Act on Your Feelings

Interviewer: Hidden beliefs about relationships number five:

You should always act on your feelings.

What exactly is this mistake and what should people do instead?

Jonathan: This usually shows up in a typical pattern when a very emotional and bubbly kind of person marries somebody who's very controlled, quiet and stable.

The person who's emotional, in a sense, thinks that's what they're being hired for and they focus on their emotions and their feelings. They exclude logic and consequences and external limitations.

What you see is if they don't get their way they do temper tantrums, or hysteria, or they collapse. That's the exaggerated expression of emotion.

If one of them does it it's a battle, if both of them do it's a disaster. It can lead to all kinds of awful things; addiction, overspending, alcoholism, all kinds of stuff like that.

What they should do instead is learn to recognize that the feelings and the emotions are only one aspect of being a human being, and certainly only one aspect of a relationship.

It isn't that emotions don't count, it's that they're one of several things that count including what works, what doesn't work, what's the external reality, what does the other person think and feel. Those have to be included for them to learn to problem solve.