ERP 077: What Happens When Your Partner Is Not Responsible?

Return to Show Notes

Welcome to The Empowered Relationship Podcast, helping you turn relationship challenges into opportunities and setting you up for relationship success. Your host, Dr. Jessica Higgins, is a licensed psychologist and relationship coach who shares valuable tips, tools and resources for you to dramatically improve your relationship.

This podcast is 100% ad-free. To support this show, please subscribe and write a review today. Here is your host.

* * *

Hi, thank you for joining today’s episode, it’s episode 77 – What Happens When Your Partner isn’t Responsible? I am answering a listener’s question today, and before we get started I just want to say that I really enjoy this time with you. I feel so privileged to be talking about relationship growth, seeing your relationship and the terrain of intimacy as an opportunity for growing and developing and fostering a more authentic, enlivening, passionate relationship, setting your relationship up for success and investing in the quality of your relationship. I am deeply passionate about this topic.

I am grateful and honored to share this journey with you and I wish that I knew more of you. Actually, I’ve seen my download numbers and I just know that I know a handful of you and I wish I had more contact with you. If you ever feel like you want to reach out and just say hello and give me a little bit of info on who you are, I would love to hear from you. I always appreciate any honest feedback or rating and review on iTunes, Twitter, Google Play, any of those players, and I also just want to encourage you to reach out if you want to be on the show.

I am now offering the opportunity to set up a one-on-one call with me to receive laser coaching, and we will schedule the call. The call will be recorded if you want it to be on the show. This session will be fully focused on your situation in the understanding that you will be featured on the show and it will be aired most likely in its entirety. The second opportunity is to submit a question to me, give me a little bit of a context and I will create an episode if it feels like it is a good fit for everyone who is listening to the show.

Let’s get started with today’s episode. Today’s episode is What Happens When Your Partner isn’t Responsible? This is episode 77. This question comes from a listener who would like to remain anonymous. She writes a little bit in short hand, so I am going to just read it as she posed the question to me.

“I am a single mom of a seven-year-old boy [Smiley face], separated from dad five years ago. Boyfriend of two years is adoring, complimentary, caring, but drinks and only works two days a week. I work 35-38 hours a week. I am motivated. He isn’t. I love him. He is a good person although he has been caught in multiple lies.

He wants us so bad and I know he wants to be good and do right, but seems to unknowingly play victim of life. I broke up with him but feel like if I am looking for someone who honestly loves me, he is so convincing that he does. My dad is the only person that I know loves me, because he proved that throughout my life by being there and taking action and being true to his word. If he is serious about something, he will do it. If it needs to be done, he will do it. I only have that example to base love, on and I would love to hear your educated thoughts on if I am being too critical, if my idea of love is biased.”

So first of all, listener, thank you very much for submitting your question. I think it is something that many people can relate to, even if it isn’t your exact situation. Just if your partner loves you and he is communicating how much they love you and it feels incredibly genuine and yet some of their actions don’t match their words. They don’t follow through. Their actions are not congruent with what they say. Sometimes they don’t do what they say they are going to do, the lack of follow through, and sometimes it can feel like irresponsibility.

So I do have a couple of points that stand out to me in your question. I am going to go ahead and give those here. The first one is love isn’t enough. I say in the realm of long lasting partnership, because he can love you, love you to the depths of his being love you, and that does not mean that he wants to be in partnership, or that he wants to have the type of relationship that you would like to have. So getting clear – which is my next point – on your values of what is most important to you in your life and in his life, as well as what kind of relationship are you wanting to create, what is your relationship vision, will give you a good sense of “Are you on the same page? Is what’s most important in life similar? Can you guys find a way of being collaborative together?”

I mean, you are not going to match on every single point, but you want to have some shared goals because you want to be working together, essentially, on partnership, ideally. I don’t know your agreements, I don’t know the dynamics in your relationship, I don’t know if he is trying to meet your standards, if you have kind of laid out “Here’s what needs to happen” and he says, “Okay, okay, okay” and then does not follow through, but I would encourage you guys to get clear and create agreements and the standard together.

