Relationships are Like Gardens Part III: Even Good Ones Have Pests

A few months ago, I was in attendance at the wedding of a dear friend in the delightful city of Chattanooga, Tennessee. On the morning of the wedding, with a few hours to spend alone in the city, I made my way out to find a wedding gift. I will note here that gift-giving isn't my strong suit (I'm great with doing favors, but less brilliant at giving gifts), so I had been thinking for days about what to get the happy couple. Finally, as I was waiting in line that morning to buy my faithful companion, giant iced coffee, I made up my mind.

I left the coffee shop and headed to a bookstore where I picked up for them a copy of John Gottman's Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work. I know, it could be construed as cynical to give a book on marital management as a wedding gift, even for people who know me well (and know how much I value knowledge and education as the foundation of happy relationships). Truly, I mean nothing negative in this gift. Elizabeth and David are a wonderful match for one another, they clearly love each other dearly, and they are both committed to making a lifetime of happiness together.

Naturally, then, you should be asking, "CarrieO, if they understand how to do a relationship well, what do Elizabeth and David need with a book on marital functioning". Good question. To answer it, I present to you Part III of Why Relationships are Like Gardens: Even Good Ones Have Pests.

Sometimes, You End Up With Slugs

Tapping back in to our analogy of a garden, the truth is that no matter how much we've learned about how to grow cilantro or tomatoes, and no matter how much we've planned and executed our planting to maximize our success, we can't prevent every  problem. Bugs, slugs, rabbits, birds, and plant diseases are things that our knowledgeable planning can help mitigate, but may not be able to prevent entirely. When the pests start creeping into the garden, we have to manage them well if we expect to be able to harvest.

Our relationships are not unlike this. Being well-matched to our partners in terms of our values, skills, and dedication to our relationship can stave off a lot of challenges that crop up (no pun intended) in our relationships. In spite of all of that, though, it is inevitable that in a lifetime together, we will occasionally encounter situations that create relational strain.

Realizing that we can't predict or control every source of relational strain, part of our becoming knowledgeable and skilled is being able to anticipate, recognize, and effectively manage unavoidable relational stressors. The upshot of this is that stress unto itself doesn't necessarily adversely impact relational quality. Rather, how we manage that strain does.

You Would Never Set Your Garden On Fire

Consider it this way: suppose you've chosen to plant tomatoes. Let's also suppose that some time after you plant, you end up with a situation in which your garden is infested by slugs that eat your plants before they bear fruit. We could manage the slugs by way of, say, setting the garden on fire. As much as that may kill the slugs, it would also decimate the garden. In setting your garden aflame, you've accomplished nothing productive. Sure, you've killed the slugs, but you've also prevented your ability to harvest the fruit of your garden. You've shot yourself in the foot because all of that planting and pruning leads to nothing productive.

You may be thinking that talking about setting a garden on fire to get rid of slugs seems like an insane and irrational example that doesn't really extend into relationship management. I would beg to differ. The reason setting fire to a garden seems insane is because it is an obvious overreaction to a problem in the garden. Interestingly, human beings aren't always quite so adept at recognizing the irrational overreaction that some of our reactions to relational strain may be.

Set Down the Matches, and Get Some Self-Control

Rather than yelling, pouting, giving your partner the cold shoulder, or retaliating by doing frustrating things in times of relational stress, the best thing we can do is muster some self-control and perspective.

The challenge in gaining perspective is in controlling emotions - hurt, anger, frustration, annoyance - that interfere with both our willingness and ability to simply speak our needs to our partners. If we allow our strong emotions to dictate our behavior in a moment then we may, in fact, do more damage to our relationships than we mean to. Much like a fire in a garden, if we act rashly out of emotion and without forethought, the damage we do to our relationships out of unhappy emotion can lead to consequences that are vastly more difficult to remedy than we intended.

So, the sum total of all of this is that when we bind ourselves in loving bonds to other human beings, we have no choice but to contend with the quirks our loved ones possess. If we want love and closeness to grow like a garden, then we have to learn to patiently cultivate the parts of the garden that nourish us without destroying the entire thing out of frustration.

Stay tuned for part four.

Relationships are Like Gardens Part II: Success Requires Skills and Planning

This is part 2 of a 5-part series drawing the analogy between gardening and building good relationships. Part I talked about how knowledge is central to success in both endeavors. Here in Part II, I discuss how the acquisition of the right skills, and the development of a sound plan are important to success in gardening and close relationships.

