This article is extracted from “This is NOT a Second Honeymoon: Helping Couples Survive Spending A Lot of Time Together”, a book that was written by Christopher L. Smith to help couples during the COVID-19 pandemic. In his clinical work, he realized that couples being quarantined together have particular challenges. The book goes into a lot of these challenges along with strategies to survive these types of times and even to have their relationship thrive. We will be sharing a series of these extracts over several weeks to help you. If you would like to look at all of them together and get the book right away, it can be found on Amazon (Book).

As we talked about earlier in this section, sometimes the things on the surface are not what is really bothering you. Sometimes, it is a concern that lays underneath it all. Commonly, these concerns can be expressed as feelings of respect or lack of it: respect for the other person, respect for the way you like or need things to be, respect for the other person’s things, respect for feelings,… When these underlying concerns are strong, solving the surface problems will not get rid of the feeling of being bothered, but these same feelings will just surface somewhere else and around a different problem.

You may not be able to address these underlying concerns right now. Some of them will take a lot of energy and time – especially if they are concerns and feelings that have been reinforced over the years and possibly even over multiple relationships. Even in these cases, considering why you feel bothered by something can help you to deal with it. It could be helpful when you know that you are bothered by her clothes not going in the hamper at the end of the day is actually linked to the punishments you received growing up to get you to clean your room until you realized it was not that hard to comply.

When these underlying concerns are strong, solving the surface problems will not get rid of the feeling of being bothered.

This is NOT a Second Honeymoon— Christopher L. Smith

On the other hand, you may find that it is better for you and your partner to talk about one (or even a few) underlying concern rather than trying to handle multiple surface issues. Once you have worked through it, the surface issues may have lost their power to bother you. For example, if you talk through with your partner about how you don’t feel that they always respect you as an equal adult partner, the fact that they tell you to eat your vegetables at supper and check your pockets before putting things in the hamper may feel more like her quirks and less about her treating you like a child. Here’s the Book.