What If There’s a Good Reason for That? A Simple Question That Can Transform Your Relationship

There is a woman by the name of Alison Armstrong. She is a researcher and writer on relationships and she has one question that has led to more change in my relationships then the years of schooling I have in human psychology.

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She has a question that has led me down a rabbit hole of self inquiry that is slowly decreasing decades of erroneous thinking about how men work. The question is “What if there is a good reason for that?”.

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Time and time again by asking this question I see myself caught a trap of thinking that an innocent action (by a male) means a great deal more than it does. This inquiry has made me face the paradox that men are not masterminds of destruction.

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It started this morning when I came down to do my early morning workout. I opened the dishwasher to put away some glasses that were on the counter. That simple action lead me to discover that my yogurt starter that I had saved have been thrown into our compost. I saved this from a farmer who we get milk from twice a month, it’s not something I can easily come by and I had a special project all in my mind just for the starter. So immediately I had feelings and those feelings lead me to a story which was driven by a belief.

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My mind told me that he got rid of something that was important to me because it wasn’t important to him. I was sad. I knew I could NOT say anything but that didn’t feel correct either, I am horrible with a poker face. So I brought it up. I started our morning talking about my emotions, the sadness. The story I was struggling with.

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Had I slowed myself down and asked “What if he has a good reason for this?”. I may have been able to determine myself that as he would later tell me he saw mold on the starter so he put it in the compost.

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It’s a very good reason. It is also VERY different from my original thought of why he was taking the action.

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Slowing down and asking the one question would have allowed me to see he was just trying to help me and most of the time even though I don’t understand it, the truth is he’s just trying to help me.

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Let’s explore what gets in my way and what I see gets in other women’s ways of actually using this question because THAT is the barrier.

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The question Allison Armstrong says to ask is “what if there is a good reason for that?”.

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The science behind the question is that men’s single focus awareness typically keeps them from being a mastermind of destruction. Most men who are engaged in a relationship with a woman they love DO want to make that person happy. They are not actually walking around the house trying to annoy you- they really have no idea how much the “stuff” in your home talks to you.

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They truly have no idea because their brain allows them to focus on one thing.

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Women have defused awareness, we focus on everything, all the time. I like to explain it to couples like this when I talk to another female, we can start talking about the purple and end up talking about Moscow in 1940. It doesn’t make any logical sense but it does follow our stream of consciousness. That’s how women are designed. You might say that this comes from us gathering berries. If we just picked from one section of the bush, that section would be barren and our ability to pick from the whole bush leaves the health of the whole bush in better shape.

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Now a single focus of a man makes for a great hunter. He can hone in on ONE animal and kill that ONE animal. Which actually leaves the whole herd from which he is hunting in a healthier way.

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Together, this creates harmony. The difficulty is, how do we use our strengths in modern marriage? How do we as women, slow down to ask the one question and how do men start to understand that even when they are married to the most high achieving, career chasing woman that her home is still her domain.

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Of course this goes deeper than just the domain of home. Though most marriages I know do not fall apart because of a capital T trauma (think adultery, financial infidelity, abuse…though these things DO occur). Most marriages fall apart because everyday in a bunch of small ways we continue to miss each other. We never learned to see each other. We never learned to see each other and hold each other in the highest regard.

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Seeing each other clearly may be the most intimate work we ever do.