn’t think about me at all. He never shows me he loves me. He’s always leaving his shit around and expecting me to pick it up. He cares more about his mates than me. He’s messy, inconsiderate, ungrateful.” The list would go on and on and on and on. I’d get fired up, come home and tell him the same things:

“You don’t think about me at all. You never show me you love me. You always leave your shit around and expect me to pick it up. You care more about your mates than me. You’re messy, inconsiderate and ungrateful.”

Guess how that ended? In a cluster-fuck of a fight that escalated beyond all comprehension until we were flinging words like ‘divorce’ and ‘separation’ around. It’s hard to put those things back in the box once you’ve let them out.

Here’s what I learned. Those things weren’t unconditional truths. There were relative truths. They were true to me and my experience but he also had a whole set of his own relative truths. Things that I did that made him feel some kind of way. Our conversations (read: raging bust ups) weren’t helping because we were both so focussed on what we believed the other person was doing wrong, we forgot to really think about why it was so important to us.

It was important to us because it made us feel a certain way. The things he did made me feel something but I wasn’t telling him that, I was just telling him (over and over and over again) all the things he was doing wrong without providing any content as to why.

So, our therapist suggested I chance the conversations from ‘you’ conversations, to ‘I’ conversations and they went like this:

‘I feel hurt because it feels like you don’t think about me. I feel sad because there aren’t any hugs for no reason, or cups of tea made or things that make me feel loved. When you leave your stuff lying around it makes me feel unappreciated. It made me sad and insecure because it feels like you’d rather spend time with your mates than with me. I’m starting to feel resentful and look at you as if your inconsiderate and ungrateful but I know that’s not who you really are, but I really want things to change.”

And guess what? We didn’t fight. He sat and held my hand while I spoke and I could see that he understood that some of the things he did and didn’t do didn’t make him a bad person, but they did make me feel bad. It also opened up the conversation so that he could express his feelings too:

‘I feel like I can never do anything right in the house or in our relationship. It makes me sad that I seem to make you so mad and angry and I just don’t know how to change it. I work so hard and I feel like that’s sometimes taken for granted and that makes me feel unloved and unappreciated too.’

And just like that…we started to find our way through.