I introduced this series with a very sad tale about how I tried once to grow cilantro and failed miserably because I didn't know how to do it. Not knowing how to do it prevented me from being able to generate a plan for when and where to plant (as it turns out, I failed on both these points) or knowing whether I had the skills to do it (I still wonder if I am capable of seeing the difference between the edible first round of leaves and the frilly, lacy, bitter leaves that the plant produces as it matures).

My cilantro fiasco (as I'm now calling it) was rooted in a lack of knowledge, but that lack of knowledge ultimately resulted in my total inability to know how to plan for planting and then tend the plant once it started to grow. These same pitfalls in relationships can cause them to fail to flourish.

Strategy: Identifying a Desired Outcome and Developing a Viable Plan to Get There

The word "strategy" can be off-putting for people in reference to their relationships. Strategy sounds like something we do when we are playing games or going to war - both of which are categorically terrible comparisons for relationship management. Curiously, when we begin what we hope is a romantic relationship, we often strategize like champs. We know what we want (to form a romantic relationship with potential-partner X) and we know how to get there (by a series of tactical moves that are part of a larger playing-hard-to-get strategy that minimizes our availability and maximizes our desirability).

Something happens, though, as we become confident in the persistence of the relationship. We stop approaching it strategically. We let the relationship, for lack of better language, "do what it's going to do". Here's the thing about relationships "doing what they are going to do" - they don't. Relationships don't do a thing. Relationships are a result of human action. If we don't behave well, our relationships won't be well.

If we want our relationships to be well, our over-arching strategy should be to take care of the relationship and each other. If caring for ourselves, our partners, and our bond is what is at the front of our minds every time (and I do mean every time) we communicate, then our tactics should match that.

Let's take a recent example from my own life. My sister and I were hanging out a couple of weeks ago. I had intended that we would hang out together with my niece, Doodle, and have dinner and catch up. She spent the first two hours of my visit working on something else and only half-listening to me during our visit. I became increasingly frustrated but said nothing to her about it until I had utterly lost my patience and felt hurt and dismissed as a result of her inattention. My hurt and anger caused me to lose sight of that big relationship objective of caring for our bond and I yelled at her to stop what she was doing.

This was a major, massive tactical fail on my part which happened because I was more concerned with expressing my annoyance with her behavior and getting her to stop rather than the bigger strategic objective of taking care of our relationship. As you can imagine, my behavior hurt and upset my sister, and we proceeded to waste the better part of the next 3 hours yelling and crying. A mildly annoying situation turned into a huge, hurtful incident because I prioritized my own emotion over the relationship. I made a bad tactical decision that I would have avoided if I adhered to my strategy of caring for us both.

If we have a good plan and commit to adhering to it, we make better choices and have better relationships (and cilantro).

Strategy Can't Work without Skill

Okay, so it's all well and good that we decide that our primary strategic objective is to care for our partners, ourselves, and our relationships and that we should devise a set of tactics that enable the meeting of that objective. The trouble is, we may not have the skills to do so.

I can assure you, that while I don't remotely have the skills to be able to grow cilantro, that I absolutely have the skills to be able to have good conflict. I simply chose not to use them in the situation with my sister that I referenced above.* But what if I didn't have the skills? What if I knew that barking wouldn't end well, but didn't know what else I could do? What if I didn't know how to express frustration and ask for us to change what we were doing without sounding angry? Would I be doomed to failure in relationships? No. Certainly not.

Skill comes from practice, but we have to practice the right things. If you have a friend who is good at the thing you want to get better at, ask if they might role-play and practice while they give you feedback. There are also people who provide relationship and communication coaching** (myself, included) who, like an athletic coach or trainer, will identify skills fundamentals that need improvement and help you to develop them. You can ask your partners to tell you how they would prefer for you to behave in a given situation. If they can alert you to the troublesome behavior and motivate you in the midst of a conversation to do a better behavior, this can help you grow as well.

Growth is the End-Game

In the case of cilantro or relationships, what we're ultimately trying to do is grow them. Our closest relationships are the most valuable things many of us have. In order to grow them, to make them closer, warmer, more stable, we need to be mindful about how we approach communicating within them. We've gotta be knowledgeable, strategic, and skilled if we intend to reap the enormous benefits of our closest bonds.