Let me go back just to this first point, so I can really flush this out. Love isn’t enough. So he can love you fully and be in a place in his life where he isn’t wanting to be responsible. And this could be for a myriad of reasons. He could be not capable, he might not be ready… What I mean by not capable, sometimes people have things that are getting in the way, meaning – and this isn’t to endorse the concept of he is a victim, but some people struggle with addiction issues. So if he does have some drinking pattern, I don’t know to what extent, that can impact his ability right now. Or if there is other issues – if he is afraid of failure or if he isn’t certain about what he wants in his life, or he is afraid to really look honestly, all of those things impact our emotional, psychological availability.

Because being in relationship, when I am talking about the type of relationship development that I am talking about in this show, I am talking about long lasting partnership where we are willing to look at our own experience, what happens for us, taking ownership and responsibility for what am I thinking? What am I feeling? What are my judgments? What comes up for me? All of these things impact the way we relate to one another. And if we are not aware at all, or we don’t want to look, it is very difficult to do the work.

The first step in any transformational model, as I have said before, is awareness, being conscious of what you are participating in. Again, often times we will be in phases in our life where we are avoiding, or we are distracted. Those things that are too uncomfortable to look at.

Now, I don’t know what your boyfriend’s experiences is and I am not at all trying to suggest that he is going through a difficult time; I have no idea what his dreams and aspirations are, but if his words are not matching his actions, it does pose curiosity. What is going on there? Without any judgment or blame, just what is that about?

When I graduated high school, I wasn’t ready to go to college. I was very much in this play mode. I had a roommate who was a very good friend of mine. She was one year older and had been to college and actually came back. She partied too much in college and came back to her home town. Basically, I had a full time-job so I did hold that down, but we played and we had people over every night, and nothing hardcore drugs-related at all, but definitely a lot of dancing and music and fun and lots of socializing until wee hours of the night. This happened every night. I remember going to work in the morning, I am like “I am so tired. I am not going to have people over tonight”, and it was just we were in that zone, that phase in our life.

Deep down I always knew that I was going to go to college. I mean, when I was in middle school I knew that I wanted to be a psychologist. This was kind of a long life dream of mine, to get my PhD in psychology. Well, at this time, I am 18, I am living with a friend and we are partying a ton, like every night. I was working full-time, and I at some point remember thinking – because we would go to these underage clubs, we would go to these… Like, there was a few people in town that would put on these huge parties. They would rent out a hall and then you would go and it was kind of like a big, big party with DJ’s… It wasn’t a rave, but it was definitely a lot of fun and lots of dancing and those type of things.

So I remember thinking to myself at one point – I think this was probably a year in, and I was just kind of in a space of a real kind of existential, kind of reflective mode and wondering “Wow, my life does not represent who I am at all. If I would die and somebody looked at the way that I am living my life, it is not congruent with what is most important to me, what is most meaningful to me and the life that I truly want to live.”

If I would have died now, it would look like I was just partying all the time. I had no real value, investing in anything long-term or no real goals, just having fun. It really posed some

motivation for me to really do an 180 and change my life. I wasn’t doing hardcore drugs, there was nothing really bad involved, but it just… I wasn’t living in alignment with what was most important to me.

So essentially, I started taking classes, then I went to school full-time. I still loved the friends that I had, we just had different values and different aspirations and I ended up going a whole different route. I moved to Miami, I was going to school full-time, I was doing research, and I was doing all the things to be on a traditional path for a psychology program. Essentially, I just became very studious, getting straight A’s in college and really went that route.

I share this with you, and I think a lot of people have these experiences where they look at their life and they really question, “Is this really what is important to me? Is this what is most important to me?” and they take an honest look at their life, and sometimes there are some changes to be made. I share this with you, that sometimes we are not living in alignment. We are not congruent with what is most important to us, and hopefully we can wake up to that and right the path. Shift and orient and reset to what is most important and start living in accordance to that. That’s easier said than done. I get that means relationships get put into question, jobs get put into question – a lot gets put into question and we evaluate, is this in alignment?

Again, I don’t know your boyfriend’s story, but if the way you are describing him is very accurate that he is working only a couple of days a week and he is drinking a lot, I have a difficult time understanding what’s most meaningful to him. What brings him life? What brings him a sense of passion? What is most valuable to him?

