You want to have children, he doesn’t. He’s a homebody, you’re ready for a party every night. She likes to spend money and enjoy life, you are frugal and like to save your money. You see opportunities and want to pursue them, she is adverse to risk and wants to feel safe. If you feel hopelessly gridlocked over a problem that just can’t be solved, it may bring little comfort to know that other couples struggle with similar conflicts yet find a way to live with them—and each other—peacefully. The thought of learning to cope with your gridlocked conflicts may seem impossible. But you can do it.

The goal in ending gridlock is not to solve the problem, but rather to move from gridlock to dialogue—discussing it.  Although the gridlocked conflict will probably always be a perpetual issue in your marriage, it can come to be one that you both can live with and talk about without hurting each other. To navigate your way out of gridlock, you have to first understand its cause.

Gridlock is a sign that you have dreams for your life that aren’t being addressed or respected by each other. By dreams I mean the hopes, aspirations, and wishes that are a part of your identity and give purpose and meaning to your life. Dreams can operate at many different levels. Some are very practical, while others are profound. Often these deeper dreams remain hidden while the more mundane dreams seem more obvious.

What Dreams Are Made Of

Often our deepest dreams are rooted in childhood. One of you may long to have dinner together every night without interruptions from TV or telephone because that was when your family was most connected and loving. Your spouse may resist having family dinners because the evening meal in their childhood was often the scene of hostility between parents and it left you with indigestion.

The issue is not so much, what are your dreams, but are they hidden or direspected by your spouse? When this occurs, you may either have open battles over the issue, or it may get stuffed and get expressed symbolically. When that happens a couple may think they are arguing over whether to have a sit-down meal every night, when in actuality the issue is much deeper and touches a core emotion connected to feeling loved and family closeness.

When Dreams Are Respected

Why do some couples cope so gracefully with these sorts of issues while others get bogged down? The difference is that the happy couple understands that helping each other realize their dreams is one of the goals of marriage. They want to know what the other person wants in their life. They work it out as a team. They fully take into account each other’s wishes and desires. Showing mutual respect for, and acknowledgement of, each other’s aspirations is part of what makes their marriage meaningful to them.

When Dreams Are Hidden

For many couples, the dream that is at the core of their conflict is not so obvious. Only by uncovering this dream can the couple get out of gridlock. If you’ve reached gridlock on any issue in your marriage, big or small, the first step is to identify which dream or dreams are fueling the conflict. One good indicator that you’re wrestling with a hidden dream is that you see your spouse as being the sole source of the problem. If you find yourself saying, for example, that the problem is simply that he is a slob or she is just irresponsible or overly demanding, that’s a sign of a hidden dream. It may indicate that you don’t see your part in creating the conflict because it has been hidden from view.

Uncovering a hidden dream is a challenge. The dream is unlikely to emerge until you feel that your marriage is a safe place to talk about it. That’s why its important to start working on the first three principles (Enhancing Your Love Maps, Nurturing Your Fondness and Admiration, and Turning Toward Each Other Instead of Away) to strengthen your friendship with your mate. You may find that when you first begin to recognize and acknowledge your dreams, the problem between you and your spouse seems to get worse rather than better. Be patient. Acknowledging and advocating for your dreams in a marriage is not easy. The very nature of gridlock means that your dream and your spouse’s appear to be in opposition, so you’ve both become deeply entrenched in your position and fear accepting each other’s influence and yielding. Once you’re ready to overcome gridlock, here’s how to proceed.

STEP 1: Become a Dream detective

Often, deeply personal dreams go unspoken or underground after marriage because we assume they must in order to make the relationship work. It’s common for both partners not to feel entitled to their complaints. They may see their own desires as “childish” or “impractical”. But such labels don’t change the fact that the dream is something you long for, and if the marriage doesn’t honor it, conflict will almost inevitably ensue. In other words, when you adjust to marriage by burying a dream, it just resurfaces in disguised form—as a gridlocked conflict.

