Darrin Stephens Is Living In My Brain

Hi Honey, I’m Home! What? No dinner?

Sometimes my brain is a real asshole.

I wrote this in my journal last night: “I was up at 6 am, worked all day, ran 3 miles after work, took a shower. I am not sure what Jenn [my wife] did all day. At 7 pm she suggested I could have a pouch of Indian food and she could have leftover pizza or leftover mac & cheese. Seriously? Instead of that, I made new food that I can eat. Aaand, now Jenn’s eating that.”

It was like Darrin Stephens, the husband on Bewitched showed up to tell me it was 1966 and that I should be able to expect my wife to cater to me. Don’t I do enough around here?

Some facts my brain omitted:

• Jenn is getting over covid. Covid hits everybody differently and can kick your ass in the energy department
• We hadn’t discussed who would be doing what, and we do not have a standing agreement about who cooks (and I like to cook)
• She knows how much I appreciate when people who live here eat already existing leftovers, and the leftovers on hand are things I can’t eat because I have celiac disease
• I work from home, so it’s not like I’d had a grueling commute
• It was my decision to postpone my run from my lunch hour to after work

So why the Bewitched routine?

It’s because I couldn’t access those bits of info while I was in the middle of feeling put upon. I could only see evidence for how I was right and Jenn was wrong.

Did I start a fight? No (thank goodness, because it would have been a really dumb argument.) Did I sulk? Yeah, I sulked for awhile. But I’m really glad I took the time to make some notes in my journal, taking a beat to sort myself out before I launched into a martyr-fueled rant.

To be sure, responsibility for a good marriage falls on both partners, but I’ve learned that I need to approach the “what I want” conversations with Jenn when I don’t have a bunch of weird Darrin Stephens crap that is all my own, coloring the conversation.

That’s a gift of coaching. Because I coach, I’ve developed techniques to get to a level of clarity before I create a situation that is much harder to sort out. And I help my clients develop their own set of techniques to get clear on what they want and get themselves sorted out and then have those conversations with their spouse to get to a happier, more satisfying relationship.

If you want to be happier in your marriage, sign up for a free one hour coaching session today. Don't be Darrin Stephens. It’s not too late to begin making it better.

ABC Television, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons