My Husbands Office Call

My Husband's Office CallRecently, my husband called me from a business call center in the Middle East, and when I answered the phone it sounded like he was trying to find out who my caller ID was. So I asked him to repeat himself and he did.My husband and I have been married for nearly twenty years and he has never had a problem with my communication skills. The problem is that when it comes to telling me what he wants to do in his life or wants me to do, we get into heated debates. 'What do you want to do in your life?' I've even taken it a step further and said, 'What do you want me to do?'We have probably been arguing more than we should be over the past twenty years. There is no middle ground when it comes to marital conflict. Whether it is conflict with our children, or the pain of getting divorced or an inappropriate way to bring up the kids, or other issues, these are all human issues and therefore part of what makes a marriage work.Although I think that I am definitely more c omfortable with my husband than most other women I know, I can't help but wonder if I am allowing him to spend so much time and energy thinking about himself? And because he is spending so much time thinking about himself and not about me, I worry that he is setting himself up for a future of unfulfilled love and relationship.Does it ever occur to you that when he asks me to give him a report about myself, it is not just about myself? He is also asking me to do a complete analysis of him. When I try to do this, I find that I am falling into an endless loop of what he thinks about himself and what I want him to think about himself.To be sure, there is a little bit of ego that goes into all this, and Ithink that there is nothing wrong with that. What is wrong is that when he does his report about himself, he seems to be getting more of himself in that report than he really is. He is taking the 'you' out of his personality and putting it all into his 'we.' His ego is being bruised to p rove something to him that I think that we are both missing.We do this every time we argue and take the time to write down the things that we think about ourselves and then we take the time to write down what we think about each other. In fact, it is a question of the relationship to continually discuss what we are feeling for each other and then to just let each other feel what we are feeling. Then, as time goes on, we may start to add to that list of what we are thinking about ourselves.To sum up, my husband and I can use this report about myself to figure out where we want to go and how we want to move forward. We just need to remember that we are in it together and that, whatever the answer is, it needs to be shared.