Do you feel like you're always handling all the heavy lifting in your shared life? Wish you felt like your partner was able to take charge and lead YOU?
Or are you the one who wants to lead more? EXCEPT your partner is so dominant (and frankly, kind of scary?) in how controlling or perfectionistic they get, that taking charge yourself feels like foolishly wading into shark-infested waters?
Or do you yearn to have a time when your partner just handles you, and handles the situation, so you don't have to make decisions or even tell them they did a good job. They're just in charge and they don’t need your affirmation.
All these experiences relate to one dynamic I call "everyday dominance and submission." This is how power plays out inside a couple. It's how we each use our driving power and our receiving power and it's how we experience ourselves and each other as a result.
Just so we’re clear: we’re not going to cover dominance and submission, in the erotic arena in this post. That's a whole other field I work in with some of my clients, in accordance with their desires. But you don't have to be at all into anything related to dominance or submission or any sort of kink in the bedroom to have these dynamics play out in the kitchen or the driveway or over email when you're trying to make sure that both of you are there for your daughter's orchestra concert. THAT is why every couple needs to understand everyday dominance and submission.
How understanding everyday dominance & submission can help your marriage
These tools have literally saved marriages. There was my client who was considering leaving because her husband just would not assert himself and make unilateral decisions, even on little tiny matters. She was losing respect for him until I taught them both how to see things differently.
Or the man who felt so disrespected and beat up by his wife that his love for her was starting to die until he learned the real reason she was so domineering. I helped him learn to handle her the way she needed him to, so she felt safer and could finally be a safer place for him.
I hope your marriage isn't as close to the brink as these couples’ were. But regardless how painful it's gotten, these tools are going to help.
Almost every couple shares the challenges of simply not understanding how to see through a lens of power, how to understand who's using power, and how to work together in a collaborative way to create an energy-giving, polarized connection between you. Once you understand power in this way, you can access closer connection and more joy and satisfaction. You each have tremendous power - not control - but power, inside your own flavor, and between you, there’s delicious chemistry and safety and fun.
If you want to go from frustration and jockeying for position, or avoiding conflict to playful, sizzling-with-energy, effective interactions with each other, read on.
His 3 Mistakes
Again, and again, I see nice guys make the same three mistakes:
They try to get it right with their wife by asking her to make the call.
They defer to their wife to try to avoid making a mistake that they're going to be “in trouble” for.
They put themselves into a role of performing and being either accepted or rejected and they put their wife into the role of judge, jury and executioner.
Although they are coming from a well-intended place, these approaches don't actually result in feeling great about yourself or feeling great about your wife.
(All of these dynamics play out in same sex and non-binary couples too, but not as often and a different configuration. If you're not in a heterosexual relationship, but this does resonate for you, find what matches your situation here. I know the tools will work even if the pronouns don't match your particulars.)
Her 3 Mistakes
Women often make these three mistakes:
When they don't feel well-supported by their spouse, they just take over the task or that whole area of life themselves, even though they feel resentful, and they wind up losing respect for their partner.
As a result, they complain and attack their partner or the partner’s performance, rather than keeping their attention and communication focused on their own feelings, needs and desires.
They stay in dominant energy themselves, even when what they long for is for their spouse to be more assertive or dominant, so that they can relax and feel partnered with and receive. They crowd out their partner’s leadership.
So if you want to go from frustrated and disconnected and lopsided in your marriage or relationship to feeling satisfied, balanced and like equal, well respected, well loved partners, this one simple recognition about dominance and submission can make all the difference for both of you.
Why Polarity Matters
Every marriage is like a pair of magnets. The charge of your connection to each other relies on polarity - on the positive or assertive side of one partner connecting with the negative or receptive side of the other partner.
What happens when you put the like ends of two magnets together? They push away from each other. That's what happens to us, too. We either move apart, or one of us is going to need to flip around to the other pole so that we can really connect. We need to do this intentionally to deliberately choose which pole to take: driving or receiving.
For example: Are you going to be in the lead or are you going to follow on this particular drive to the movie theater? What about the home remodeling project? Supporting your child through a difficult developmental season?
You can absolutely both be in charge sometimes and both follow other times. But you can't happily both do the same thing, at the same time. Two leaders create a battle. Two followers create a standstill. One of each, I call polarity, complementarity, synergy, connection.
Three Keys to Creating Polarity
I'm going to teach you three keys to creating this arc of polarity in your relationship.
Key #1: Pay attention to your attention.
Your attention will be in one place if you're going to be in the dominant role in this interaction and it will be completely different if you're going to be in the more submissive or receptive role. To have dominant attention, pay attention to the other person. Put the focus on them.
For example, if you're paying attention to what your partner's doing or not doing, you have dominant attention, you're going to be the dominant pole or you're going to be in a pissing match.
They cannot dominate you while you have all your attention on them. But if you put your attention on the other person, on how they're responding to you, on what they're thinking, on inviting them to put their attention on themselves, then you are in a clear, dominant role.
On the other hand, if you're in the submissive role, your attention is going to go inward. You're going to pay attention to your own sensations, your own experience. Attend to what things feel like inside you, what emotions and desires are arising.
Rest in what you're inflicting or what you’re experiencing.
I know this sounds kind of sadistic and, honestly, it is. Sadism is not just inflicting pain. It's inflicting sensation and inflicting sensation is so much of what sharing pleasure and truly giving love is about. You can inflict the sensation of feeling cared for, of feeling handled, of feeling received, seen, heard.
Let your attention rest on the experience you're providing and the tone you're setting, when you want to have dominant attention.
In the submissive role, rest in what you're feeling, sensing and desiring. Lie back into that, as opposed to pushing forward into the other person, what they're thinking, what they're feeling, what you're going to do with them, what they're going to do. Stay right here with you and your inner experience.
Speak in penetrating or receptive ways.
Speak in penetrating ways about what you see in the other person, what you want them to do, and what you're going to do. For example, you could say, "You look tired, I invite you to go lay down and rest," or "I'm going to bring you a cup of coffee, would you like cream in it?" Those are ways of speaking in penetrating ways, being directive, and looking at the other person with your attention on them. You can talk about what you're going to do, but your attention is on how it's going to impact them and the reasons for doing it have to do with what's going on for them.
If you want to be in the submissive or receptive role, speak in self-revelatory ways. Share from that inner experience. Report from the inside: what you're feeling, what you're sensing, what you're desiring. Do not put your attention and your communication over on the other person. "You need to do this. You're doing that because..." Get out of their head. Stay inside your own head and, even more importantly, your own body to communicate from your own feelings and sensations.
Key #2: Switch up your role
If you desire to be led, stop leading.
Only one of you can be in that penetrating, dominating role. Submit to the leadership that's there now. Breathe more life into it by taking the receptive pole. Share your feelings and desires, but do not lead yourself. Do not take charge, do not tell them what to do.
If you want to stop being assessed, start assessing yourself
If you don’t want to be judged, told that you're not doing it right, or afraid that you're not measuring up, start assessing yourself. You can turn down your partner's evaluations of you and your anxieties about that by beginning to have a standard for yourself. It might be a higher standard, it might be a lower standard.
Begin to measure yourself on your own terms. You begin to decide what good enough is authentically, not defensively, not just trying to get your partner off your back, but truly what feels good for you, what expresses your values. What do you want to inflict on your partner, on your family, on the world?
This may relate to your employment or income. This may relate to how you use food or drugs or alcohol or how you use your time. This may relate to how you show up for dates or for sex.
If your partner's standard has become oppressive for you, set your own standard. Begin to march to the beat of your drum. If you have a drum beat that is authentic for you, it will inflict something very different on your partner from what you've been inflicting, by trying to march to their drum beat or rebelling against the beat that they were setting.
Key #3: Follow the sensation.
Whichever role you're in, find the turn-on in what's happening. Even as you lean toward more of what you want or what you desire to have happen next, find what's sensational about what's happening right now. It might even be that there's sensation in your frustration. It might be that there's sensation in feeling judged or put down or like you're not enough.
I know that's provocative to say. There are many experiences we put in the “Negative” box, but I invite you to drop your judgments about the sensations you're experiencing and just notice where the intensity is.
Intensity is turn-on. I mean that in the sexual sense, but also just in the emotional and the aliveness sense. This life is meant to be an embodied experience. What all of us really want in our relationships, when it really comes down to it, is more aliveness.
And yet we tend to reject so many of the sensations of aliveness that arise because we put them in that box that we label “Bad Sensations.” So tear the label off that box and follow the sensations that are arising now.
Feel what you feel. Report on that if you're in the receptive role and if you're in the dominant role, speak to what you see in your partner. What do you notice in the sensation they're experiencing?
Here’s a Quick Recap:
Key #1: Pay attention to your attention. It’s going to either be over there with the other person or it's going to be internal with you. If your attention is focused internally, you are in the submissive role. If your attention is focused externally, you are in the dominant role. If you and your partner in the same role, you're going to be repelled from each other so one of you needs to flip.
Key #2: If you haven't been enjoying the role you were in, then switch up what you're doing. If you want to be led, stop leading and submit to the leadership that's there. If you want to stop being assessed, start assessing yourself.
Key #3: Follow the sensation. Find the turn-on and whatever's happening, and continue to lean toward more of what you want next.
Those are the three keys to cultivating polarity in everyday life. Now you have a choice to make. Do you want to keep repeating the same patterns of frustration, conflict or stalemate? Or are you ready to create real partnership through deliberate dominance and submission, choosing to lead or to follow and create delicious connections and deeper love?
May you create delightful polarity by experimenting with the keys I've given you, so each of you can express your greatest gifts in your relationship and in your lives, and fall deeper in love with each other - and your every experience - than ever before.