Because if he doesn’t know, it is very difficult then to enter into a shared dialogue of what you are creating together. If he has not found himself, so to speak, then it is really difficult to have this really authentic partnership. Now, I am not saying that it is impossible, but creating a real authentic relationship requires the willingness to be honest and share your experience, to develop the conversation where there is that love of honesty. That is difficult to do if one isn’t really being honest with themselves.

The second point I want to make has to do with values and a vision, I have already talked about it a little bit. This is, do you know what kind of life you’re wanting to create together? Have you had that conversation around what you imagine, what you envision for yourselves? What type of relationship you’re are wanting to create? This is something that I do in my couple’s course.

I have a program, it is a 12-module program and part of the curriculum of that in the principle is to really unpack and flush out our values and vision to craft where we are going. What is our destination? What is the map and how to get there? It could be helpful to look at what are our expectations? What are our desires? Most of us walk around without even really knowing what those are.

I have a couple that I have worked with for a while and when they came to me, they had an enormous amount of difficult, some people would call baggage – layering of hurt and pain protection, defensiveness and really getting stuck with one another. Part of their story is she had two kids before they got together; he in his own single life had decided himself he never wanted to have children, fell in love, wanted to be together, wanted to be in partnership. He moved in with her, they moved in together and they never talked about what his role would be. She wanted and assumed, expected that he would be a co-parent. He would go into the role of a step-parent and really embrace that.

For him, I think he thought, “Well, we would just continue our dynamics. She mothers her children and she parents and they have that kind of thing going on and then I am her partner, and all have our relationship”, because they dated for a period of time before living together and that is kind of how it was designed.

There was no explicit conversation around what they each wanted and negotiating what they could work together on or collaborate to create together. So with those expectations and hopes, without any discussion around it, then there comes disappointment, then there comes misunderstandings and then there is a lot of things that get complicated in that, which is also addressed in my course. I would encourage for you guys to try to have some version of this conversation.

If you are interested in taking my course, I highly recommend it, you can reach out to me, you can find my contact information on my website which is drjessicahiggins.com and you can click on contact and you can find the ways to reach me there.

The course is really meant to be fun, experiential. It has got lots of different teaching modalities and exercises to help you develop the skills and tools to navigate real healthy, lasting, happy, fulfilling relationships. Most of these things we can get to. If you are listening to this podcast, you are hearing me talk about concepts. It’s one thing to get it intellectually and it’s a whole different thing to be living it and then the experience of it. Most of the time we need guidance and support to integrate and implement it into our life. It’s just a little plug for going deeper with some of these work.

My third point or note has to do with your heart and what you would love, my dear, because as you are talking in your kind of statement in question, I am wondering where your doubt is coming from. You are basically asking me is my idea of love biased? Am I too critical? Am I wanting too much? I just want to say I think it is great to get feedback around what a healthy relationships look like, what is realistic to expect – those types of things.

I also want to validate that the way you feel loved and what you are wanting in relationship is uniquely you, and you get to have that. What you want and what you long for is uniquely you, and I want to support what you want, how you feel loved. I would not want you to

compromise what is most important to you in the matters of love. Now, I say this from a place of what your heart of hearts desire is, is probably not going to go away.

When I meet with couples or individuals with relationship concerns, their true desires usually have to do with “I want to feel cared about, I want to feel loved, I want to feel connected, I want to have emotional intimacy, I want physical sexual intimacy, I want to feel play” – there is very positive desires. All of that is worthy and good. I would not take away any of that from anyone. Where we get stuck is the strategy of how to get it.

Sometimes we criticize or nag or are on somebody to try to get them to do what we want them to do. Now, that mechanism I would want to coach and work with because it usually isn’t going to get you the result that you are wanting, which is to feel loved and supported and cared for and to have trust, to have dependability and accountability – those type of things. Your desire to have trust and accountability in your relationship – I would not lessen that at all. That is very important. The how, how you develop that, is another thing.