STEP 2: Work on a Gridlocked Marital Issue

Choose a particular gridlocked conflict to work on. Then write an explanation of your position. Don’t criticize or blame your spouse. Instead, focus on your needs, wants, and feelings about the situation. Next, write the story of the hidden dreams that underlie your position. Explain where these dreams come from and why they are so meaningful to you.

Once you both understand which dreams are fueling the gridlock, it’s time to talk about them. Each person gets 15 minutes as the speaker and 15 minutes as the listener. Don’t try to solve the problem! That would most likely backfire. Your goal is simply to understand why each of you feels so strongly about this issue.

Speaker’s job: Talk honestly about your position and what it means to you. Describe the dream that’s fueling it. Explain where the dream comes from and what it symbolizes. Be clear and honest about what you want and why it is so important. Talk as if you were explaining your dream to a good friend or neutral third party. This is not the time to criticize or argue with your spouse. How you feel about your spouse in relationship to this dream is a secondary issue that should not be addressed right now.

Listener’s job: Suspend judgement. Listen the way a friend would listen. Don’t take your spouse’s dream personally even if it clashes with one of yours. Don’t spend your time thinking of responses or ways to solve the problem. Your role now is just to hear the dream and to encourage your spouse to explore it. If you can, tell your partner that you support his or her dream. That doesn’t necessarily mean that you believe the dream can or should be realized.

There are three different levels of honoring your partner’s dreams—all of which are beneficial to your marriage.

  1. Express understanding of the dream and be interested in learning more about it even though you don’t share it.
  2. Offer financial support for the dream
  3. Become a part of the dream, to actually make it part of your dream as well

The bottom line in getting past gridlock is not necessarily to become a part of each other’s dreams (although your marriage will be more enriched to the extent that you can) but to honor these dreams. After all, you don’t want the kind of marriage in which you triumph at the expense of crushing your partner.

STEP 3: Soothe Your Partner

Discussing dreams that are in opposition can be stressful. Since you’ll accomplish nothing if either of you becomes flooded, take a break for some soothing before you continue to work through the gridlock. We discussed more about soothing in Principle 5.

STEP 4: End the Gridlock

Now it’s time to begin the ongoing task of making peace with this issue, accepting the differences between you, and establishing some kind of initial compromise that will help you continue to discuss the problem peacefully. Understand that your purpose is not to solve the conflict—it will probably never go away completely. Instead, the goal is to take the “sting” out of the issue, to try to remove the hurt so the problem stops being the source of great pain.

One way to reach a compromise is an exercise to find common ground. On a piece of paper, draw two circles—a smaller one inside a larger one. In the inner circle, make a list of the aspects of the problem you can’t give in on. In the outer circle list all the aspects of the problem you can compromise about. Try to make the inner circle as small as possible and the outer circle as large as possible. Share your lists with each other. Working together, and using the skills you learned in Principle 5, come up with a temporary compromise. Try it for about 2 months and then review where you stand. Don’t expect this to solve the problem, only to help you both live with it more peacefully. This will provide you with many opportunities to display grace to each other.

STEP 5: Say Thank You

It may take more than one session to overcome gridlock on issues that have been deeply troubling to your marriage. These sessions can be stressful, no matter how diligently you attempt to accept each other’s viewpoint without judgement. Saying thank you lets you finish on a positive note. The goal here is to try to foster a spirit of thanksgiving in which you count your blessings and express gratitude to each other, and to God, for all you have. This may be particularily difficult to do after talking about gridlocked issues, but that’s all the more reason to try.

Follow these five steps, and you’ll be able to move out of gridlock on your perpetual problems. Be patient with the process—and each other. By their very nature, these problems are tenacious. To loosen their grip on your marriage will take commitment and grace on both your parts. You’ll know you’re making progress when the issue feels less loaded to you both—when you can discuss it with your sense of humor intact, and it no longer dominates and crowds out the love and joy in your relationship.

Next time: Principle 7–Creating Shared Meaning