KOCHI: Imagine this. You decide you need to rest. And for once, you switch off all your alarms to sleep in instead of waking at five in the morning to do your exercises and everything else in the usual rush. You have an early dinner, announce your plans to sleep in, and go to sleep, letting yourself awake slowly instead of being alarmed into wakefulness.
Soon, you find yourself in a quiet space, curtains still drawn, a hush in the air, and you check the time and it is close to nine. You walk out of the bedroom into the living space and it is bustling with activity, with your partner in the middle of all that high-energy action.
Now, in this situation, do you expect at that time for your partner to be super sweet to you and glad that you had a wonderful restful sleep, tell you sweet things, or do you expect to hear some degree of sarcasm, or envy, or even outright complaint about how you get to sleep in but they do not have such luxuries?
If over time your relationship has found itself getting stretched by the demands of a busy life, and you have experienced a fair degree of sniping at each other as expectations have waxed and waned over the years, you might have gotten used to a whole lot of seemingly funny but ultimately taunting commentary when you get to relax or take a break when the other doesn’t. It might come in small snappy things like, “Look who is up finally!” Or a funnier, “Hey, are you going to bed so early?” but you start reading resentment into it.
In such a situation, even if the partner is trying to be nice and is feeling warm and friendly, we might be so used to receiving resentment that we might read even a genuinely innocuous, “Good morning!” as snarky. If we reply, “Yes, yes, I know it is late. No need to rub it in,” or worse, “Is it? I mean, is it good? Will you let it stay that way?”. Chances are we might nip anything good that might be brewing in the bud.
We are designed to protect ourselves. We do it even when there is no threat just because there is a history of threat, even if the history was not with this person.
However, it helps to pause and to reaffirm if there was indeed a here-and-now threat. Just a “Hmm?” that asks your partner to reaffirm what they were saying can be enough to double-check your reading of the room. Whether your partner looks up and smiles at you at the hmm, or grumpily turns away, will be confirmation.
We need to practice that pause. Often, the pause makes all the difference between a good and a bad morning.