by Dr. Neill Neill, Registered Psychologist

Impatience with your wife or husband can bring you a mountain of grief.  Patience facilitates personal insights and growth. A couple of examples of impatience are in order.

You say "I stopped for coffee after I did the banking,"  and your spouse replies, "Why?  There’s coffee here."

Or, you say "I’ve just ended my friendship with (naming an old friend)."   Your partner says impatiently "You told me you were going to, but why aren’t you happy?  You should be happy."

In each case you defend yourself with a perfectly rational explanation.  But in each case your partner senses something that doesn’t quite ring true and may feel left out of the loop. There could even be an outright argument with accusations of lying or disloyalty.

The details of the event are percolating unconsciously and you aren’t yet conscious of the truth.

Human beings have an amazing ability to make something up when questioned. We even believe our own rationalizations.

The truth is you had no idea why you wanted to stop for coffee.  A week later you might realize you have been ruminating about your relationship with one of your adult children, and the coffee break was just a solo pause from busyness to further that unconscious rumination.

The truth is that ending the troubled relationship with a friend did provide you some relief. But when you were asked why you weren’t happy, you didn’t yet understand you would be going through a period of a least a few days of grieving and readjustment.  The ending was, after all, a loss. You couldn’t know why you were unhappy, because you weren’t yet even conscious of your grief.

The correct, honest answer would have been in each case, "I don’t really know — I’ll tell you if I come up with anything." 

When one party to a relationship demands an explanation for something the other doesn’t really understand, important insights are often blocked from emerging. Even worse, your impatience could escalate into a conflict about the amount of time you are spending or not spending together, or about disloyalty or keeping secrets.

 A personal story

When we lived in Toronto I was exploring work possibilities in Northern Ontario.  At first my wife Eileen was supportive, but then one day she said she was having misgivings.  When I asked her why, she honestly answered that she didn’t know.  I said "Okay, just let me know if anything comes up."  In other words, I encouraged her to let it percolate.

Two or three weeks passed. Then one day she said "I know what’s bugging me about your working in Northern Ontario."  I said "What?"  And she said "I’m afraid you’ll like it; and if you like it, I may never get back to the West Coast."  Less than three months later we were living on the West Coast.

If I had been impatient and not supported her in letting her intuitive reservation percolate, she could have and would have come up with an immediate explanation. It would have been about the cold climate, about leaving friends or about something else; and we might still be living in Ontario. And this website probably wouldn’t exist.

Letting things percolate demands a lot of patience, both patience with your partner and patience with yourself.  But the benefits to relationships can be spectacular. Patience is fundamental to real communication.