I guess the first point I am trying to make here is, is your partner capable and does he want it? Years and years ago my mother used to tease me, and it was actually a way of calling me out a little bit, calling me into my integrity. Because if I would say,” Oh, I want a garden” and she would ask me, “Oh, did you buy any plants?” or “How did that go?”, I mean, this was like ten years ago, but she would ask me about it and I would say, “Well…” and I’d have all these different excuses around why I hadn’t done it. And she was like, “Oh, you want to want a garden”

She would essentially point out to me that I did not want it enough. I wanted to want it. I liked the idea of it. I was attracted to the notion or the fantasy of doing it, but I did not actually want to do it enough to be willing to do the work. So I don’t know with your boyfriend. That would be the first step. First of all, you want to get clear on what you want. Then you want to check him out around “Can we have an honest dialogue? Are you open to this conversation? Can we explore together? What are you really wanting? Let’s get real here.”

Let me go back though, my number three is just really supporting your heart. Of course, you deserve to have somebody that thinks the world of you and is willing to follow through, and is willing to show up for you. The how – again, that gets tricky, but the real desire there, I want to support that.

There is something called the five love languages and I want to note really quickly on that. I will put a link on the show notes for the book. It’s called, “The five love languages” by Gary Chapman, and I think he does a great job of categorizing five ways people typically feel loved. In your question, it sounds like the acts of service are really important to you. I am actually going to do a podcast on this, so I am not going to go into great depth about this, but it’s possible that you and your boyfriend have different love languages.

So the five quickly are: words of affirmation, quality time, receiving gifts, acts of service and physical touch. We usually give the thing that we want, that’s our primary love language. As an example, I think I’ve mentioned in previous podcasts that my husband’s primary love language is acts of service. He shows me that he loves me through doing things, and he has done that from day one. I learned very early on that me following through with what I say I am going to do is very important to him. He feels cared about, he feels special, he feels loved. When I don’t follow through, he feels quite the opposite – I don’t care about him, he doesn’t mean a lot, and just negative things of where he stands with me. Whereas my primary love language is words of affirmation. The spoken words of “I love you” or “You are important to me, I care about you”, me hearing it lands in a deep way for me. My husband has had to learn this, since it hasn’t been comfortable for him.

I say this in brief just to point out that it is possible that you and your boyfriend have different love languages and there might be some miss going on here. However, in your comment I feel like that is maybe a side note; I don’t think it is the main core substance of what I am wanting to say to you. I am wanting to note that that can be playing a role.

Again, just going back to this point of supporting what is most important for you and your heart, I am saying this because in your question I was wondering – and this was part of me taking this a few steps further based on what I know about people – I was wondering, is your boyfriend at all telling you you are looking for too much, you want too much, that this is kind of your thing, “We are not working out because of you are always on me, you are nagging me… Give me a break… If you just relax we would be fine”, those type of things. When I think about that, I get a little cautious. Why I get cautious is it is a deflection mechanism. Instead of him taking ownership of lying or not following through, he is making it about you. Well, and it’s true. You may have a mechanism that is criticizing him or nagging him, which isn’t helping the situation, and in that case he probably has a point, and it’s important for him to be willing to take ownership and responsibility as it is for you.

I don’t know how either one of you are going to foster and develop trust if you guys can’t actually look at your part. If he said one thing and he did another, or if he lied, without the blame or shame, but let’s look at that. If he isn’t willing to look at it and deflect it, make it about you, then that is pretty challenging, especially when there is drinking involved, because this can get down to that slippery slope of where we justify, we rationalize, we make excuses. This is where that concept of co-dependency comes into play. We make all these excuses for a partner’s bad behavior and that is just a vicious cycle. But again, they are not participating in a real honest, authentic conversation, and it’s difficult to really develop that trust that you are longing for.

Okay, I have talked about love not being enough, just the emotion of it. Relationship entails more than just loving one another. Long-term, authentic, passionate relationship requires more than just the emotion of loving someone. Number two, you will want to get clear on your

values and what type of relationship you are wanting to create together. Are you guys in alignment at all? If there is any disconnect, is that workable?

Number three, is it supporting what’s most important to you, your heart, what you long for in a love relationship, that that’s okay?

