Q: My boyfriend and I have moved in with each other but find we’re arguing a lot.
I thought at first this was inevitable, but my grandmother tells me she and my grandfather seldom argued. How can we be more like them?
A: The odds of you getting the kind of relationship with your boyfriend that your grandmother had with your grandfather are not very high. Grandma and Grandpa lived in an era when role expectations were very clearly defined. Let me give you an example.
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My mom and dad got married one Sunday afternoon. They were too poor to take any kind of a honeymoon, so they bounced right into their relationship with each other.
Each one of them knew what to do. My mom got up early Monday morning, made breakfast for the two of them and tidied up around the kitchen. My dad got up, got dressed, ate his breakfast and went off to work with the sandwiches my mom made for his lunch.
Sometime during the day my dad slipped over to the bank, checked his account and made sure that he had enough cash on hand to cover the various bills they got in the mail.
What you need to understand is that my mom and dad did all of that stuff for each other without actually talking about it. They knew what each of them was supposed to do from all of the expectations that clearly defined what a man and woman should do when they lived together.
Sounds great, doesn’t it? But it wasn’t.
My mom and dad may have known what each of them was supposed to do, but actually neither of them had a chance to do what they wanted to do.
You and your boyfriend have any number of opportunities to become the people you have dreamed about for all of these years.
However, you must also acknowledge more responsibilities than my parents did. As a result, you need to communicate a lot more with each other than your grandmother and grandfather did. And, yes, sometimes that communication is going to be a bit stressful.
But it is that communication with each other that results in you supporting and encouraging each other to follow your personal dreams amid the excitement of two people being together and loving each other to pieces.
Jacklin Andrews is a family counsellor from Saskatchewan. Contact: jandrews@producer.com.
