Think you’re more emotionally intelligent than your partner?

A client of mine came to our session the other day and said she was ready to dig into a topic that was particularly tough that we had let be on the back shelf for a while.

She showed great courage in letting herself feel some things she’d never really gotten close to, and came to understand something about her inner world that had confounded her for decades.

At the end of our session she was soft and tender in that way a person gets when they’ve taken off old armoring and had a good cry. Sensing her rawness, I told her I’d check in with her the next day.

When we connected the next morning, I asked how her evening had been since we talked.

“Not good,” she said with a mixture of anxiety and exhaustion in her voice. 

“I told my husband about our session at dinner, and then said I just wanted to go to our bedroom and have quiet time to myself. When he didn’t come in to check on me before bedtime, I picked a fight with him and everything went sideways.”

“Oooh yeah. That makes sense,” I empathized.

I knew from what she and I had talked about the day before that she had been sad. I also knew that there’s a protective part of her who would rather feel just about anything but vulnerable, and for that part of her it was easier to pick a fight than it was to ask for a hug.

She was comforted by seeing that her fight with her husband had been instigated by a knee jerk reaction from the part of her who always protects her from the threat of vulnerability, and felt confident she knew how to apologize—and what to apologize for.

But then worry crossed her face again. “The worst part, though, is that last night I went into this awful place in my head where I told myself my marriage might not work because my husband isn’t mature enough or emotionally intelligent enough to meet me.”

Again, I empathized and asked her if she could see how this was a similarly protective part of her who was trying to mitigate future vulnerability by “figuring out” how things were going to go so that she could make a plan and feel more secure.

I then asked her if she was open to hearing a difficult truth about romantic relationships, and confided in her that when my mentor had shared this with me years ago I kind of wanted to punch her—but only for a moment before I felt her words settle in quietly the way only truth does. 

She said she was open, so I shared:

It’s common to think that we are more aware, more emotionally intelligent, and have done more “work” than our partner, but the reality is, if you were more of all of those things yourself, your partner would be, too.

Which is to simply say: if you were healthier, you’d have a healthier partner. 

Even if it doesn’t always seem like it, we tend to partner with people who have the same sort of relational maturity and emotional intelligence we do.

Or, more accurately, that PARTS of us do. 

For example, how could my client expect her husband to come cuddle and soothe her when she has literally never asked that of him in the twelve years they’ve been together? 

Her default behavior from the protective part of her when she feels vulnerable is to be alone or to pick a fight with him. That’s the pattern they’ve normalized in their marriage, and it’s “worked.”

Even though her Wise Adult may indeed be more mature than other parts of her husband, that protective part of her certainly isn’t. 

And this is true for all of us. Someone’s Wise Adult is always going to be more mature or evolved than someone else’s younger or protective parts. The key is which part are you and your partner most routinely showing up as with each other?

So, if you are sometimes tormented by whether you’re more evolved than your partner, it’s time to take a courageous look at the part of you who ISN’T.

Because I can pretty much guarantee you that it’s there. We just don’t spend our daily life in partnership with someone who is entirely in a different level of consciousness than we are.

If you kind of want to punch me right now, that’s ok, I get it.

If this idea is landing in you quiet, like truth, you may want to sign up for my signature online program, Yours Truly .

In it, I’ll help you identify which parts of you that you may unconsciously be relating from, and how to more reliably come from the Wise Adult part of you—and encourage the Wise Adult to come out in that person you love who also might drive you crazy sometimes.