One of the more complicating things couples do is personalize a partner’s experience before they fully understand what that experience is.

Your partner is upset.

Something is bothering them.

They tell you they’re unhappy.

And before they’ve finished explaining, you’re already wondering:

What did I do?

Which can quickly become:

Wait a minute. That’s not fair.

And now, instead of listening to your partner’s experience, you’re defending yourself against it.

I was working with a couple when the wife said:

“I’m not happy with my life.”

Her husband responded:

“Okay, what am I doing wrong?”

There it was.

She hadn’t said she was unhappy with him. She hadn’t even said she was unhappy with the relationship.

But he had already put himself into the middle of her experience—and begun preparing to defend himself against it.

The Jay-Z Principle

“One of the guiding principles for relationships I draw from comes from a Jay-Z song. Excuse the language:

‘What you eat don’t make me shit.’”

Crude? Sure.

But as relationship principles go, it’s surprisingly useful.

Your partner can have thoughts, feelings, opinions, disappointments, fears, and interpretations without those experiences automatically being about you.

And even when they are about you, that doesn’t mean you have to immediately decide whether they’re correct.

You can understand someone’s experience without first accepting blame for it.

That’s the distinction.

Listening Isn’t the Same as Pleading Guilty

When people personalize a partner’s feelings, listening can begin to feel dangerous.

If I hear you say you’re unhappy, perhaps that means I’ve failed.

If you feel hurt, perhaps you’re saying I hurt you.

If you’re disappointed, perhaps you’re accusing me of disappointing you.

So instead of becoming curious about your experience, I begin mounting a defense against it.

That’s not what happened.

You’re leaving out what you did.

You’re being unfair.

That’s not what I meant.

Maybe all of those things are true.

But now we’re litigating your experience before I’ve even understood it.

And that creates another problem: you begin editing what you tell me because you know you’re going to have to manage my reaction to hearing it.

The original issue gets lost.

Two People, One Relationship

The psychological idea underneath this is sometimes called differentiation.

A close relationship involves two people becoming deeply connected without ceasing to be two separate people.

Your partner has a history you didn’t create. They have insecurities you didn’t create, preferences you don’t necessarily share, reactions you may not understand, and ways of interpreting the world that existed before you arrived.

So do you.

Differentiation doesn’t mean living separate lives or saying, Your feelings are your problem.

Quite the opposite.

It allows me to become interested in your feelings without assuming that I have to defend myself against them.

I can ask:

What’s going on?

Rather than:

What did I do?

That’s a surprisingly big difference.

Sometimes It Actually Is About You

Of course, Jay-Z doesn’t get us completely off the hook.

Sometimes what your partner is upset about is something you did.

Maybe you were inconsiderate.

Maybe you weren’t listening.

Maybe you’ve been doing the same irritating thing for fifteen years and they’ve finally had enough.

Not personalizing doesn’t mean refusing responsibility.

It means not deciding what your responsibility is before you understand what happened.

Your partner can also project things onto you. All of us carry expectations from earlier relationships, families, insecurities, and previous hurts. Sometimes a partner will interpret what you’re doing through one of those older stories.

Again, you don’t have to immediately accept or reject it.

First understand it.

Then the two of you have something to talk about.

“What’s Wrong?”

We’ve probably all noticed a partner becoming quiet or distant and asked:

“What’s wrong?”

But listen to the tone sometimes.

It may contain less curiosity than dread.

What’s wrong?

Meaning:

What did I do now?

Before the other person has answered, we’ve already put ourselves into their experience.

And if the answer implicates us, defensiveness arrives almost instantly. We begin explaining, correcting, minimizing, or demonstrating why the other person’s reaction isn’t justified.

The irony is that we may be trying to avoid being blamed while doing something considerably more damaging:

making our partner’s experience about us.

Figure Out What Belongs to You

No relationship consists entirely of shared problems or entirely of individual ones.

Some things belong primarily to you.

Some belong primarily to your partner.

Some belong to the relationship you’ve created together.

And plenty are mixtures of all three.

The trick isn’t getting the categories perfectly right.

It’s resisting the urge to put yourself into every category before you’ve even heard what the problem is.

So the next time your partner seems upset, try replacing:

What did I do?

with:

What’s happening for you?

Listen long enough to find out.

There will be plenty of time afterward to decide what belongs to you.

Because that’s really the point of the Jay-Z principle:

What your partner experiences doesn’t automatically make you responsible for it.

Unless, of course, it does.