Dear Advice King,
I am living with my fiancée, to whom I’m engaged to be married next spring. She is a hairstylist who entered her profession right out of high school, whereas I am almost finished with my degree. As a senior getting ready to graduate, I am often stressed out about classes, projects and exams. My fiancée can’t relate to this and tells me I am “just overreacting.” How can I make her understand the challenges that college presents?
- Harried Hubby-to-Be
Dear Hubby,
For some people – commonly referred to as “hard-headed” – true knowledge can only be obtained through experience. Your fiancée hasn’t experienced college, and it sounds like that has prevented her from relating to your stress about the demands placed on you as a student.
Although you can’t fault her for her absence of experiential information, there’s actually a larger issue at play. Can you guess what it is?
Empathy is defined by Encarta Dictionary as, “the ability to identify with and understand somebody else’s feelings or difficulties.”
From your fiancée’s get-over-it-and-stop-whining attitude, it appears as though her empathy chip went missing when she came out of the factory.
It might not seem like a hugely important issue on the surface, but it does warrant some examination. Is it a deal-breaker? Probably not. Is it a red flag? You betcha’.
The real question here is this: Is your fiancée able and willing to take your difficulties seriously, whether they are real or imagined? Is she prepared to get on your team and support your feelings, even if she doesn’t think you should feel that way?
Reminder: She’s your fiancée. That means that you will be married with the implicit expectancy of staying that way forever.
I’d venture a guess that this isn’t an isolated incident; chronic dismissers of others’ feelings – or, “the empathetically challenged,” as I like to call them – can rarely just decide one day to start empathizing and then execute that decision immediately.
Don’t be fooled into thinking that once you graduate, this problem will disappear. This trait is highly likely to surface regularly as variations on the same thing. A close friend of mine is married to an empathy-deficient man, and they’ve been having different versions of the same fight for seven years.
As my friend and her husband have successfully worked on their marriage, so it will take effort from each of you: time, patience and honesty from you, and willingness, compassion and understanding from her. If you cannot give each other those things, you shouldn’t be together in the first place.
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Send Jess your question on twitter @advicefromjess or e-mail jess.king@okstate.edu.
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