To Gridlock or not to Gridlock, that is the question.

I am CHEAP!  There, I said it!  It is just the way I am and I think I came by it naturally maybe even genetically through my mother.  It is a great virtue sometimes and it is also sometimes a terrible vice.  My husband on the other hand was not cheap.  He liked to spend money mostly on sports equipment but he also loved to be generous which made it a virtue most of the time.  This could have been a perpetual problem and for some of our marriage it actually was.   I finally decided that our marriage was just a little dysfunctional when it came to money and how we dealt with it.  We figured out how to make it work without creating a lot of tension.  

With that being said, we didn't allow our differences to determine how we interacted and as we created our family over time, I learned why we both had the feelings and attitudes we had.  His was because of the emotions around money in his childhood home.  In my childhood home, we never lacked for anything but my parents discussed why we should be careful with money.  I am cheap not because I feel the need to not spend money, I am cheap because I just am.  He is generous and doesn't keep very good track of where he spends money just because he is.  I love him for who he is and have learned to live with his little quirk by enjoying and thanking him for his thoughtfulness when he spent money in spoiling me and our children  or being generous to others.  He dealt with my cheapness by making sure he enlisted our kids help to direct me not to buy the cheapest model available but to look for one he had prompted them on before.  I could laugh that he did that because sometimes my cheapness even bothered me, it's just one of my quirks.  After he passed away last year, I can look around my house and see all the nice gifts he showered me with that have so much more meaning.  They make me feel a little closer to him and  I am grateful that I have little reminders of him all over our house.    

In Gottman's book The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work he states that perpetual problems don't have to lead to gridlock which is when partners can't find a way to overcome their perpetual problems and they lead to feelings of resentment.  Gridlock and resentment eventually make compromise impossible along with all the ensuing emotions inherent in perpetual conflict. 

After about 15 years of marriage I decided that if I wasn't going to divorce him over a problem that we had, I would learn to just let it go and accept him as he is.  If the problem was such that I couldn't live with him and the problem, it was something we needed to work out.  There weren't too many of those problems but the ones we had, we were both emotionally intelligent and deeply committed to our family that we worked them out by compromising and supporting each other.  That process refined both of us into two people who created a beautiful happy marriage and family.