How to Respond to Unexpected Events in Your Relationship and Family
And how to not lose sight of your larger goals in the process
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Gotta be honest. I’m at a bit of writers block this morning.
Not because I don’t know what to write, but because there are a lot of different topics that I could write about and that seem urgent.
Julia and I schedule our podcast topics for Sexvangelicals months in advance, and we’ve decided to correlate Relationship 101 content with Sexvangelicals material. This week, we’re talking with pop sensation Adaline about the process of coming out as queer in conservative Evangelical communities:
The timing of our content doesn’t necessarily align with current events.
And there’s a part of me that wants to respond, Whack-a-Mole style, to these events:
Abortion and reproductive rights, especially given that Florida and Arizona have recently established draconian policies about abortion.
The right to protest, and the horrific responses from university leaderships across the country to invite local law enforcement to “negotiate” with protestors.
The complications of the protests. What would happen if we protested both the existence of the religious nationalism of Hamas and Likud, rather than making this “Pro-Palestine” or “Pro-Israel”?
And what if we saw the parallel process between Hamas, Likud, and the Republican Party, all of which are fear-based ideologies ignited by the alleged (and, in the cases of Hamas and Likud, stated) erasure of their peoples from outside forces rather than strategies and policies to protect all peoples in a designated land structure?
And what would happen if protestors were more educated in the events that they’re protesting. For instance, in the last two weekly newsletters, I’ve placed two books that have been really helpful in providing some larger context of the development of the Netanyahu family and the evolution of Likud into a religious nationalist political party. Please read Walter Russell Mead’s The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People and The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen. It’s important to also remember the historical events within Israel since the resettlement of the West Bank as a “haven” for Jewish people following the Holocaust in World War II. Thank you Wikipedia for providing a comprehensive, yet digestible timeline of the conflict between Israel and Arab populations since 1948.
For that matter, please also read 1988’s Doctrine of Hamas, published on The Wilson Center. It incites jihad against Jewish people. While the Gaza Blockade, starting in 1991, from the Israeli government has been horrific, it also was significantly expedited by the Doctrine of Hamas. Also, protestors, enactments of Article 16—“It is necessary to follow Islamic orientation in educating the Islamic generations in our region by teaching the religious duties, comprehensive study of the Koran, the study of the Prophet's Sunna, and learning about Islamic history and heritage from their authentic sources”—have resulted in the oppression of human rights throughout the Islamic world in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Israeli and Palestinian people deserve better than the current governments that they have. In this particular case, where both governments are extremely toxic, protests that move into favoring one side over the other only serve as a parallel process to the communication strategies that Likud/Zionism and Hamas/Sunni Islam use to demonize the other.
Ahh, that felt good.
So let’s bring this back to Relationship 101. Because families are consistently faced with the tension between two competing needs:
The development and implementation of a longer term plan.
Investing energy and resources to respond to the current events that arise, from national events, such as the one that I’m describing, to unexpected shifts, like the death of a family member or the unexpected loss of work.
Relational and family success depends on a couple’s capacity to successfully navigate these tensions. How does a family simultaneously:
Develop and remind itself of its long-term goals and structures that effectively capture the personalities, interests, and strengths of each of its members?
Respond effectively to happenings that one cannot prepare for, such as death, job loss, pain and the early onsets of disability, and the unexpected flare-up of PTSD?
Make adjustments to the long-term goals and structures when needed, while not losing sight of the personalities, interests, and strengths of each of the individuals?
This becomes more complicated when each person in a relationship has different ways of navigating this tension. My style for navigating this—tend to the extraneous topics that don’t directly impact our current goals as quickly as possible so that we can spend the bulk of our time addressing current relational and family goals—sometimes clashes with Julia, who prefers a slower, more methodical way of addressing this tension.
I don’t have a good answer for how to navigate this tension in a universal sense.
However, there are lots of couples and families that we work with that lack long-term goals, vision, and purpose for their relationships in the first place. Rather, the bulk of their decisions are made in reaction to situations that pop up, leading to a chaotic, reactionary lifestyle. (I would argue that, until the last year, the Democratic Party has functioned more as a reactionary counterweight to the populism of the Republican Party than it has in developing its own goals and purpose for their existence.)
So this week, I’d invite you and your partner (or other key people in the oversight of your family system) to consider these four questions:
What is the current mission of the relationship/family?
What are the personality traits, interests, and strengths that inform the mission?
What are unexpected situations that might arise that would require us to revisit the mission of our relationship/family?
How do we let each other know when these situations might require us to revisit the mission of our relationship/family?
We’ll return tomorrow to our conversation about the impact of Evangelical spaces on the coming out process.
Let’s heal together!