Now I am going to speak to the part of you that is interested in exploring – is he capable, and is he available and can we do this differently? Now, that’s assuming that he is willing to take ownership, he is willing to talk with you about values and what you are creating together. He honors that you have things that are important to you, that mean something to you, in your heart of hearts, the type of love you are wanting to feel, that he can value that. Then you can get curious with him looking at “What are we doing together that is creating this dynamic where you feel like you need to lie to me or you have a difficult time following through? What is happening there? Am I asking for things that you don’t want to do or are you wanting to do them but then it feels like it’s too much?” You can explore what is going on there.

I have a couple that I am working with and part of their struggle – there are different things that we have been working on, but one of the smaller things is that he isn’t always home when she thinks that he is going to get home. He will say, “I am on my way”, and for her that sounds like “Okay, he is in the car and he is driving home. It is going to be an x amount of time.” It’s then a lot longer than what she anticipated, and then there is conflict. She is checking in, she is wanting to know what is going on and he is like, “Oh my gosh, already. I feel like you are hovering or you are kind of trying to micro-manage me”, and it starts to polarize them. They start to feel distance and start to experience struggle and conflict.

So in us flushing this out, there are a lot of dynamics that we have been working on. Again, this is the smaller mechanism part, so we are just trying to help them with this strategy. I was suggesting – because it sounded like as I got to know his experience (and this was me getting curious), I wasn’t blaming him for being late, I wasn’t judging him, I was just genuinely curious, like “What happens for you when you text ‘I am on my way’. What is going on for you?”

Well, it sounded like he was in transition, like he is making his way to leave. Sometimes when you are out, you want to say goodbye to everyone, or you have to get the check and sometimes that does not come as quickly as you want it to, or you have parked further away or you have to get gas… There could be a lot of reasons with the delay, or expanding the amount of time of you being on your way. So I was like, “I wonder if there is a way to communicate I am wrapping it up?” And that could be anywhere from 5 minutes to 45 minutes. There is a window, and maybe if you want to check in, there could be, “Okay, I am in the car, I am actually on my way”, which is more “I am on my way, I am in the car and I am driving.”

So just helping them have a shared language, because when people are defining terms differently, that is a lot of room for misunderstanding and then you start to have disconnect, then your fears get in the way, and then you start trying to communicate, but you are missing each other and the problem ensues. We start to cycle and really miss each other.

So part of the goal here is just to get curious, unpack… “Okay, what happened there? What was going on? Were you afraid to disappoint me? Did you not really want to do what we agreed on, or what happened?” This allows you to gather more information. So if you are really questioning the relationship, you will have more information to work with. If you are feeling caught up around “I don’t know what decision to make here. I don’t know if I should give him another chance or what I should do?” If perhaps you are already back together with him or let’s say you do want to give it a try…

You know, unfortunately we do this in relationships, sometimes we make a decision and it’s against our better judgment, or we have a gut feeling and yet we still go back anyway… Don’t get too caught up on this, because most of the time we are going to run the same pattern and we are going to just have another opportunity down the road. The pattern is not going just to go away, so if you are wanting to give it another shot, again, you’ll want to deal with it differently. Otherwise, you will just recreate the same pattern over and over again. I mean, it’s typically what happens, and couples will do this forever.

I have couples that come to me, for 20 years they have been together and they have been running the same type of pattern. I encourage you to look at this. Time is not just going to heal it, and this romantic notion of love will conquer all – I think there is a lot of beauty in that and a lot of value in that, and these patterns definitely take some shifting if we are going to look at wanting more in the relationship.

The larger point I am trying to make here at number four is just the opportunity to get curious. Because when we stay curious, we get out of blame and shame and it invites someone to lean into you and to open more. You will get more information and you will get more honesty and you will get more transparency if you are curious. People want to share when there is curiosity. People do not want to share when there is blame or shame. They shut down and they get defensive and there is little communication there. So if you can be curious and really wonder, then you are going to get a lot more information.