Of course, all of the knowledge, strategy, and skill in the world can't prevent the occasional pest or hassle from creeping into our relationships and cilantro beds. We'll come to that in my next post, so stay tuned for Part III.

Notes:

* Yes, dear readers, being an expert doesn't necessarily mean I always do the right thing. I'm well-educated, but I'm sure not perfect. And yes, I absolutely did apologize to my sister.

** If you're looking for a relationship coach, scrutinize credentials. There are lots of people who will sell relationship coaching services with no educational or experiential credentials that would justify their charging you for their alleged expertise. Find someone whose academic or experiential credentials are clearly identifiable, and ensure that their degrees, certifications, or experience are in an appropriate field (e.g., you don't want an MBA in Management teaching you interpersonal conflict management but they may be perfect for business communication coaching). Many certified legal mediators with specialties in family mediation may also offer coaching services.

Relationships are Like Gardens. Go on, Roll Your Eyes, then Keep Reading

Love is like a garden - feed it, tend it, and it will bloom. Blah blah blah.

Some cliche analogy isn't where this post is going. Instead, I want to share a comparison I often use to talk about the choices we make and actions we take in our relationships. Analogy is useful for teaching, and the big-picture comparison I use to talk about relationships is gardening.

To make my point that relationships are basically like tomato plants, I'm going to post a 5-part series on why building good relationships is like growing a garden. Each post will deal with one of the five following characteristics of both relationship building and gardening:

They require knowledge.

They require skills and planning to execute well.

They require ongoing tending.

They present their fair share of pests, annoyances, and hassles.

They should result in something that feeds you.

I'm going to kick off the series by addressing the first point:

Building Relationships and Growing Gardens both Require Knowledge
I tried to grow cilantro once. It was a miserable failure. I was mystified by my inability to grow cilantro because I was under the impression that growing it was about as easy as growing a wild onion (i.e., it's easy to be successful by accident). Apparently, that is not the case.

So, the question is: why did I fail? The answer is: because I didn't know what the blazes I was doing.

It's my feeling that most people attempt to manage relationships in the same way that I attempted to grow cilantro - with the misguided assumption that they are natural and they will essentially grow themselves. We come to this impression because most of us have had relationships forged for/with us for a very long time with little thought, work, or input of any sort on our parts. We form relationships with our parents, siblings, classmates, neighborhood kids, etc. We meet people, tell them things about ourselves, we like the same things, we become friends, and tah-dah - instarelationship.

That our relationships are forged for us for most of our formative years sets us up, I think, to assume that we inherently know how to form, grow, and maintain relationships. That assumption is as problematic as my assumption that I can grow cilantro because it's a plant and plants grow by themselves all the time. When I say it like that, it sounds slightly crazy that we all think we just get how to be in relationships.

Here's the truth: we have to learn how to do relationships the same way we need to learn how to grow cilantro or tomatoes. Part of learning means understanding that why an action (giving a plant too much sun, or yelling in a conflict) results in one outcome or another (plant death, or hurt and anger). I am positive that had I known the first thing about how to plant cilantro, I would have been more successful than I was. Similarly, if we want to grow relationships, we need an education about how to do so.

There are any number of ways to educate yourself. Take classes in communication or social psychology to understand what scholars have learned about relationships. Seek out relationship coaching or couples therapy to learn about how to interact with one another more fruitfully. Read a relationship blog.

Better yet, you should learn about your partner. Talk to your partner about how something they do in a conflict, for example, affects you (and vice versa). Deliberately try communicating differently to see if you get a different outcome (because whatever the outcome is, you've learned something). Talk to each other about how your experiments are going and adapt your communication to what you've learned about one another.

Whatever you learn, how ever you learn it, you should be learning it mindfully. We improve our odds of having successful relationships when we are deliberate and purposeful about learning what we need to in order to address our most important relationship concerns.

In retrospect, it occurs to me that I never googled how to grow cilantro. How easy that would have been. Instead, I embarked on an adventure armed with nothing but a desire for fresh cilantro all the time. I ended up with nothing to show for it but frustration. Be better about approaching your relationships than I was about approaching gardening. If you do, you will amass knowledge and information that will help you plan better, acquire more skills, and  have more tools in your repertoire to be able to succeed at building solid relationships.

Stay tuned for Part II.