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According to many studies, the most common thing couples fight about, after money and sex, is housework. You and your partner probably have different attitudes about what housework exactly is, what needs to be done, how it needs to be done, and who needs to do it. Those dishes aren’t going to wash themselves!
Consider this scenario: You come home from work to the home you share with your partner. As you pass through the kitchen you see some dirty dishes sitting in the sink, dishes that your partner placed there without washing.
Do you react by:
A) washing the dishes and putting them away while whistling a happy tune?
OR
B) gritting your teeth as rage starts to burn deep down in the core of your being, your face getting flushed as you think about how inconsiderate and uncaring your partner is to commit this horribly selfish act?
If you said A, you have permission to skip this post. I envy you.
When we are in relationships, with all their opportunities for the exposure of deeply rooted feelings of anxiety, fear, and resentment, these emotions tend to manifest in innocuous, everyday ways. Little things like leaving the TV remote in the wrong place, not closing the bedroom door all the way, or leaving dirty dishes in the sink. Seemingly insignificant actions become loaded with deeper meaning. These objectively innocent occurrences become subjective affronts, triggers that inflame the deeper emotions beneath our surface.
What are these deeper feelings beneath the surface? That depends. These issues are going to be specific to your relationship. It could be a commitment issue, a lifestyle related problem, family conflict, disagreements regarding children, infidelity, intimacy issues, addiction, shame, or any number of issues many couples experience. But no matter what the specific, unique-to-your-own-relationship issues you’re dealing with, the anger that wells up inside you when you see the Dirty Dishes of Doom in the sink is the same.
The deeper causes of this kind of relationship conflict often have their roots in our childhood experiences. Children whose parents addressed their physical and emotional needs in a supportive way, worked to develop a nurturing relationship, and took actions that instilled a sense of reliability tend to grow up to be adults who can replicate these qualities in their relationships. Children whose parents or caregivers did not engender a feeling of trust, who did not exhibit an appropriate amount of attention, and who acted out their own feelings of anger and anxiety in ways that confused the child tend to also replicate these qualities in their adult romantic relationships.
We’ve gone pretty deep here, starting with some dirty dishes in the sink and arriving at an analysis of our early childhood experiences, but it’s important to realize that we are who we are because of everything that’s happened to us since the day we were born, with the most formative experiences often happening earlier in our lives than most of us realize. In this relationship situation, are we aware that it isn’t really the dishes we’re angry about? Most of us aren’t. Why doesn’t he just wash the dishes? Why doesn’t she just put them in the dishwasher? What’s so hard about that? Why does this keep happening even though we’ve talked about it so many times? It’s because we’re unaware of how we’re so influenced by our past experiences. The Dirty Dishes of Doom are the tip of the iceberg. Here we are, piloting our boat along the river of our relationship, and we keep bumping up against the tip of an iceberg, complaining about the tip of the iceberg, trying to avoid the tip of the iceberg, trying to come up with a plan to avoid the iceberg in the future, when in reality it’s the rest of the iceberg hidden underwater that is the greatest danger.
So, how do we learn to better control the emotions guiding us in these moments? Well, you’re already at step one: Awareness. The next step is to think more about why you get these flashes of anger when you see the dishes in the sink. Yes, you have talked about this before. Yes, your partner has said they’ll try to clean the dishes. Yes, you felt good about talking about this and expressing your feelings. And yet, when you see those dishes all the rage flares up again.
What is this anger really about? That’s where it gets specific to your situation, your relationship, your life. This is an area to explore with a therapist, either on your own or as a couple. Someone to guide you past the surface emotions and down into the deeper water. Because at this point, any more time you spend standing in the kitchen discussing the rules of the sink isn’t going to help, and if it feels like it does, it’s probably just a band-aid. Band-aids look nice, they make you feel like you’ve done something but they only heal scratches, not gaping wounds. And what we’ve got here is probably closer to a gaping wound.
So be aware of the Dirty Dishes of Doom and their impact on your emotional connection with your partner. Get deeper than the dishes and start to think about the rest of the iceberg beneath the surface. Find a therapist and explore how you might be acting out your childhood experiences in your current relationship. And while this process is taking place: maybe eat out more?