This does take a level of courage, because if we are being really curious, we are almost opening up to say, “Okay, even if I don’t want to hear it, I want to hear it. Even if it’s not easy or it is uncomfortable to hear, I am open.” I do recognize that that does take courage. And it’s way more important to get the honest than it is to run the patterns over and over and over again, if you have been with him long enough to know that you are going to get the same result with that same pattern. If you are wanting something new, you want to get curious and be courageous to look at what is there, what you are working with?

My last point would be looking at, if you are going to get into this place of “Okay, I want to give this a shot”, I would look at agreements and really getting clear on what those agreements are. If they are too big, breaking them down, having smaller agreements, making it doable. I do have a whole podcast on agreements, and funny enough, I looked at my statistics today… You guys, it’s like the least downloaded podcast. I guess people just do not really want to hear about agreements. It sounds too business or dry, not sexy, not loving, nothing positive, but I think they are the foundation for building trust and building connection. If we can be clear and if we can really understand each other and meet each other.

I was just working with a couple this week and I was using this analogy of communication essentially trying to build a bridge. Just talking at someone doesn’t land. I mean, that’s not communication. You have a sender and a receiver and you want to build a bridge. I think the same thing with trust. It cannot be one person calling the shots. If you are creating a relationship together, you want to build a bridge where both of you are contributing to that, and you can both stand on the bridge. If your agreements are not working and you get curious to explore, “Okay, what about those that are not working, and how do we set this up for more success?”, I would encourage you to check out that podcast episode. I believe that it is podcast episode six, but I will put that on the show notes link.

Again you can find the show notes on my website, which is drjessicahiggins.com and click on Podcast. You will find the most recent podcast on the top. Again, today’s episode is 77, and I will put a link to that podcast about how to make and keep agreements.

Essentially, like I am saying, they build trust but also it’s incredibly empowering. When I can say no to something I don’t want to do – yes, I am afraid of hurting somebody’s feelings, I am letting them down, it’s uncomfortable to say no, but when I say yes I mean yes, and I know that I can do it. It empowers me to show up and then I am off the hook when I can’t do something. There is lots of language that can help finesse this, but this just takes a little practice.

In summary, one, love isn’t enough. Gosh, when I even say that I am like “Oh, I fight against that…” The romantic part of me is like “Yes, love is enough!” The emotion of love is so pure and is so transformational, and when we talk about the human experience of being in partnership and living day-to- day life, especially when we talk about parenting and having a child that we are raising, we need structure, we need accountability. We need to create ways of relating where we can rely on one another, we can depend on one another. So that’s the ground for some of this love, so that when I say that love is not enough, I am talking about the partnership that the love is contained in. It’s almost like there is a container that holds the love and you want a safe container.

Number two, values and vision. Do we want the same things? Do we envision the same things? Is our version of what we would love similar? Do we want the same things?

Number three, honoring your heart. Supporting what you long for and what really matters to you. The way you want to be loved, the way you feel loved. That’s important. It isn’t just going to go away. You can’t think yourself out of that. Sure, the mechanisms of how you get it, that can get fine-tuned, but the genuine, underlying need or feeling is worthy.

Number four, getting curious. Curiosity is opening the lines of communication.

Number five, small agreements, starting somewhere new. Kind of wiping the slate clean and building block by block. Building a bridge where you can meet each other. Are you really speaking the same language? “On my way” – does that mean you are in your car or does that mean you are wrapping it up? There is a difference. Can we build a shared language together where we can really be in contact, where we are meeting each other?

Okay, that’s what I have for you today. Thank you so much for submitting your question. Again, this is What Happens When Your Partner Is Not Responsible, episode 77.

Thank you for joining me in today’s podcast episode. Again, I always enjoy talking about relationships with you, exploring how to improve, how to be more growthful and seeing our relationship as worthy of investment. Please reach out to me if you have feedback for me, if you want me to know that you liked something or didn’t like something. Your input really matters to me a lot, so I would love to hear from you. If you would like to be on the show or you have a question to submit, please find my website, drjessicahiggins.com, click on Contact and you can find some more information there. Until next time I hope you take great care.

* * *

You’ve been listening to Empowered Relationship, your relationship guide. Remember to take a moment to write a review and subscribe today. You can also get your free relationship gift by visiting drjessicahiggins.com

Return to Show Notes